The People between Procedure and Populism
Paulina Ochoa Espejo
Populism is generally regarded as a pathology of democracy.1 With very few exceptions,2 academics see populism as a threatening or degenerate form of democratic politics. But their view raises the question of why, if democracy is rule by the people, are populists not considered democrats? Moreover, if we cannot believe the populist who claims to speak in the name of “the people” and to represent “the general will,” why should we believe those who profess to be “real” democrats?
These questions arise in a variety of situations in which both the media and scholarly literature see populism at work. Take, for example, the “Every Man a King” scenario,3 in which a politician stirs popular enthusiasm and support by promising the masses what they want, but then cannot fully deliver: in this case, we could ask, why is this politician a populist rather than a democrat? Making promises, after all, is a normal feature of electoral politics. Likewise, when politicians mobilize wide swaths of the population against the elite, and the movement is characterized as populist, the question arises: Is it not true that democracies aim for legal and political equality among citizens, and hence, for the progressive elimination of corporate and hierarchical privileges? A similar question might be asked when there is popular mobilization against an out-group: Is it not always the case that the privileges of democratic citizenship require discrimination against non-citizens? But in situations of constitutional crisis, when more is at stake, distinguishing between populism and democracy is even more challenging. At such times, when one group claims to speak for the people and, in its name, rejects the legality of existing institutions, it is particularly hard to distinguish a populist movement from a genuine democratic revolution. Why are populist mobilizations that claim to embody the will of the people pathological, while democratic institutions that also claim to embody the will of the people are a healthy form of political organization?
I believe that these questions arise and remain vexing because scholars tend to avoid issues of political morality in their work on populism. This is particularly true of those scholars who study the phenomenon empirically and claim to eschew normative judgments yet unwittingly introduce such judgments by virtue of accepting the distinction between democracy and populism. Given that most contemporary scholars agree that liberal democracy is the best form of political organization, describing a movement as “populist” rather than “liberal-democratic” is a way of sneaking a normative judgment in through the back door. In this chapter, I will bring this agreement into focus and explicitly ask: What is the normative criterion that allows us to distinguish between a populist mobilization and a liberal-democratic revolution? Answering this question is important if we want to understand the causes, internal dynamics, and consequences of populist movements. At the same time, the answer has wider implications in that it can bring new insights into the sources of legitimacy in the democratic state, both from a sociological standpoint and from the perspective of normative political theory.
In what follows, I argue that the key to distinguishing between populism and liberal democracy is to determine who are the people who legitimize the state—or, more precisely, what concept of “the people” is being employed for that purpose. However, as I will show, this cannot be done on the basis of empirical research. Thus, the boundary between populism and democracy will remain blurry unless democratic theory can identify who the people are who can and should govern themselves democratically. In attempting to do so, however, we face a dilemma, because when we specify the criterion that delimits a democratic people, we undermine equality—one of the fundamental values of liberal democracy. I call this problem “the indeterminacy of popular unification.” Theoretical responses to the problem tend to press liberal democracy from two different directions. On the one hand, procedural views, such as Jürgen Habermas’s, equate the people with institutional procedures, so that we cannot conceive that movements that reject the legitimacy of existing institutions are constituted by the people; on the other hand, populist views, such as Ernesto Laclau’s, equate the people with extra-institutional mobilizations, so that they blur the distinction between populism and liberal democracy to the extent that we cannot judge popular movements from a normative perspective.
In this chapter, I offer a third option. To do so, I turn to a recent discussion in political theory, which in the last decade has paid renewed attention to the concept of “the people” and in the process has avoided the well-known difficulties of representing the people’s will through electoral mechanisms4 and the tension between constitutionalism and democracy.5 Instead, the focus has shift ed to the nature,6 composition,7 and boundaries8 of the people and to assessing the consequences that holding a given conception of “the people” may have for democracy.9 Several scholars in this debate associate “openness” with a liberal-democratic people. In their view, liberal-democratic legitimacy requires that the people be unbounded and open to change, both in fact and in principle. In this chapter, I use this theoretical insight to construct a new criterion for distinguishing between populism and liberal-democracy: self-limitation. I argue that populists reject any limits on their claims to embody the will of the people—claims that they hold to be always right, always the correct and authoritative interpretation of the common good. Liberal-democratic movements, by contrast, also appeal to the people, but they frame this appeal in a way that guarantees pluralism and presents any particular cause as fallible, including their own. Self-limitation arises from openness: if the people can (and probably will) change, then any appeal to its will is also fallible, temporary, and incomplete.
This chapter is divided into six sections. The first explains why the leading definition of populism cannot distinguish between populism and liberal democracy in times of crises. The second traces the origin of this shortcoming to old problems in the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and examines Habermas’s proceduralism. The third presents the challenge of popular indeterminacy, while the fourth turns to Laclau’s populism and shows how his theory makes it impossible to assess a popular movement. In the fifth, I argue that a liberal-democratic response to the problem requires that we conceive of the people as open, and then it posits self-limitation as a criterion to distinguish populism from liberal democracy. The sixth section tests the criterion’s mettle by applying it to a recent case of alleged populism in which Andrés Manuel López Obrador led a movement to contest the results of the 2006 presidential election in Mexico.
A Blind Spot in Classical Definitions of Populism
In recent years, several scholars have revisited populism, seeking to clarify the concept and its complex relationship with democracy. Out of these efforts, Cas Mudde’s definition stands out because it both captures how the term is used in politics and the media and also synthesizes the core elements that appear in most current scholarly definitions of the term. Moreover, the definition lends itself to use in empirical research, and it helps us to think of the phenomenon of populism comparatively.10 According to Mudde, “populism is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”11
This definition succinctly brings together five widely held intuitions about populism. The first is that movements and leaders become populist when they sidestep institutional constraints and seek legitimacy by direct appeal to the people. Here, Mudde’s definition allows for the fact that populist leaders oft en use plebiscitary strategies, while at the same time it does not make this trait a necessary condition for populism.12 The second intuition is that populism draws a sharp moralized distinction between “us” (the people) and “them” (the elite, the foreigners, or the other). A third is that there is a category difference between populism and democracy: populism is an ideology,13 while democracy is a type of regime. Thus, “the people” in populist discourse is a symbolic or normative construct, rather than a reference to a concrete collection of individuals or a specific form of government. The fourth idea is connected to Mudde’s categorization of the ideology as “thin-centered,” which explains populism’s malleability and accounts for geographical and temporal variations.14 Finally, the definition contains a criterion of demarcation between the people and the elite that explains why populism does not sit comfortably with the ideology and values of liberal democracy, which considers both masses and elite as part of the people. This last trait is the most important for this chapter’s purposes: the definition promises to help us distinguish between liberal mobilizations and populist uprisings.
According to Mudde’s definition, populists hold that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. Liberal democrats, by contrast, believe that a well-organized polity will constrain the people’s will and allow for pluralism.15 The Rousseauvian language in the definition conveys the populist idea that the direct, non-represented “people’s voice” is equivalent to the common good; and so the general will trumps liberalism’s legal constraints. The definition thus stresses that, for populists, the popular will has a higher authority than representative mechanisms and institutions such as constitutional courts, the judiciary, in dependent electoral courts, or central banks.16 Accordingly, we can determine who is a populist and when this position is a threat to liberal democracy by the degree to which a politician or party ideology favors the people’s will over liberal principles and in dependent institutions.17
While Mudde’s definition is useful for distinguishing among party ideologies within settled electoral systems, it has a blind spot when dealing with popular mobilizations that lead to constitutional crises. On those occasions, the distinction between populism and liberal democracy breaks down18 because the mobilizations oft en occur outside the legal and recognized channels of an established political system, such as legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, or ombudsmen. Insofar as the movement in question challenges the legitimacy of those institutions that have had the authority to judge whether a movement complies with constitutional guarantees, the sharp distinction between liberal institutions and the populist appeal to the “general will” collapses. So, for example, during periods of constitutional stability we can confidently say that a movement is populist if its spokesperson appeals to electoral mandates or majoritarian sentiment to undermine the rights of individuals or minorities. At such times, we can spot a populist when she appeals to the moral superiority of the common people as a reason for questioning constitutional constraints, the decisions of the judiciary, or other in dependent institutions whose in-principle legitimacy she nevertheless accepts. However, during constitutional crises this way of distinguishing is not helpful, because a liberal movement would behave in exactly the same way.
Imagine a constitutional system in crisis: a country where a large part of society actively challenges the legitimacy of current institutions. These challengers may be suspicious of institutions because they believe that they are substantively or procedurally unjust. They may believe that judicial decisions are constantly biased against one group in society, that the police and judiciary are easily corrupted, or that the constitutionally enshrined rights of minorities protect a system of privilege for the elite (that is itself a minority), while effectively disenfranchising large swathes of the population. In such cases, participants in the movement do not accept the authority of the institutions that they think are causing harm, and thus they do not accept the authority of institutional constraints. Hence, in such cases, a liberal-democratic movement would have to appeal to the people, and against the established institutions, in order to gain the legitimacy required to enact liberal reforms. By proposing a new order in the name of what is right for all, a liberal-democratic movement would also claim “that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” That is, according to Mudde’s definition, in such cases, a liberal-democratic movement would also be a populist movement. When a liberal-democratic movement is extra-institutional, this definition cannot help us distinguish between liberal democracy and populism.
A liberal critic of the view I am putting forward could object that the entanglement of populism and liberal democracy in such cases is easy to resolve. If liberal principles are universal and thus in dependent of the uprising’s concrete circumstances, an impartial judge could distinguish a liberal leader from a non-liberal one. However, the reply to this objection is straightforward: when the coin of legitimacy is in the air, there is no authoritative impartial judge available. Unlike philosophical debate, which allows direct or hypothetical appeals to truth, when it comes to ideological challenges, there is no higher authority than the people, who become the sole arbiters. So it is that during a constitutional crisis, there will be appeals to the people, and the relation between populism and liberal democracy will always be ambiguous in this respect.19
However, the appeal to the “general will” is only one aspect of Mudde’s definition of populism. What about the Manichaean distinction between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”? Upon examination, we can see that in times of crisis, this characteristic is not unique to populists either. If, during normal electoral periods, a politician claimed that society is separated into two antagonistic groups (“the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”) and that only the people deserve to be heard, then this politician would be threatening liberal principles. His or her views would probably be unacceptable within the liberal political system, and it would be easy to recognize this individual as a populist; for liberalism requires the recognition of equal rights and protections for all, and does not accept the exclusion of minorities on the basis of non-liberal criteria. However, in times of crisis, a liberal movement must also make sharp distinctions and exclusions: it must clearly distinguish those who are entitled to participate as equals in the polity from those who should be excluded. Moreover, on those occasions, in order to preserve pluralism, a liberal movement must also exclude those who do not accept the terms of the liberal constitutional arrangement, and have both the power and the will to overthrow it. (This is the rationale behind banning the Nazi party in Germany, for example. Liberal institutions also require and allow for a militant defense.20) Indeed, those excluded may in fact be a corrupt elite: given that liberal democracy seeks to establish equal rights for all, the supporters of the old non-liberal regime (i.e., the old elite) must either accept the new terms or leave. So, during constitutional crises, liberal democrats also draw moral distinctions between “us” and “them.” They too visualize a pure people (who has the right to establish new institutions) and a corrupt elite (who support the old ways). This tendency can even be seen at work during periods of liberal stability: in such periods, liberal democrats oft en seek to exclude populists and non-liberals from the polity.21
A second critic could dismiss these ambiguities as anomalous, seeing them as problems that arise so rarely that they do not really challenge Mudde’s definition of populism. However, even though constitutional crises are called “exceptional” or “extraordinary” in theoretical debates,22 they are much more common than they may seem. In fact, such crises preceded most revolutions that instituted the liberal-democratic orders in the Western world. At their inception, all current democracies had to appeal to the popular principle to establish their legitimacy.23 The people, after all, form the constituent power in a democratic state.24 Moreover, even if it is true that revolutions and the founding of new regimes occur very seldom, appeals to the people to challenge or re create existing orders are quite common. According to Andreas Kalyvas, just such claims are made by spontaneous informal movements and extra-constitutional assemblies, both of which are part of the fabric of contemporary democracy; moreover, such claims may be desirable to revitalize democratic politics.25 Even during periods of liberal stability, these claims generate what Jason Frank has called “dilemmas of authorization.” These dilemmas occur whenever popular mobilizations threaten the liberal order by not playing by established rules or when those who call themselves liberal democrats seek to reform the liberal order from the outside to make it better comply with its own rules. According to Frank, “these dilemmas appear and reappear not simply at moments of constitutional crisis but in the fabric of everyday political speech and action.”26 So ambiguity is present every time the legitimacy of the existing order is put into question, and this can happen on a daily basis in democratic orders.
The ambiguous relationship between populism and liberal democracy is more pervasive than the proponents of Mudde’s definition may have noticed. Even in normal times, we may not be able to distinguish between populists and genuine liberal-democratic revolutionaries. Why are the protesters who reject the legitimacy of existing institutions in Europe populists, while the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the “Arab Spring” are seen as democratic revolutionaries? Why are those who exclude foreigners from citizenship using the territorial principle considered “liberals,” while those who want a national principle of exclusion oft en called “populist”? Mudde’s definition of populism cannot help us to make distinctions in these circumstances. In fact, this would seem to lend credence to the view that it is impossible to tell populism apart from revolutionary politics—that, in effect, “populism becomes synonymous with the political,” as Laclau has famously proposed.27
So, if the differences between populism and liberal democracy are so uncertain, why should we try to disentangle the terms? One reason is that without some clarity regarding the object of study we cannot understand populism in specific circumstances, such as the diffusion of popular mobilizations that occurred across the Maghreb, Europe, and the Americas in 2011. More importantly, though, issues involving political morality are at stake. Given that currently there are few genuine alternatives to liberal democracy as a form of political organization, describing a movement as populist rather than liberal democratic is a way of sneaking in a negative normative judgment. Conversely, not distinguishing mobilizations that are populist from those that are liberal democratic gives a free pass to all popular mobilizations that become hegemonic. To determine whether a movement is worthy of support, we cannot shirk from making a distinction and an explicit normative claim. To do this, I hold, we should go back to the normative core of democratic theory. In the following sections I will make these underlying normative assumptions explicit and tackle the following question: What is the normative criterion that allows us to distinguish between a populist mobilization and a liberal-democratic revolution?
Popular Sovereignty and Procedure in Liberal Democratic Theory
Few authors clearly spell it out, but most imply that the difference between populism and liberal democracy is that populism uses the name of “the people” to further its agenda, while misrepresenting the “real” people—the demos who, by definition, rule in a liberal democracy. However, rejecting a populist view because it misrepresents the people’s will presumes that one could give a correct account of who the people are and what they collectively will. What then is the correct articulation of the popular will? To answer this question, we must go back to the theory of popular sovereignty.
The sovereign people is the ultimate judge of legitimacy in a democratic regime. This normative idea of the people is a distinctive feature of modern democratic theory; it did not exist in ancient political thought. In ancient democratic theories, “the many” were a fraction of the demos, and an even smaller fraction of the community. This fraction could be capricious, act erratically, and be easily corrupted. However, since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract, “the people” qua sovereign has come to be seen as inherently good. According to Rousseau, the will of a politically engaged unified people is always right. “The sovereign [or active, unmediated, people], by the mere fact that it is, is always what it ought to be.”28 However, this means that the concept of the sovereign people is an idealization, or an abstraction of right principles, not to be confused with the masses or even the electoral majority. The sovereign people is the ground of law, under the assumption that the people could only legislate what is right, and thus, the general will, unlike “the will of all,” coincides with the common good by definition. Hence, popular sovereignty justifies democracy by establishing a common legal background sustained by an original consensus, and afterwards, by harmonizing individual interests in a general will that coincides with the common good.
Rousseau’s seminal idea is that we could have collective and individual autonomy simultaneously, provided that every individual wills what is good for all. In this vein, social contract theories from Rousseau and Immanuel Kant to John Rawls and Habermas presuppose popular sovereignty as a rational order that harmonizes individual interests with the common good, allowing a just legal state to emerge from individual consent. To know what this order could be, contemporary social contract theorists follow Kant in arguing that we can construct the general will out of abstract principles. This allows us to create a hypothetical standard against which to measure real political practices. However, abstract principles are not themselves sufficient for deciding and judging in specific cases—that is, for ruling. So, in this view, popular sovereignty remains an ideal on which to ground constitutions, rather than an instrument for governing. Critics of popular sovereignty thus argue that, in practice, a democratic state will be governed, not by the people, but by those who claim to represent the general will. And because there are no higher criteria or infallible judges who could tell us what is the common good, this arrangement always runs the risk of turning into paternalism, vanguardism, … or populism.
This weakness in the theory of popular sovereignty has always been a problem for liberal democracy. Some theorists construe the problem as a tension between “two pillars” of liberal democracy29—between, on the one hand, the hypothetical construction of the common good (constitutionalism or “reason”) and, on the other, the actual wishes of the population as expressed in electoral politics and also in extra-electoral mobilizations (populism or “will”). Liberal democracy and pluralism thrive when the tension between constitutionalism and electoral democracy is contained by a consensus that operates in the background and legitimizes the state. In a plural state, this background consensus supports the peaceful coexistence of many groups and minorities, as well as political contestation among them. However, when a group within society questions the background consensus and challenges it as a myth or a deceit, legitimacy erodes. In extreme cases, both liberal constraints and electoral institutions lose their legitimacy. Rebuilding or reestablishing the background consensus requires popular support and legal institutions. So, from such a destabilized position, a group that claims to be the embodiment of liberal values would be indistinguishable from a group that claims to be the embodiment of the people. Moreover, as discussed in the prior section, this type of ambiguity does not arise only in exceptional circumstances.
In the last two decades, several political theorists have tried to address the problem in the theory of popular sovereignty by conceiving it as a diffused procedure involving institutions and citizens’ interactions, rather than by equating the people with electoral majorities or in terms of the definite will of a group of individuals.30 In this view, which is most strongly associated with Habermas’s constitutional theory, the appeal to the people is not an appeal to electoral majorities or to the masses that exist in dependently of institutions; instead, an appeal to popular sovereignty invokes “subjectless forms of communication that regulate the flow of discursive opinion and will formation in such a way that their fallible outcomes have the presumption of practical reason on their side.”31 In his view, the interplay of hypothetical principles embedded in the constitution, along with the continuous challenge of popular opinion, grounds the legitimacy of institutions in a liberal-democratic state.
However, as Margaret Canovan has argued, this disembodied version of the people cannot fully solve the problems of popular sovereignty or clarify the relation between populism and democracy.32 The philosophical explication of the complexity of democratic politics does not solve the practical problem of how to legitimize the state to actual populations. In fact, due to this difficulty, democratic politics becomes a dangerous act of balancing on a knife’s edge. On the one hand, accepting that the people cannot fully legitimize liberal institutions on the basis of a preexisting general will may weaken these legal institutions to the point of failure. On the other hand, relying on the fiction of the people to legitimize the state prompts groups to seek a homogenous organic community to make good on the promise. In the worst cases, the appeal to an organic community may lead to dangerous forms of unjust exclusion and even to ethnic cleansing.33 As Canovan puts it: “It would appear that voters need to swallow the democratic equivalent of Plato’s ‘noble lie,’ whilst not believing it to the point that they attempt to act on it.”34
In sum, contemporary theories of popular sovereignty conceive of the popular will as a diffuse procedure, and this allows us to think theoretically about the ground of legitimacy in a state. Yet, this pushes both democratic publics and theorists to ask who are the people whose will is institutionalized and conveyed in the procedure? The fact that populations come back to the idea of the people as a concrete group of individuals shows that the theory of popular sovereignty has not solved the problems inherent in popular sovereignty. And to the extent that there is no “right” democratic formulation of the people, there cannot be a populist “usurpation” either.
Popular Indeterminacy
Populism presents an interesting challenge to democracy. When populists claim to speak for the people, they force democratic theorists to clarify what they mean by such technical terms as “demos.” In the last decades, pressed in part by debates related to populism and immigration, political theorists have begun to ask again who are, and who should be, the people who govern themselves in a democracy.35 This new debate goes beyond the problem of making sense of electoral results or determining the policy preferences of the electorate; or rather, it goes beneath that debate, and it tackles a prior question: What are the proper boundaries of the demos? Who precisely are the people?
The dominant response at this point in the debate is that in liberal democracies the boundaries of the people are indeterminate. This conclusion follows from confronting a difficult and persistent logical problem of self-reference that arises when you try to define the people according to liberal-democratic principles: in a democracy the people decides on important matters, so it should decide who is part of the people, which is a crucial matter for democracy. But this, of course, is impossible. Yet, even if scholars agree that this self-reference is a problem, they have not agreed on a precise formulation or name for it. A well-known formulation is “the boundary problem.”36 It states that if the question of who to include in the demos is politically important, then in a democracy, the people should decide the matter at the polls. But if we need an election to delimit the demos, how do we choose the electors? This question generates an infinite regress. In the last decades, similar formulations of the problem have been called “the problem of the unit,”37 “the paradox of founding,”38 “the democratic paradox,”39 “the paradox of popular sovereignty,”40 “the paradox of democratic legitimacy,”41 “the paradox of politics,”42 and “the problem of constituting the demos.”43 In each case, there is a self-referential structure, but theorists disagree over whether this is a real problem for democratic legitimacy. In this section, I argue that self-reference is indeed a problem because it makes it impossible to distinguish populism from democracy according to the traditional definitions.
The problem of popular indeterminacy is that if we believe that the people is a well-defined collection of individuals, then democracy turns out to be incoherent. This incoherence follows from the incompatibility of two widely held assumptions about the legitimacy of democratic rule. First, democracy requires a people that rules and is ruled; second, it is commonly assumed that in a democracy all individuals ruled must be publicly treated as equals. The first assumption is true by definition, and the second is the justificatory ground for democracy. This second assumption, moreover, has an important implication: in order to establish equal public treatment, all those individuals who are ruled should be able to participate in the creation of the basic institutions that rule them. For, even if subsequently all individuals are treated equally, the original difference between those who founded the institutions and those who did not may give an upper hand to those who participated in the creation of institutions. Those who interpreted universal principles and created the basic institutions have some leeway in determining which political differences matter and which ones do not. The ability to use this leeway gives them an advantage that others did not have, and thus it also gives them public preferential treatment.
Those individuals who created institutions may argue that this original in equality is not relevant, because it grounds a just government for all, and is good overall for those who are later brought into the polity, even if they did not participate in the creation of institutions. However, those whose interpretation was not taken into account can argue that government has been paternalistically imposed on them and that this paternalism creates a relationship of authority where there should not be one. The resulting paternalism violates the democratic principle of political equality, as defined above. In sum, according to this view of democracy, to legitimize the state democratically, you require a people and equal public treatment. Yet, if one conceives of the people as a collection of individuals, then these requirements are not compatible because satisfying the second one implies that every single individual of a group should be allowed to participate in the creation of basic institutions of rule. These institutions comprise the agreement that settles the terms of political participation, including the question of membership in the people. However, this requirement leads to an infinite regress: any such agreement requires a previous agreement on the terms of the first agreement and so on. To escape this problem, liberal democracy usually appeals to an already constituted people or a foreign founder. But these appeals reinstate the problem of paternalism (and the concomitant in equality), because then not all individuals in a constituted group would have had a say in the creation of the institutions that rule them. Thus the second requirement is incompatible with the first. If we try to create a democratic people we get caught in a paradox of self-reference.
Popular indeterminacy arises because the very group of individuals that sustains the citizenry and the democratic state must be democratically defined in order to comply with the requirement of equality. Yet the self-reference of this requirement inevitably creates indeterminacy. The individuals of a group cannot all have a say in the making of the group unless the group already exists, and for that reason, a people, as an association of individuals, cannot sustain democratic legitimacy. Hence, if democracy depends on the people conceived as a collection of individuals, then democratic theory cannot tell us who the people are without getting into fatal problems.
In sum, democratic theory faces insurmountable difficulties when it comes to defining “the people” and thus, to defining its will—even if “the people” is construed as diffuse and disembodied, as Habermas proposes. The corollary of this problem is that if we do not know who the people are, we cannot distinguish populism from liberal democracy. How can contemporary political theory deal with this condition?
Embracing Populism
In recent years several scholars have recognized the indeterminacy of the people as an inevitable aspect of democratic thought, and rather than seeing it as a problem, they have adopted it as the ground of their political theories.44 Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, in which popular indeterminacy is the starting point of all reflections. In Laclau’s view, indeterminacy is not the product of a logical problem in democratic theory; rather it is “inscribed in social reality as such.”45 In democracies, this basic fact is not a problem, as it is from a proceduralist perspective, because “the people” is not conceived as the result of an institutionalized procedure that must somehow be grounded in a prior popular will. Instead, Laclau sees “the people” as a movement that is constituted discursively by the connection of a series of demands (claims made by scattered individuals or social groups) that stand outside the juridical sanction of the state. The unauthorized leaders who claim to speak for the people constitute the people in the very act of expressing those claims, and this people can legitimize those claims in retrospect.46 And this mechanism, as it happens, is also the way populism works. For Laclau, then, to the extent that “the people” is always constructed this way, democracy must be structurally identical to populism. Thus, by embracing indeterminacy, he embraces populism, and he seeks to show that populism is neither an aberration, nor a pathology of democracy: it is just politics as usual.
For Laclau, then, “the people” is essentially indeterminate. The word “people” and the images this word evokes have no stable material or conceptual referent because they mean something different to each person. Yet, in each case it evokes what the person confronting the symbol believes would unify the people. For instance, during a populist movement, a leader puts forward a symbol. Different political demands with which individuals identify can become associated with symbols of the people, even though the demands may be different, incoherent, or even contradictory. Individuals mobilize around leaders and images that claim to embody “the people” not because all individuals have a common will, but because they see their own will reflected in the word and its accompanying images. The mass movement, then, attracts individuals to a partial but dominant group within society (the hegemonic group) because each may see his or her political cause reflected in the idea of the unified people presented by the populist leader. Yet, given that the unity referred to means something different to each individual, “the people’s will” cannot mean anything definite or concrete.47
However, according to Laclau, even though populist movements rally around nothing concrete, the idea of “the people” nonetheless achieves a certain coherence when a common enemy is identified.48 This enemy is frequently the governing elite. The hegemonic movement that symbolizes the whole always excludes another group within society. In this way “the people” is constituted: it never embraces all individuals and it never unifies, but the exclusionary hegemony may be sufficiently powerful to either topple or sustain a government in power. The upshot of this view is not only that “the people” is always the foundation of political power, but also that democracy is structurally identical to populism: both ideologies use the name of the people to institutionalize a political order, and draw a sharp moralized distinction between those who belong to the hegemonic order (“the people”) and those who do not (elites, foreigners, or non-democrats). In fact, in Laclau’s view, populism is not only equivalent to democracy; it is also equivalent to all politics, because all political groupings are generated in the same way.49
This view can be attractive to theorists because it does not seek to solve the problem of popular indeterminacy. Instead, it incorporates the difficulties into the theory and acknowledges the obscure and perhaps tragic character of political practice. However, even if this view could help us explain how collective identities emerge, it does not help us solve the normative problem at hand: When should we embrace a popular movement? How do we know it espouses the values of freedom and equality and limited government with which we associate liberal democracy? Laclau’s theory cannot help us distinguish between liberal democracy and populism because it assumes that making a people always requires drawing arbitrary lines of exclusion, and thus it also presupposes giving up on universalistic liberal principles. Laclau shares with other critics the view that liberalism’s quest to avoid arbitrary exclusion is a chimera.50 In his view, popular movements may legitimize a government or a ruler sociologically, since their legitimacy depends on how efficiently the government or leader symbolizes the whole people in the eyes of the majority. But those who do not see themselves reflected in the movement are left out of the group that calls itself “the people.” The hegemonic group, moreover, considers itself entitled to exclude these particular individuals from collective governance, given that for the populist, “the people” is not the actualization of individual freedom and collective autonomy through the common recognition of each individual’s freedom and equality. Laclau calls his position “anti-essentialist” and claims that this anti-essentialism gives populism its strength. This may be true, and Laclau’s theory may explain the strength of populism; however, it cannot make sense of liberal individual rights or justify rule democratically to those excluded. In fact, Laclau’s view would commit us to eliminating political morality from this discussion. Therefore, this view could not help us distinguish democracy from populism, given that, as I have argued, the difference between populism and democracy hinges on a normative distinction.
The collapse of populism and democracy into this structural view of politics would be inevitable if it were true that the people must always be exclusionary. But is this the case? In the next section I turn to a view of the people that accepts popular indeterminacy, and also admits of a normative criterion for distinction between liberalism and populism.
Self-Limitation and Openness: Popular Sovereignty beyond Unification
The criterion that I propose for making this distinction is self-limitation. We can see self-limitation in action when a popular movement justifies its aims by appealing to the people, but depicts “the people” as open. That is, self-limitation is at work when the movement depicts the people as the framework that guarantees pluralism, and also frames any particular cause as fallible, including its own. Self-limitation arises from a conception of the people as indeterminate but not exclusionary, from the implicit acceptance that the people can (and probably will) change, and from the ensuing recognition that an appeal based on the people’s will is fallible, temporary, and incomplete. Such a movement acknowledges that its claims may be wrong, and it accepts political defeats. This attitude opens a window for institutionalizing individual rights and creating a working multi-party democracy. By contrast, populists depict their movement as necessarily right, claim that the legitimating ground of government lies in the direct appeal to the people’s will, and hold that the voice of the people is always indefeasible. Thus, whereas populists claims to speak in the name of the people, and hold that this justifies refusing any limits on their claims, liberal democrats, in the name of the people, place limits on their claims.
It is clear that this criterion can help us determine the differences between liberalism and populism in normal times, but its main attraction comes from its ability to distinguish movements during times of crisis. The argument for why it can do this is the following: the essence of liberalism is limited government and respect for individual rights; during crises, however, there are no legitimate, or universally accepted, enforcers of the legal constraints on government; therefore, to be recognized as liberal, a movement that wishes to reestablish or reform liberal government must impose these limits on its own—it must exercise self-limitation.
Regarding this last point, one could object that it may be easy to see that a movement is not liberal when it abuses individual rights, but it is much harder to judge whether a movement is liberal when it is trying to establish a new regime. How can such a movement claim that it represents the people and also limit its reach at the same time? How can a movement claim to be the bearer of the general will of the people, to be the highest source of authority, and also say that these claims should be limited? My argument is that it is possible to do both simultaneously, but this requires that the movement portray the people as open, or unbounded. Moreover, I argue that openness is normative. Conceiving the people as open is required for all democrats because openness is the best response to the paradoxes in the theory of popular sovereignty, which, in turn, is a necessary part of democratic government. For these reasons self-limitation is possible, and it is also a better criterion of demarcation than that offered by other definitions I have discussed.
Openness is the main response given by contemporary democratic theory to the paradoxes of popular sovereignty.51 The sovereign people’s being open-ended was traditionally seen as a problem, but in recent years democratic theorists have argued that this is in fact a requirement for establishing liberal-democratic legitimacy. The requirement for openness allows us to see why a liberal-democratic appeal to the people must be self-limited, and how this liberal-democratic account of the people and its sovereignty differs from a populist view of the general will.
To elaborate: “openness” can help democratic theory if it is understood as involving unboundedness, pluralism, and change.
UNBOUNDEDNESS
The advocates of an open concept of “the people” see it as being unbounded in space and time. For these theorists, unboundedness follows from popular indeterminacy: those who are ruled should be able to participate in creating and governing the institutions that rule them. Yet, it is impossible for those who are ruled, or those over whom power is exercised, to define who they are before they are ruled. This logical problem, however, does not prevent individuals from participating in changing and governing institutions that affect them now. We can thus amend the theory of popular sovereignty such that each individual is considered part of the popular sovereign by participating in an ongoing (and unfinished, or open) process. This amendment to the theory of popular sovereignty makes democratic theory coherent again, but it has a radical conclusion: given that current institutions affect (or could affect) almost everyone in the world, the people could potentially include everyone.52 As Arash Abizadeh has argued, even if we circumscribed this radical argument and accepted that only those who can claim that the state coerces them now are part of the demos, we would still have a potentially unbounded demos because borders coerce those outside them.53 This means that democracy cannot delimit in advance the precise spatial extent of the demos: the demos is in principle unbounded. In fact, as formulated by Abizadeh, this thesis provocatively implies not only that a state has no right to unilaterally control its own borders, but also that, in general, democracy should be practiced in each state with a potentially unbound demos in mind.54
PLURALISM
“The people” that makes democracy coherent is also open in a second sense: it is plural, rather than homogenous, or unified in one voice. However, this pluralism is not restricted to the usual sense of the term, wherein it serves as a legal umbrella covering the rights of groups and minorities within a state. Pluralism in the sense at issue here encompasses traditional pluralism and extends beyond it. Traditional pluralism is insufficient when it faces popular indeterminacy, because, as I argued above, it presupposes a bounded background (the precisely limited shadow of the legal umbrella), for which democratic theory cannot vouch. On the conception of pluralism that arises from normative openness then, pluralism can only be guaranteed to the extent that we conceive of the people as embedded in a process of pluralization: where the limits of pluralism are open to contestation. As a result, popular sovereignty (the ground of pluralism in the state) is also open to contestation,55 and the idea of “the people” itself is changing, fragmented, open. This view, then, requires that we acknowledge that pluralism’s limits are shifting and that the principles that unify and exclude cannot be drawn once and for all. Hence a view that is consistent with this kind of pluralism cannot equate “the people” solely with the electoral majority.
In practical terms, the difficulties of conjuring a unified people lead not only to a pluralist conception of the people, but also to a concomitant effort to expand the forms of representation and the relations that constitute society and citizens. According to Pierre Rosanvallon, within existing states, “openness” can be understood as avoiding oversimplification. This means avoiding equating “the people” with the electoral majority. It also requires that we multiply “the people” into a “complex sovereign” consisting of pluralities that occupy different spaces of the political culture and institutions. Thus, “the people” remains the constituent power in the state, but given that it does not speak with one voice, it can challenge the institutions without completely rejecting them. If the constitution of the state is not thought of in terms of unification, the challenges to the state are also crosscutting and multiple, and they do not threaten the stability of the constitution as a whole.56
CHANGE
Another aspect of openness is the capacity and tendency of a people to change. This translates in practice to accepting change in democratic politics. Thus, where “the people” and the institutions that the people legitimizes are constantly changing, any claim to represent “the people” can be no more than partial or provisional. Indeed, this very indeterminacy can help legitimize liberal-democratic politics and distinguish them from populist appeals. For, if we think of the people as an ongoing process—as an unfinished series of institutional events in which individuals partake, rather than as a well-defined group of individuals57—we recognize that it is not only the institutions that change over time; the people changes, too. So we can incorporate the fact that populations themselves are constructed over time and never completely finished into theory and practice. Thus, we can claim that there is “a people,” even if it is never fully determinate and complete. We can also conceive of the people as the main actor in civil disobedience and revolutions without falling into contradictions. If the people are ever-changing, claims to speak in the people’s name must themselves be provisional, and it is this provisional quality of democratic claims that distinguishes them from the categorical pretensions of populist claims and practices. Populists claim that they are absolutely and permanently right; liberal democrats, by contrast, acknowledge that their claims may be wrong and thus both welcome future challengers and accept temporary defeats.
In sum, thinking of the people as open (unbounded, pluralizing, and changing) allows us to define the subject of popular sovereignty without falling into the indeterminacy problem. Seeing the people as open would help us to differentiate democracy from populism by introducing a specific criterion as a litmus test: self-limitation. If a popular movement acknowledges the unbounded, plural, and changing nature of the people, it will appeal to the people, but only in a negative sense. Given that “the people” is not complete, its decisions and its will cannot be absolute and unchallenged. A movement that acknowledges an open people does not claim to know the content of the people’s will, and it does not claim to be the final authority regarding the truth or correctness of democratic principles. It offers an admittedly partisan and temporary view of what a group of people within the polity holds to be the common good.
In conclusion, self-limitation works as a criterion of demarcation between populism and liberal democracy because it does not undermine the justifying principles of democracy, and it expresses more clearly than current definitions of populism the concern with the misrepresentation of the popular will.
“To Hell with Your Institutions!”: Self-Limitation between Proceduralism and Populism
I have argued that during constitutional crises existing definitions of populism do not help us differentiate between liberals and populists. Instead, a better way to tell whether a leader or a movement has either populist or liberal-democratic tendencies is to look for signs of self-limitation. Populists think that there is no limit to what can be justified in the name of the people. While liberal democrats also appeal to a concept of the people and may even do so in moralized terms, but do so in a way that puts a brake on the scope and authority of any claims—and most importantly, their own claims—to speak for “the people.” Here I illustrate the point with a recent example: the crisis that occurred when a popular movement contested the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico.
In 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the candidate of the leftist PRD party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or Party of the Democratic Revolution), and leader of the Coalición por el Bien de Todos (Coalition for the Good of All or CPBT), lost the Mexican presidential elections by about one half of one percent, and refused to accept the electoral tribunal’s ruling to this effect.58 Between the first week of July, when the first tally of votes was made public, and the first week of September, when the in dependent electoral tribunal ratified the official results, AMLO and his supporters engaged in acts of civil disobedience. For fifty days in July and August, they blockaded the center of Mexico City, symbolically and physically. AMLO’s supporters set up a tent city in Paseo de la Reforma, which is simultaneously the historic avenue that houses the city’s and the country’s most recognizable monuments, the main avenue of the city’s financial district, and the direct path between the president’s official residence and the seat of the federal executive power in the city’s Zócalo, or central square. In September, after refusing to accept the tribunal’s final ruling, AMLO took an alternative oath of office during a rally in Mexico City, and assumed the title of “Legitimate President.”59 He went on to organize a “shadow” government.60
These events very nearly precipitated a constitutional breakdown.61 The country’s institutions were not able to solve the standoff between the different factions within the state. A coalition of parties and the acting government of the country’s most populous region (the Federal District where Mexico City is located) refused to accept the legitimacy of the court that had jurisdiction in these matters and claimed that the people had a higher authority. To those camped out in Reforma, there was no higher court of appeal than the people. Yet, most others (particularly in the media) did not see this as a democratic revolution. Instead, they saw it as a threat to Mexico’s budding democracy—and as a textbook example of populism. How do the criteria at our disposal work when seeking to determine whether the movement was a case of populist demagoguery or a liberal-democratic cry for electoral justice?
According to many analysts, López Obrador’s actions represented a clear-cut case of populist leadership. Even before the events surrounding the election, his speeches and his politics had been described as examples of populist politicking. However, the reasons why he was deemed a populist varied widely. Some held that AMLO was populist because his party and his movement inherited the clientelistic structure and mass political dynamics of the old hegemonic catch-all party: the PRI.62 He also inherited the strategy of the deficit-spending nationalist movements that dominated Mexican politics from the 1940s to the 1960s, which in turn put him in the same class with other populist New Left movements in Latin America.63 According to other analysts, it was not the movement that was populist, but López Obrador himself. Citing his “charismatic” rhetoric and “messianic” personality, they concluded that it was his personal traits that made him a naturally populist leader.64 However, after the elections, most of those who believed that AMLO was a populist characterized him using a metric that fits Mudde’s definition: he was considered a populist because of his ideology, which presented politics as a contest between ordinary Mexicans and a corrupt elite, and because he appealed to the “popular will” to establish the legitimacy of his movement and his claims to power. He rejected the limitations that in dependent liberal institutions put on the mass movement, and he directly challenged the authority of electoral authorities and the state.65 This tendency toward populism, in that traditional sense, reached its highest point in September when, during a rally in Mexico City’s main square, he uttered the phrase that has become most closely associated with the crisis: ¡Al diablo con sus instituciones! (To hell with their institutions!).66
According to Kathleen Bruhn, who uses Mudde’s metric, it was the outright rejection of institutions coupled with the use of a Manichaean discourse that made AMLO a populist. I agree with this analysis. However, I argue that these traits would not have allowed us to distinguish AMLO from a liberal democrat at the time, given that the state’s legitimacy was widely contested after the razor-thin elections. This became obvious in the period of near-constitutional breakdown. During those months, AMLO appealed for his movement’s authority to the “people” of Mexico as represented in the public square, contrasting them with the corrupt elites who, he claimed, stole the elections on behalf of the incumbent’s party. This division of society into two homogenous and antagonistic groups is, by Mudde’s definition, a sure sign of populism. Yet, in this situation, to appeal to the people was to take recourse to a higher source of legitimacy where no other judge was available, something a liberal democrat under the same circumstances could also have done. In such situations, referring to the higher moral standing of “the people,” qua electorate, would be required by democrats of all stripes. Moreover, appealing to the moral superiority of one’s supporters is a typical campaign strategy, not uncommon among liberal democrats. AMLO’s appeal to the poor during the campaign is also a normal development of electoral politics in the context of economic in equality.67 Moreover, the references to “the people” and its corrupt antagonists are not entirely misplaced in a country where a history of electoral fraud could objectively allow voters and PRD supporters to talk about a corrupt elite.68 In these circumstances of crisis, the rhetorical use of “the people” and “the elite” do not help us decide whether AMLO was a populist, and thus the first part of Mudde’s definition would not have been able to help us determine the movement’s character as it was unfolding.
The second part of Mudde’s definition, the claim that politics should express the people’s general will, seems to hold more promise at first. AMLO appealed directly to the people and scoffed at the alleged in dependence of key institutions, notably, the in dependent electoral tribunal. Yet, his reliance on plebiscitary claims rather than on the official electoral results, his preference for “legitimacy” over “legality,” and his open rejection (his cursing!) of institutions cannot be used to tell him apart from a liberal democrat. For it is by no means obvious that under the circumstances of constitutional crisis a liberal democrat would have acted differently. According to Bruhn, “Any candidate who loses a presidential election by less than one per cent of the vote may be tempted to challenge the results, all the more in a country like Mexico where electoral fraud has been common.”69
There are good reasons and ample evidence to believe that the 2006 elections were in fact clean and fair.70 However, at the time, it was plausible that there had been irregularities in the election, or that the electoral tribunal may have harbored illegal biases. Moreover, even though the elections were organized by in dependent electoral authorities, AMLO’s allegations of corruption were credible to his supporters because of the long history of electoral fraud sanctioned by the state.71 According to Todd Eisenstadt, AMLO’s refusal to comply was rational in the context of the prior decade’s concertacesiones, or gentlemen’s agreements, between the PRI and its opposition, by which electoral irregularities had been overlooked and election results decided in the back room and with complete disregard for the ballots.72 Most importantly, however, AMLO’s strategy and demands were credible to large swathes of the population, not because his supporters believed that the people are the true fountain of legitimacy, but because of a deep-seated suspicion of any existing authorities.73 In sum, AMLO’s moralizing view of the people and his appeal to the general will do not give us enough evidence to prove that his position was not liberal during the crisis. According to other scholars, it was precisely his opposition to less-than-perfect institutions that made him a true democrat.74
So, how can we tell whether AMLO was a populist or a radical liberal democrat? According to my self-limitation criterion, AMLO could have been recognized as populist during the crisis because his claims to legitimacy were not self-limited. In fact, they were unlimited and illimitable. By portraying the people as bounded, unified, and unchanging, he consolidated the fount of legitimacy into an indivisible, inalienable, eternal source of legitimacy. By appealing to the people as absolute, he claimed the moral superiority of his cause, and made his claims unquestionable within the frame of his discourse. Pluralistic dialogue became impossible, and with this closure, the possibility of electoral democracy and liberal rights was also shut down. On my view, it was not his denunciation of existing institutions that made him a populist; it was his failure to set self-imposed limits or constraints. We can see this in the way he appealed to a people imagined as bound, unified, and unchanging.
“The people” was bounded in López Obrador’s characterization because he used the term to refer to the unified nation (ethnos) rather than to the open liberal demos. According to Henio Hoyo Prohuber, his dismissal of institutions was possible only in the context of a nationalistic discourse of renovation.75 Moreover, as Soledad Loaeza argues, the success of AMLO’s discourse hinged on his ability to promise “integration and coherence in a society whose relations to the state had been destabilized by democratization.” This promise required the revival of Revolutionary Nationalism, “the ideology associated with the goals and traditions of the Mexican Revolution.”76 That ideology provided the foundation of national identity (it was ripe with myths, rituals, and symbols) but it did not encourage active citizenship.77 So AMLO appealed to the people as an equivalent of the cultural nation: by so doing, he made his claims irrefutable within his own discourse. For unlike the demos as the citizenry, or the electorate, which is a changing group of individuals whose will shifts over time, the nation is an organic whole whose will cannot be established by an aggregative decision-making procedure: the national will can only be interpreted and channeled by the leader.
Second, López Obrador portrayed “the people” as unified, as having one voice that is always right. This had weighty consequences, because according to the terms of his discourse, he could not have accepted defeat. According to Bruhn, “López Obrador sought to overturn the election not on the basis of solid proof of irregularities, but on the ‘basis’ that the people could not have lost an election to the elite.”78 This reaction was populist not because he rejected the tribunal’s decision or appealed to the people, but rather because of the concept of “the people” he invoked. The hidden premise in his argument is that the people are always right. In his September 6 speech, AMLO portrayed the people as the classical unified popular sovereign who “will set aside the fake institutions and create an authentic, true Republic.”79 From his perspective, the people are always right, and thus can have only one unified voice and will. This means that, in his view, it was “morally impossible” that the opposition could win.
Finally he portrayed the people as unchanging. In his view, Mexico’s political institutions should have molded themselves to accommodate the people, a fixed referent. As a populist, AMLO claimed that the only legitimate institutions were those backing “the people’s” rule. A liberal democrat, instead, would invoke the people, but only to show that any particular claim to speak in its voice must be partial and incomplete, if only because the people’s composition changes together with the population, and its opinion may shift from one election to the next. For AMLO, the people was always an unchanging referent: it was the static crowd cheering in front of him, rather than a changing process, the interplay of different claims, institutions, and grassroots movements over time.
In sum, what allows us to recognize Lopez Obrador as a populist during the electoral crisis is not that he appealed to the people or that he cursed Mexico’s political institutions, but rather that he could not have conceded the election or accepted his defeat without contradicting himself.
Populism goes hand in hand with democratic politics: it is its underside, as Benjamín Arditi has argued.80 The pervasiveness of populism can be explained by virtue of the fact that the legitimacy of democracy does not, and cannot, rest only on electoral procedures. The requirement of a people as the foundational ground of legitimacy in the state, and the vicious circle that this requirement begets, creates a perennial deficit of legitimacy in constitutional states. This means that democracy will always have a legitimization deficit that expresses itself in extra-electoral appeals to the people, oft en in the form of mass mobilizations and exchanges in the public sphere. However, this does not mean that democracy and populism are the same, nor that all popular mobilizations are desirable, or that every appeal to the people absolves a popular uprising from moral scrutiny. If populism is the underside of democracy, a normative criterion for identifying populism will not help us banish populism from politics, but it will allow us to figure out which side is up.
In this chapter, I have argued for a criterion of demarcation between populism and liberal democracy: self-limitation. Popular movements that visualize the people as open will limit their claims; popular movements that visualize the people as closed will refuse any limits on the authority of what they claim is the people’s will. Hence liberals use the people as an ideal referent that reminds them that they cannot use a part in the name of the whole. “The people” of the populists, by contrast, is defined as unified, unchanging, and bounded, and it will always be a problem for pluralist and liberal-democratic politics.
Self-limitation can be easily recognized, even when politicians invoke the people against a corrupt elite or make references to the general will. When a politician or movement is self-limiting, the concept of “the people” is in principle unbounded; its identity is diffused, its institutions are changing, its will is fallible; the popular sovereign is not a unified entity, either in time or space. Liberals invoke the people to point out the limitations of the leaders and the political system, and most importantly to limit the reach of their own powers and their own claims. Hence self-limitation could be useful in understanding and judging movements in times of crisis—movements like the uprisings that occurred in the Middle East in 2011 and 2012 and inspired mobilizations throughout the region, movements like those that will occur elsewhere in the world in times to come.
Notes
1. Taggart (2002) holds this view explicitly. For a historical survey of authors who have seen populism as a pathology of democracy, see Róvira Kaltwasser 2012.
2. Among them Canovan 1999 and Laclau 2005. I discuss their views below.
3. The phrase “Every Man Is a King” comes from politician Huey Long’s famous speech in the 1930s. See Sanson 2006.
4. Riker 1988.
5. For the classical formulation of the problem see Holmes (1995); in relation to populism see Abts and Rummens (2007).
6. Ochoa Espejo 2011; Smith 2004.
7. López-Guerra 2005.
8. Abizadeh 2008; Näsström 2011; Whelan 1983.
9. Canovan 2005; Yack 2001.
10. Mudde and Róvira Kaltwasser 2012, 8–9.
11. Mudde 2004, 543; Mudde and Róvira Kaltwasser 2012, 8.
12. Compare with Weyland 2001. On this point see Róvira Kaltwasser, forthcoming.
13. Laclau (2005) calls it a “discourse”; Kazin (1998) calls it a “persuasion.”
14. Canovan 2002, 32–33.
15. Plattner 2010.
16. Mudde 2004, 561.
17. Róvira Kaltwasser 2012.
18. By “constitutional crisis” I understand the (temporary or definitive) incapacity of state institutions to mediate conflict among political elites due to a widespread loss of legitimacy of the legal process. The source of the legitimation crisis is oft en related to a democratic deficit. See Habermas 1996, 436–44.
19. Canovan 2005, 83–90.
20. Kirshner 2010.
21. Mudde notices “the similarity with much of the anti-right-wing populist discourse, which opposes in biological terms any compromise or cooperation because ‘the populist virus’ will ‘contaminate’ the democratic ‘body’ ” (2004, 544).
22. Kalyvas 2008; Schmitt 2008.
23. Ackerman 1991; Arendt 1990; Kalyvas 2008.
24. Yack 2001.
25. Kalyvas 2008, 297.
26. Frank 2010, 33.
27. Laclau 2005, 154.
28. Rousseau 1978, 55.
29. Abts and Rummens 2007; Canovan 2002.
30. Ackerman 1991; Habermas 1998.
31. Habermas 1998, 486.
32. Canovan 2002.
33. Mann 2005; Yack 2012.
34. Canovan 2002, 42.
35. Abizadeh 2008; Goodin 2007; Miller 2009; Smith 2008; Whelan 1983; Benhabib 2005; López-Guerra 2005; Frank 2010; Näsström 2007.
36. Whelan 1983.
37. Dahl 1989.
38. Arendt 1990; Connolly 2005.
39. Mouffe 2000.
40. Yack 2001.
41. Benhabib 2006.
42. Honig 2007.
43. Goodin 2007.
44. Arditi 2007; Frank 2010; Honig 2009.
45. Laclau 2005, 67.
46. Laclau 2005, 99.
47. Laclau calls this reference without stable referent an “empty signifier” (2005, 71–83). He qualifies the theory with the notion of “floating signifiers” (2005, ch. 5).
48. Laclau 2005, 93–97.
49. Laclau 2005, 154.
50. Mouffe 2000; Schmitt 1985.
51. Openness can be interpreted as an “empty space” (Lefort) or as an ongoing process open to the future (Habermas). The concept can be traced to Popper and Bergson. I favor Bergson’s formulation.
52. Goodin 2007.
53. Abizadeh 2008, 45.
54. Goodin 2007.
55. Connolly 2005, 143–45.
56. Rosanvallon 2011, 129.
57. Ochoa Espejo 2011.
58. Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación 2006.
59. Ramos and Herrera 2006.
60. Reséndiz and Gómez 2006.
61. As Bruhn argues, “If López Obrador failed to create a constitutional crisis, it was not for lack of trying” (2012, 98).
62. Loaeza 2007. This characterization fits well with the definitions of populism as a mass movement, rather than an ideology. See Roberts 2006.
63. Castañeda 2006.
64. Grayson 2007; Krauze 2006, 65.
65. Bruhn 2012, 97.
66. López Obrador 2006.
67. Arditi 2008; Castañeda 2006; Loaeza 2007.
68. Langston 2009, 183; Morris and Klesner 2010.
70. See the TRIFE ruling. For analysis see Dominguez 2009; Eisenstadt and Poiré 2006; Grayson 2007; Klesner 2007; Loaeza 2007.
71. Bruhn 2009, 183–84.
72. Eisenstadt 2007, 38.
73. Ochoa Espejo 2011, 26.
74. Ackerman 2010.
75. Hoyo Prohuber 2009, 397–98.
76. Loaeza 2007, 411.
77. Loaeza 2007, 413.
78. Bruhn 2012, 96.
79. López Obrador 2006.
80. Arditi 2007.
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