Democracy and Unequal Power: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores the idea that politics, as a project, aims to properly allocate power across societies and polities. Democratic systems and institutions, it follows, should be arranged to allow those who are governed to have more equal say in who or what rules dictate their behavior and lives. This may be realized through implementing procedures, avenues, or mechanisms within or outside institutions to correct for problems of maldistributed power, and thus to create legitimate authority to act on or for a polity. In so doing, to better and more fully theorize democratic spaces, we ask what are “problems of power”? What does democratic theory offer to rectify these problems? And are extra-institutional power structures desirable as part of the system or theorized as a necessary recourse?
Central to all the papers on this panel is a contribution to democratic theory that seeks to theorize power gone wrong or sequestered improperly, and to articulate a vision of democracy as rectifying this grievance through redistribution to the wronged people in the proper way. Problems of power range from ideas of domination, exploitation, marginalization, abuse, violence, and coercion. And the solutions may include some combination of increasing voting access, participation, deliberation, social activism, and organizing. Properly achieving this right kind of institutional, or non-institutional, inclusivity can bolster the vitality of our democratic institutions.
In keeping with this year’s theme, “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization,” this panel offers a lens for understanding the merits of democracy as cultivating the strength and stability of its institutions by redistributing power to diverse segments of society. Contending with difference in a pluralist community requires stable institutions that are necessarily democratic, but how they are arranged depends on the ways in which we conceive of power as operating within these differences. Indeed, democracy is strengthened, rather than destabilized, through engaging with a diverse swath of voices.
In the first paper, Naomi Scheinerman conceives of exploitation as a problem of unequal bargaining power and limited options, and is necessarily knowable through the lived testimony of those who have experienced loss of self-worth and/or degradation. The solution to this requires a deliberative democratic moment in order to allow individuals to testify to their experiences of exploitation. This should be a fundamental design within institutions meant to guard against exploitative labor, but there is also democratic recourse that can operate through collective action on the institutions of power.
Next, Vatsal Naresh offers an account of violence for democratic theory. He argues that contemporary political theory has largely ignored violence besides elite conflict, or assumed that the successful operation of democracy would itself render violence futile. His paper then examines three theories of democratic violence situated at different temporal stages in the expansion of democracy: the prospective stage in B.R. Ambedkar’s writings on caste and democracy in India; the expansive stage in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; and the destructive stage in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. In so doing, Naresh reconstructs and compares their critiques of two key facets of modern democracy: majority rule and collective public presence.
Third, Lisa Disch defends a “mobilization” conception of political representation as a counter to the preeminent model of interest representation which she argues sets mass democracy up to fail by virtue of adhering to a unidirectional model of responsiveness that has no empirical warrant. She uses the term “mobilization” differently than political scientists for whom it names the activities that political parties and other organization undertake to raise electoral turnout by targeting people’s partisan identities. She argues then that a “primordialism” about groups haunts these various uses of the term, which this paper undertakes to reclaim “mobilization” for a conception of democratic representation in which plurality takes precedence over citizen competence as modern democracy’s most important requisite.
And in critiquing the idea of democracy as redistributed power, Deva Woodly takes a page from Foucault and contends that power is not a finite resource, but instead a set of relations that change over time. In keeping, she takes up Young's critique of "the distributive paradigm" and shows that organized groups like social movements can change social relations in ways that create new power relations, both within existing institutions and outside them, which cause lasting social and political change. Social movements effect these changes not only by organizing people but also, but (re)organizing ideas, changing public meanings and political possibilities as they seek the social and institutional arrangements that animate their causes.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Individual Presentations

• Exploitative Power and Deliberative Democratic Recourse in the New Economy - Naomi Scheinerman, University of Pennsylvania

• In Defense of ‘Mobilization’ - Lisa J. Disch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Majority Rule and Democratic Violence: Tocqueville and Ambedkar - Vatsal Naresh, Yale University

• Social Movements and the Creation of New Power - Deva Woodly, New School for Social Research

Chair

• Mark E. Warren University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Giulia Oskian Yale University