The Responses of Populism to Dahl's Democratic Dilemmas
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12038 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Responses of Populism to Dahl’s
Democratic Dilemmas
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
University of Sussex
From Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Sarah Palin in the US, populist leaders
claim to offer more power to ‘the people’. However, most scholars argue that populism is in fact a democratic
pathology,because it seeks to build a political system devoid of the rule of law. While it is true that populism maintains
an ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy, little attention has been paid to the legitimacy of the questions
raised by populist forces. Drawing on the work of Robert Dahl, I argue that current manifestations of populism are
offering specific responses to two dilemmas that do not have a clear democratic solution:the boundary problem (how
to define the people?) and the limits of self-government (how to control the controllers?). My article shows that
populist forces are posing legitimate questions about the current state of democracy in Europe and the Americas,
although their solutions tend to be more controversial than helpful.
Keywords: populism; democracy; Europe; Latin Amer ica; United States
Populism seems to be a pervasive phenomenon in the contemporary world. From
North to South America and from Eastern to Western Europe populist leaders, move-
ments and parties have become increasingly influential in the last decade.Although they
vary in their definitions of populism, many authors maintain that populism is first and
foremost a democratic disease or pathology (e.g. Abts and Rummens, 2007; Alonso et al.,
2011; Rosanvallon, 2008; Taggart, 2002; Urbinati, 1998). In this view, tainted though it
is by medical metaphors, populism is damaging for democracy: it is a syndrome that
permits the rise of chauvinistic and fundamentalist forces seeking to dismantle checks
and balances, jettison the rule of law and establish a new regime where political power
relies on the unified will of the people rather than on representatives and unelected
bodies.
While it is true that populism has an ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy,
depicting the former as ‘bad’ and the latter as ‘good’ produces more problems than it
resolves.This way of thinking overlooks the fact that the very institutional design of the
liberal democratic model is anything but perfect, particularly in terms of maintaining an
equilibrium among the so-called checks and balances, as well as between them and the
power of the demos (Armony and Schamis, 2005). Behind this moral language used by
many scholars is the tacit assumption that populism has nothing substantial to offer to
democratic theory and praxis. In contrast, in this article I argue that populism raises issues
that are entirely legitimate and, in consequence, we should avoid treating populism as an
irrational impulse. In consonance with the work of Benjamin Arditi (2004; 2005) and
Margaret Canovan (1999;2004; 2005), I maintain that populism deserves more intellectual
attention, because it poses fundamental questions that are difficult, and to a certain extent
impossible, to solve in a democracy. That said, my article does not intend to offer a
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12038
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 470–487
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
romanticised view of populism, but rather tries to develop an original approach regarding
how to think about populism vis-à-vis democracy.
This is a theory-driven article, which develops a novel framework for studying the
ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy,and which offers some empirical
illustrations to highlight the usefulness of the proposed framework.The article is structured
in three sections. In the first part, I examine Robert Dahl’s work with the aim of showing
the existence of two dilemmas that do not have a clear democratic solution:the boundar y
problem (how to define the people?) and the limits of self-government (how to control the
controllers?).The second part of the article is focused on the solutions that contemporary
populism is prone to offer when it comes to dealing with the two democratic dilemmas
sketched above, and it will illustrate some of the differences and similarities between the
predominant manifestations of populism that Europe, Latin America and the US are
experiencing today. Finally, I conclude by providing some suggestions for rethinking the
relationship between populism and democracy.
Dahl’s Democratic Dilemmas
Without a doubt, Robert Dahl is one of the most important political thinkers of the
twentieth century. Unlike many other authors, his work has been influential for both
empiricist and theoretical researchers. Dahl’s notion of ‘polyarchy’ is probably the most
commonly used concept for measuring and operationalising democracy. His list of insti-
tutional guarantees that a regime has to comply with in order to be considered democratic
is the minimal core of almost all empirical approaches. Moreover,his work is characterised
by historical and heuristic reflections about not only the nature but also the normative
grounds of democracy. As Michael Saward (2003, p. 48) points out, Dahl is particularly
interesting‘because he both absorbs and extends the dominant Schumpeterian narrative,on
the one hand, and in more normative mode is one of the most trenchant critics of the limits
of American democracy, on the other’.
In sum, at the heart of the Dahlian perspective is the very idea that both the empirical
and normative aspects of democracy should be combined in a single theoretical approach.
How can this be accomplished? Dahl’s answer to this question is that we have to be aware
of the dual meaning of democracy: it refers not only to an ideal, but also to actual regimes
(i.e.polyarchies) that fall considerably short of the ideal. For instance,although no one really
doubts that contemporary Spain is a democratic country, the indignados have good reasons
for claiming that the political system is not functioning properly and that the principle of
self-government is not being met.After all, ‘the invisible hand of the market’and suprana-
tional institutions are imposing reforms at odds with the will of the Spanish people.As this
example reveals, the concept of democracy can be used to evaluate whether a regime is
democratic or not, and to criticise existing democracies for their difficulties,and sometimes
inability, in guaranteeing substantive outcomes.
According to Dahl, the double meaning of democracy is often confusing, but also
indicative of a productive tension between empirical and normative approaches.Whereas
the former seek to measure whether and to what degree a country is democratic, the latter
aim to show that democracy is justified as a political system that is responsive to all its
citizens. Given that the gap between existing democracies and the democratic ideal cannot
DAHL’S DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS 471
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014, 62(3)
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