Popular Sovereignty, Democracy and Representation

Abstract

Democracy is largely understood as government by the people. Yet, both the processes of formation of a people and its actual substance are highly contentious issues. In addition to scholarly disagreement, political reality itself conditions who a people is or what a people is justified to do. In other words, there are multiple approaches regarding the constitution and the role of the collective subject. Furthermore, in the context of representational democracies, a people naturally features internal differences. How a democracy is supposed to handle such differences becomes problematic when political actors raise populist claims of representing a unitary people or, worse yet, when they openly harbor anti-democratic agendas. Our panel will address such problems that depend on shifting interpretations of popular sovereignty, democratic representation and popular action.

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