Rethinking Political Competition

Abstract

Although competition is clearly central to democracy — the dominant definition of democracy for more than half a century has turned on the presence of electoral competition — the concept of competition itself has been surprisingly neglected in democratic theory. Competition has served as a label for a model of democracy that is set against cooperative or 'consensualist' models, a contrast reinforced by such different figures as Jane Mansbridge in her classic (1980) distinction between ‘adversary’ and ‘unitary’ democracy, as well as by minimalists such as Ian Shapiro (2017), who argues that deliberative ideals imply anti-competitive ‘collusion in restraint of democracy’. This unhelpful dualism blinds us to the diversity and tensions within conceptions and practices of political competition -- such as the tension, stressed by Simmel (1908), between direct struggle or conflict on the one hand and parallel striving to the benefit of a third party on the other, or the different politics produced by competition for a power monopoly in a two party system (advocated by Shapiro) and the politics of multi-party competition (advocated by Kelsen). The dualism between competitive and consensualist models has also drawn attention away from the centrality of concepts and practices of competition within deliberative democracy, in the form, for example, of adversarial argumentation and competitive debate, the role of frame competition in stimulating judgment (Disch 2011), and the activities of competition implied by accounts of the benefits of epistemic diversity. In this panel we seek to interrogate the concept of political competition, exploring its diverse forms and meanings, and highlighting the ways in which different forms of competition can appear in a wide range of democratic norms and practices. This panel thus aims to both challenge the apparent dichotomy of competitive and consensualist accounts of democracy, and to open up space for a richer account of the role and limits of competitive norms and practices in democratic politics.

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