Redemptive Democracy

There is a deep and widening disjuncture between pessimistic assessments on democratic governance among elites and popular enthusiasm for democracy, even in countries thought to be suffering from backsliding, in the developing world. At the same time, ordinary people are facing economic uncertainty and exclusion in countries experiencing dramatic increases in oligarchic inequality, yet voting for right-wing populists that are thought to be implementing democratic backsliding. How might we understand these dynamics? In order to understand these dynamics, we argue that democracy has two “faces”: the procedural and the redemptive. Most elite commentators and scholars in the West see democracy as always and only defined by procedures by which all citizens can choose among groups of politicians through regular elections, as long as they have key civil and political rights. Procedural democracy is neutral with regard to the distribution of income and wealth. Inspired by populist mobilization from the Global South, redemptive democracy, by contrast, stands for the promise that the many – the ordinary, working people – rather than the few – the elite establishment – should maintain and wield political power. Proceduralists focus on defending extant norms and institutions in order to prevent backsliding by populist leaders, even as they might maintain inequality. Oligarchic forms of political inequality, by contrast, represent a violation of redemptive notions of democracy, allowing populists to mobilize against the status quo. In the 21st century, the relative success of right-populists against the establishment arises from redemptive claims against Western-oriented establishment that defends an administrative state that reproduces inequality in practice and provides benefits for a concatenation of interest and identity groups without articulating a sense of the people as distinct from the elite. Thus, in order to address the crisis of democratic backsliding, we argue that creating new institutions that can carry redemptive promises forward might be more fruitful than the defense of extant institutions in the name of procedure.