Populist and Liberal Notions of Citizens’ Rights

• In Event: Populism, Institutions and Institutionalization

Abstract

Populism’s antagonistic divide between the people as the holders of sovereignty and an irretrievable other raises fundamental questions about the relation between populism and democracy. Arguably, if antagonism is to be understood as the Schmittian version of the friend/enemy divide, it supposes an homogenous people and the hard exclusion of the non-people. Chantal Mouffe’s (2009) notion of agonistic democracy sets up the possibility of a pluralistic construction of the people. It requires considering the other as a legitimate adversary as holder of certain rights, such as freedom of expression, and a set of shared values to underpin these rights.
What is not acknowledged in Mouffe’s reformulation of the enemy as adversary is the need to introduce the citizen as a sine qua non-actor in a democracy . It is only by considering citizenship as a common, overarching, identity that the complex, often troubled, relation between the people and its adversaries does not become a conflict between enemies and an agonistic space for mutual recognition and negotiation, as well as for conflict and contestation, can be established. However, citizenship, and the rights and obligations attached to it, does not necessarily mean a liberal-individualistic conception of citizenship. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, Guy Aitchinson (2017) notes that that “populist citizenship” embodies the people that has ‘no part’ and thus goes unheard and uncounted in the ordinary course of institutional politics. He further argues that given the limits and exclusions of formal citizenship, populist struggles have a vital role to play in political renewal, creating and securing rights for excluded political subjects whose claims fall outside the dominant values and procedures of constitutional legitimacy. Populist struggles take place whenever social groups mobilise outside institutional channels to challenge the legitimacy of an hegemonic formation and lay claim to new demands through direct appeal to the sovereign authority of the people themselves. This paper discusses liberal and populist notions of citizens’ rights. Drawing on cases of populist parties in office in Latin America and Europe, it will explore the ways by which popular demands are acknowledged and institutionalised as citizens’ rights and what are its implications for the inclusive or exclusive nature of populist institutions.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso 2009
Aitchinson, Guy “Three Models of Republican Rights: Juridical, Parliamentary and Populist.” Political Studies 65 (2) (2017) 339-355.

Author

• Francisco Panizza, London School of Economics