Agonistic democracy and constitutionalism in the age of populism

Date01 January 2022
DOI10.1177/1474885119871648
Published date01 January 2022
Subject MatterArticles
Article EJPT
Agonistic democracy and
constitutionalism in the
age of populism
Danny Michelsen
University of G
ottingen, Germany
Abstract
The article examines the compatibility of agonistic democracy and populism as well as
their relationship to the idea of constitutionalism. The first part shows that Chantal
Mouffe’s recent attempts to reconcile her normative approach of an agonistic pluralism
with a populist style of politics are not fully convincing. Although there are undeniable
commonalities between an agonistic and a populist understanding of politics –
the appreciation of conflict, the rejection of moralistic and juridical modes of conflict
resolution etc. – the populist mode of the construction of the people (and the denun-
ciation of political opponents as enemies of the people) risks impeding the transfor-
mation of antagonistic into agonistic modes of political contest. The tensions between
agonism and populism are especially evident in matters of constitutionalism. This topic
is examined in the second part of the article, which provides some ideas for reducing
the normative and institutional blind spots of contemporary theories of agonistic
democracy. It focuses on elementary principles for an agonistic concept of democratic
constitutionalism that differs from the populist view of the relationship between politics
and law, especially in respect of its interpretation of the concept of ‘resistibility’ of
legal norms.
Keywords
Agonistic democracy, Chantal Mouffe, constitutionalism, judicial review, populism
Corresponding author:
Danny Michelsen, G
ottingen Institute for Democracy Research, University of G
ottingen, WeenderLandstraße
14, D-37073 G
ottingen, Germany.
Email: danny.michelsen@demokratie-goettingen.de
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474885119871648
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2022, Vol. 21(1) 68–88
Introduction
As Cas Mudde (2018) recently remarked in the Guardian, the political science
community is today ‘closer to a consensus than it has ever been’ when it comes
to the task of def‌ining populism. The normative evaluation of populism, however,
is still very much disputed. While its liberal critics such as Jan-Werner Mu
¨ller
condemn it not only as illiberal and anti-constitutionalist, but also as a ‘directly
undemocratic understanding of representative democracy’ (Mu
¨ller, 2014: 484),
other scholars make a more ambivalent assessment by describing populism as a
‘threat and corrective to democracy’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013b) or as
an ‘internal periphery of liberal-democratic politics’ (Arditi, 2005: 77), since the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, which is often glorif‌ied and played off against
constitutional principles by populist politicians, is, after all, still a part of the
democratic narrative. On the other hand, it has always been in a certain tension
with the liberal-constitutionalist tradition of this narrative (Rovira Kaltwasser,
2014a: 500). Some express unease about an unduly ‘moralizing’ debate on the
dangers of right-wing populism (Blu
¨hdorn and Butzlaff, 2018: 15; J
orke and
Selk, 2017); a few political scientists even call the populist logic of separating the
good people from the neoliberal power bloc a ‘genuinely democratic response to
representative-oligarchic processes of closure’ (Jann, 2017: 289). Perhaps the best-
known advocate of this latter position is Chantal Mouffe, who is also the best-
known representative of the ‘agonistic’ tradition of democratic theory in Europe.
Since the 2000s, Mouffe has presented her concept of agonistic democracy as a
means to revive the old left-right-dichotomy of European party systems which
would be the best recipe for countering the electoral gains of right-wing populists.
In her more recent publications, however, she seems to assume that populism is
not only compatible with agonistic democracy. The populist style of politics – its
construction of the people as a collective actor that is suppressed by a cultural-
economic elite – is even described as the most promising way of challenging the
‘post-political’ status quo (Mouffe, 2018: 6).
Mouffe’s defence of populism raises suspicions that there might be something
like a general aff‌inity between agonists and advocates of a populist understanding
of democracy. After all, both describe the relationship between democracy and
constitutionalism as contradictory (Honig, 2009: 26–35; Mouffe, 2000: 2–5); and
they criticize strong forms of liberal cosmopolitanism – especially the ‘legalist’
hope for the universal enforcement of human rights through transnational pro-
cesses of constitutionalization – as politically naive (Honig, 2008: 106) or even as
undemocratic, since such processes could undermine ‘the old rights of sovereignty’,
which enable the people to govern themselves (Mouffe, 2005: 101). But above all,
agonistic democrats, like populists, consider the openness of the constitutional
consensus to divergent interpretations and the empowerment of citizens to artic-
ulate disagreements ‘not only within the rules of law but also over the rules of law’
as the sine qua non of political freedom (Tully, 2008b: 96). Nonetheless, I will show
that Mouffe’s assertion of an overly harmonious relationship between democracy
69Michelsen

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