Populism and Representative Democracy : Towards the Possibility of Populism as an Emancipatory Strategy
Abstract
The article seeks to engage into the dispute about the possibility of populism as an emancipatory strategy via questioning the relationship between populism and democracy. It is usually suggested that populism is antithetical both to democracy and representation.
The article, however, depicts populism as a logic based on representation and also challenges common understanding of the relation between liberal democracy and populism based on the so-called twostrand theory. The article claims that this two-strand theory understands the relations between populism and democracy in terms of supplementarity which actually prevents it from questioning the populist's relation to democracy.
Instead the article proposes analytical method that divides democracy and populism into several key concepts that could be compared. The article than demonstrates the analytical method on the concept of populist representation that is understood as a mixture of acting for and descriptive and symbolic representation as defined by Pitkin.
Since Pitkin sees symbolic and descriptive representation as problematic, the article provides a deconstructive reading of Pitkin's argumentation to prove that taking into consideration the elitist nature of representation the populist amendment of symbolic and descriptive representation could paradoxically provide an instrument to make liberal democracies more democratic and accountable.