Developing new understanding of citizenship while countering right-wing populism: A comparative analysis of case studies in United Kingdom and United States

Civil society is said to be perhaps the main actor in advancing democratic innovations in contemporary societies. Indeed, a considerable amount of scholarship has recently conceptualized the role of progressive actors such as social movements and civil society organizations in proposing and trying to implement new versions of democracy by going beyond representation and its liberal assumption. Against this backdrop, the present paper aims to contribute to the debate on the role of civil society in advancing democratic innovations from a slightly different and understudied perspective. By looking at civil society actors in the United Kingdom and the United States, the paper critically assesses what kind of democracy is envisaged by social movements opposing right-wing populism in power. While several studies looked at the relationship between populism and democracy, and a growing amount of research concentrates on anti populism as the strategy to bring back the true meaning of liberal democracy against the threat of right-wing populism and extremism, very little attention has been placed to the democratic proposals of civil society actors opposing right-wing populism. Tackling the issue from this angle allows for theoretically broadening the relationship between populism, anti populism and democracy, by going beyond some limitations of the current scholarship on anti-populism that still has an uncritical account of liberal democracy. Through a mixed method approach, combining interviews with founders and key activists in selected movements alongside a quantitative text analysis on Facebook posts of the official accounts of the same movements, the paper tries to understand what idea of democracy these movements elaborates in responding to right-wing populism in government. Notably, in the two contexts, the way of articulating a response to the same threat differs. Indeed, the analysis shows that in the United Kingdom the main critique concerns the concept of representation. Notably, Brexit was limiting the rights of several people who could not vote in the referendum. This problem suggests the need for a more comprehensive account of citizenship that triggers democratic innovations going beyond a national understanding of the democratic polity as well as a representative liberal democracy. On the other hand, in the United States, the constitutional foundations of the presidential system sustaining the US democracy is put into question and the activists are trying to elaborate institutional changes that can be applied by elected members of congress. The strategies of producing substantive change in the understanding of democracy between the two countries also varies for contextual factors.