Toward an assessment of marginality in democratic systems: The Charlie Hebdo debate in the United Kingdom
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118758237 |
| Author | Andrea Felicetti,Pietro Castelli Gattinara |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118758237
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2018, Vol. 20(2) 497 –517
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118758237
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Toward an assessment of
marginality in democratic
systems: The Charlie Hebdo
debate in the United Kingdom
Andrea Felicetti1 and Pietro Castelli Gattinara2
Abstract
This article offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of marginality of actors and ideas in
democratic systems. We do so with respect to the extensive public debate that ensued from
the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks of January 2015. Using content analytical data retrieved from
The Guardian, we assess the degree and nature of marginality as indicated by the presence of different
types of intervention in the public debate. Our findings show that women have very limited visibility;
religious and minority groups—particularly Muslims—are sidestepped; and actors challenging the
dominant securitisation narrative are systematically neglected by those holding dominant positions.
We argue for greater attention to the problem of marginality and introduce the Maximin principle
of marginality as a means to address this issue in analyses of democratic systems.
Keywords
Charlie Hebdo, deliberation, democracy, marginality, public debate, The Guardian
Introduction
As theoretical and empirical research in deliberative democracy continue to develop,
ideas from the field are being adopted in a growing array of disciplines (Elstub et al.,
2016). Consequently, it is increasingly important to ensure that deliberative democratic
analysis is endowed with the means to critically assess extant democratic politics and to
engage with a number of pressing issues affecting contemporary democracies (Chambers,
2009). Empirically informed theoretical studies are particularly useful contributions
toward these objectives (Bächtiger et al., 2010). In this spirit, this article intends to con-
tribute to the recent spread of large-scale empirical analyses of contemporary societies
from a deliberative democratic standpoint (see, for example, Curato and Ong, 2015;
Davidson et al., 2016; Kuyper, 2016; Riedy and Kent, 2015). In particular, we aim to shed
1Center for Political Research, KU Leuven
2C-REX Centre for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo
Corresponding author:
Andrea Felicetti, Center for Political Research, Parkstraat 45 Bus 3602, KU, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Email: andrea.felicetti@kuleuven.be
758237BPI0010.1177/1369148118758237The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFelicetti and Castelli Gattinara
research-article2018
Original Article
498 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20(2)
light on an important yet overlooked issue—the problem of marginality in democratic
systems. Specifically, we refer to discursive marginality: that is, marginality of actors and
their views in public discourse.
By marginality, we mean the extent to which a system features limitations to the effec-
tive engagement of some actors in relevant public discourses. Rather than investigating
the mere presence or absence of certain actors in a public debate, we are interested in
exploring how the visibility of different actors varies in public debates. As we will see,
since the early stage of deliberative thinking, the ability of actors to voice their interests
and ideas in public discourse has been deemed central to the purview of a deliberative and
democratic society (Dryzek, 1990). Despite its significance, however, marginality is
largely overlooked in contemporary deliberative democratic analysis, which, thus far, has
advanced little or no conceptual means to tackle, asses, and reflect upon the problem of
marginality.
Taking as an example the resounding public debate that followed the January 2015
Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris, this article seeks to show the alarming extent of
marginality of certain actors and to identify ways forward in thinking about how to redress
this problem. Focusing on the coverage of the debate in the UK media (see below), we
address the following questions: How is marginality configured in the way the Charlie
Hebdo debate was reported in national media? What type of actors tends to be marginal?
And, most importantly, what are the implications of marginality for democratic systems?
Our attempt to answer to these questions begins with an exploration of one of the most
recent and influential developments in deliberative democracy: the deliberative system
approach (Chambers, 2009; Dryzek, 2011; Mansbridge et al., 2012; Parkinson and
Mansbridge, 2012). As we show in the first part of the article, despite its many merits, this
approach falls short of providing satisfactory means to deal with the issue of marginality.
By identifying the main characteristics and implications of marginality from a democratic
perspective, and by discussing the relevance of marginality in real-world public debates,
we argue that contemporary systemic analysis needs to be able to assess the multiple
ways in which a system may (or may not) feature marginality. In other words, we suggest
that the assessment of democratic systems may not rely exclusively on the evaluation of
the overall deliberative quality of the system but ought to integrate this with measure-
ments of the extent to which it also displays marginality.
Since we find the deliberative system approach ill-suited to shed light on the issue of
marginality, we refrain from adopting a deliberative system approach ourselves.
Deliberation, though important, is just one of the activities that need to occur within a
working democratic political system, along with voting, protesting, and petitioning,
among others. Deliberation can perform only certain functions in a wider democratic
system. Consequently, our purview should be on ‘democratic’ rather than ‘deliberative’
systems (Easton, 1953; Kuyper, 2016; Warren, 2017).
In the second part of the article, we support our exploration of the issue of marginality
in democratic systems with illustrations from extensive empirical analysis of the public
debate that unfolded in the United Kingdom, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris
of January 2015. While the attacks took place in France, our choice to focus on the United
Kingdom is justified by the substantive content, as well as the scope, of the ensuing
debate. Substantively, in fact, the Paris attacks have produced a short circuit in public
discussions on a range of crucial issues for European societies, including immigration,
religion, security, and civil rights. The attacks triggered heated debates across Europe in
a highly emotionalised atmosphere, as the logic of polarisation between in-groups and
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