An Alternative Model of Democratic Self-Defence: ‘Procedural Militant Democracy’

ABSTRACT An Alternative Model of Democratic Self-Defence: ‘Procedural Militant Democracy’. Lisa Hill University of Adelaide. The dichotomy of procedural versus substantive democracy has long pervaded the militant democracy (MD) literature. Under this dichotomous influence, MD typologies, theories, and case studies tend to associate the phenomenon with substantive democracy. So, when a procedural democracy enacts a militant measure, it is understood to be engaging in divergent substantive behaviour (i.e., privileging values over procedures) to reach a substantive outcome. In this paper, I challenge this general understanding of MD by proposing a new variant which I call ‘Procedural Militant Democracy’ whereby certain militant measures are not divergent but rather congruent with proceduralism. Drawing upon Robert Dahl’s proceduralist legitimacy criteria, I demonstrate how certain legislated measures––such as, compulsory voting laws, truth in political advertising laws, and restrictions on political donations––represent militant prima facie rights violations that that are not intended to achieve a substantive outcome but rather to enhance the robustness and therefore legitimacy of democratic procedures. Crucially, within PMD, militant measures are only permitted to the extent that they enhance procedural legitimacy. Since party bans violate procedures, they do not qualify whereas requiring people to vote, prohibiting the bad faith speech of political elites and reducing the influence of dark money in elections do. Such seemingly militant measures constitute a procedural facilitation of a substantive outcome: democratic self-defence. It achieves this, albeit without purporting to do so directly, by addressing anti-democratic threats at their root causes: social and political disparity, polarization, exclusion, discontent and disinformation. Therefore, rather than side-stepping ‘the people’, PMD hyper-activates them and reinstates them at the centre of democracy: militancy is applied, not so much to repress undesirable actors, as to empower ‘the people’ to act as alert and enlightened stakeholders in and caretakers of their democracy. By virtue of this activation under certain conditions ––referred to here as ‘hyper-inclusion’––PMD offers a legitimate and arguably more effective bulwark against anti-democratic threats than both its non-militant procedural and substantive counterparts. I use Australia is the main exemplar of PMD, not only as a means by which to fill out the details of how such a model can work in practice, but as proof of concept.