Democracy and Hegemony Reconsidered: Constructing and Resisting "Common Sense" in the Democratic System

Hegemony has long been a concern for democratic theory. There has been a long-standing worry that ostensibly equal and inclusive processes of deliberation could nevertheless be tainted by it, as well as the fear that democratic innovations could be instituted in such a way that inadvertently reinforces it (Sanders 1997; Young 2001; Dryzek 2011). In this paper, I make two arguments. First, democratic theory today has more need for a theory of hegemony than it has traditionally recognized. This is partly because such a theory can help to make sense of certain problems, including trends toward "post-democracy," loss of faith in major political parties, and the increasingly contested role of putatively "background" institutions such as the police and central banks. But it is also because, in an era marked by democratic backsliding and populist authoritarianism, liberal democracy can no longer merely be stipulated as the institutional venue within which political contestations take place: democracy today is the subject as well as the site of hegemonic struggle. My second argument is that, while democratic theory has long recognized the concept of hegemony, its employment of the concept has been somewhat limited. Often, it appears as little more than a synonym for ideologically skewed discourse as opposed to a broader conception of how social forces within and outside the state reinforce the terms of political "common sense." Poststructuralist conceptions such as Mouffe and Laclau’s (1985; 2018) are also limited. At the same time, I believe the recent "systemic turn" in democratic theory (Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012) makes available new resources for theorizing hegemony in democratic societies. Precisely because it recognizes democratic legitimacy as a multi-step process involving interactions among variegated institutions and practices, a systemic approach can account for the ways different segments of that process may also surreptitiously shape the terms of political common sense. Drawing in part Mark Warren’s (2017) "problem-based approach" as well as Steven Klein’s "democratic power approach" (2021) to democratic theory, I propose a differentiated, institutionalist conception of hegemony that can account for several ways social forces shape the terms of democratic politics in various institutional locations. Thus, "directive hegemony" steers the terms of collective agenda and will formation at the level of such institutions as the political party system or oligopolized mass media. Meanwhile, "pedagogical hegemony" permeates major institutions of subjectivation, such as schools, police, and sites of social reproduction, affecting the terms of democratic inclusion and empowerment. Finally, "infrastructures and circumstances of mobilization" describes the semi-institutionalized environments that in various ways constrain the operation of social movements in public spaces. These include media environments, digital networks, and (in some ways) the financial system as well as path-dependent features of domestic and transnational politics. Institutions can occupy more than one category; however, such a differentiated conception allows for analyses of how these interact and propagate through different components of the democratic system. In turn, such analyses can open new perspectives from which to develop new strategies to counter distortions to democratic legitimacy.