Concepts of Competition in Democratic Theory

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 tendency to contrast 'competitive' and 'consensual' approaches to democratic politics ignores the conceptual connection between competition and consensus: competition is a social practice which depends on a range of commonalities and shared commitments. In this paper I aim to survey the variety of uses of the concept of competition in contemporary democratic theory, including pluralism, deliberative democratic theory, and agonistic theories of democracy, drawing attention to the different ways in which they frame the coupling of competition and consensus, and how they articulate the boundary between competition and conflict.