Democracy or Demography? Learning to Represent the “People”

The inability to predict Trump’s victory, Brexit, the Finns Party election landslide in 2011, or right-wing populisms in Hungary for years are connected. They fall down to a dichotomy of demos and demography – or even demography and democracy. Since the 1960s mediatization and skills of demographic computer assisted analysis of the interests of the people has led the traditional liberal and conservative political parties to identify and “represent” rather than set popular trends. This politics that delivers to and constitutes distinct groups, has often and in critical times been less successful those that momentary emphasizes and constitutes an ambiguous and often critical “us” (c.f. Laclau 2005). Given our rational knowledge of the actual heterogeneity of the people, many commentators have strong doubts of an ameba-like, contingent, fluid, and at least temporarily homogenizing, simplifying us that manifests itself as the representative of the people tout court (c.f. Muller 2016). Naming the people can indeed be essentialist and exclusive: xenophobia and racism must be made explicit. Yet, from an anti-essentialistic perspective the people is a processual category. This paper traces how the “people” is commonly treated on a demographic or individualist basis in the media, administration, and researcher. It shows how democratic innovations are premised on clientele-like demography instead of the development of the people as a heterogeneous subject of politics, a demos. Finally, perhaps the answer to the crisis of representation is not mere populism (Arditi 2010). The paper provides an example of new forms of representation that support diversity based on the processual, anti-consensual and anti-essentialistic understanding of the people.