For the Balkinization symposium on Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugaric, Power to the People: Constitutionalism in the Age of Populism (Oxford University Press 2021).
Silvia Suteu
Tushnet and Bugaric offer a welcome
reassessment of our understanding of populism in a constitutional key. In their
Power to the People: Constitutionalism
after Populism, they argue against easy assumptions about what populism is
and isn’t, and in particular “write against a background of popular and
academic publications arguing that populism is by definition antithetical to
constitutionalism.” (36) Their monograph proposes to take seriously both the populist
critiques of liberal constitutionalism and the alternative visions of
constitutionalism the populists put forth. In that sense, they reject the
notion – advanced by Jan-Werner Müller and others – that populists are by
definition anti-constitutionalists. Instead, they echo Robert Howse, who has argued
that anti-populists seeking to defend elite liberal democratic politics
mischaracterise populism in purely pejorative terms, as synonymous with mob
rule. Like Howse, Tushnet and Bugaric are interested in rescuing the radical
democratic potential of populism and “are sympathetic to many aspects of
progressive populist programs.” (2) They argue that there are different types
of populisms out there, and selection bias has meant that analyses so far have
overemphasised authoritarian versions – especially the cases of Hungary and
Poland – and underemphasised progressive ones – such as Syriza in Greece,
Podemos in Spain, and several Latin American examples. (44) Instead, the
authors view populism as coming in both democratic and authoritarian varieties,
and compatible with a host of ideologies, making easy generalisations a
mistake. (45)
In this contribution, I want to focus on
Part III of their book, which also gives its subtitle. More specifically, I’d
like to engage with arguments the authors raise in the final chapter, on
‘Empowered Democracy’, about the potential for democratic renewal after the
populist challenge. This is where they look at the constitutional tools
employed and the type of democracy embraced by progressive populists. In
particular, they focus on populists’ supposed affinity for direct democracy,
especially the referendum. Contrary to the views of scholars like Nadia
Urbinati and, again, Müller, Tushnet and Bugaric believe populists not to have
a plebiscitarian penchant for its own sake. Instead, they argue that “populists
in Greece and Spain used direct democracy precisely because they wanted to
“deepen” sometimes too rigid and unresponsive channels of representative
democracy.” (147) For Tushnet and Bugaric, in other words, direct democratic mechanisms
are not in opposition to representative democracy; the referendum is not an
inherently evil tool of decision-making; and progressive populists are interested
in engaging the electorate directly because they are committed to the idea of
self-government and because they believe, unlike elitist liberal democrats,
that ordinary citizens have relevant policy expertise worth tapping into.
As a democratic constitutionalist myself, I find much to agree with here. As I have argued elsewhere, we ignore populists’ critiques of liberal constitutionalism at our own risk. These include fierce attacks on the rise of technocracy, pushback against the retreat of politics from policymaking, and an overt rejection of the project of globalisation in the name of national economic (and often identitarian) retrenchment. There is a reason this discourse resonates with voters, especially in places where they have felt systematically sidelined, and a committed democrat should be able to provide a better answer to these woes, rather than simply ignore them. In short, then, I agree with Tushnet and Bugaric that constitutionalism after populism has the potential to be more genuinely democratic and inclusive. However, I believe their analysis – in Chapter 10 of the book in particular – rests on two main misconceptions: one rooted in oversimplification and one in nondifferentiation.
1.
Oversimplification: populists and referendums
The authors focus on the referendum as
the main tool of direct democracy, and implicitly self-government, that populists
are prone to use in decision-making. They seek to rescue it from criticism that
it is an inherently flawed mechanism of decision-making, and instead view it as
“only one of the tools available for populists seeking to determine what a
majority prefers”, and even that on only a subset of policy issues. (260) But
to suggest the only, or even main, reason why populists, and indeed any
politician, will put an issue to a referendum is to determine majority views on
a given question is to miss the special appeal of referendums. Referendums
could easily (and much more cheaply) be replaced by national opinion polls if
that were the case.
Instead, it is the special claim to
democratic legitimation that a referendum vote can bring that makes it
appealing. All parties will try to shape public opinion during the referendum
campaign, not just gauge it dispassionately, and may use unfair tactics to do
so. Even less nefariously, the referendum may be used as a way for politicians
to eschew responsibility for unpopular decisions (e.g. on abortion or same-sex
marriage), to break political deadlock or rework the political rules of the
game (e.g. changing the electoral system), or even for inner party reasons, to
settle internal competition (e.g. as the Brexit referendum started out). All of
this to say that, even during ‘normal’ times of representative politics, the
recourse to referendum is more complex and potentially instrumental than the
authors’ account acknowledges. I see no reason to believe populists’ use of the
referendum is somehow purer or insulated from party politics and political
self-interest.
Elsewhere, the authors also equate
referendums with a form of direct policymaking by the people: “Legislation by
the people themselves may be the cleanest example of populism”. (252) This,
connected to their view of (progressive) populists as singularly committed to
maximising self-government, make referendums especially appealing to the
populist as democrat. However, arguing that referendums may be democratic instruments need not require us to go as far as
identifying them with popular authorship as such. Not just because referendums
are prone to manipulation and elite control, but also because the very decision
of putting an issue to the people is not open to all. Rules will differ greatly
across systems on the right to initiate a referendum (most often resting with
the political branches) and may leave much wiggle room; assessing populists’
relationship to referendums solely on the basis of whether they have put a
particular issue to a popular vote therefore risks ignoring the politics
surrounding that initial decision.
To illustrate these points, we can look
at some examples Tushnet and Bugaric themselves consider. They point to
Ireland’s successful legalisation of same-sex marriage and liberalisation of
access to abortion through referendums as examples of the instrument’s success,
not least in advancing, rather than stifling, minority rights. (259) To the
authors, the embrace of citizens’ assemblies in addition to the constitutionally-mandated
referendums on constitutional change in Ireland meant that “Ireland did see a
political party taking direct democracy as part of its program and to that
extent saw an existing party become more populist.” (270) However, there is a
different way to tell the story of both Irish referendums that raises doubts
about them as the means of choice to effect legal change. In both instances,
groups previously excluded from full rights recognition were forced to argue
for their accession to full citizenship. This in itself caused harm,
reinforcing as it did the notion that the LGBT community and women would need
to persuade the majority in order to be granted full equality before the law.
Seen from this perspective then, the minority rights-based objection to referendums
is harder to dismiss than Tushnet and Bugaric acknowledge. It’s precisely the
majoritarianism reinforced by the referendum that is the problem.
2.
Non-diferentiation: populists as direct or deliberative democrats?
Briefly on the second misconception now.
The authors discuss direct and deliberative democracy interchangeably, and
count the turn to deliberative mechanisms such as citizens’ assemblies and
deliberative polling together with the use of referendums as part of populists’
entrusting of ordinary people with decision-making capacity. This would read as
an at least unorthodox understanding of deliberative tools, seeing as
deliberative democracy has long been accused of precisely the type of elitism
populists want to overcome. The small size of deliberative exercises such as
citizens’ assembly at the very least raises doubts as to whether they are
participatory instruments in the way referendums are. Tushnet and Bugaric
simply assume the problem of scale can be overcome, and even believe “citizens’
assemblies are designed precisely so they can be scaled up.” (262)
This is not the case. In fact, the
scaling up problem persists in deliberative democracy, even while the spread of
the use of deliberative mechanisms allows for more evidence gathering and experimentation.
In the authors’ own cited case of Ireland, where a constitutional convention
and a citizens’ assembly preceded the same-sex marriage and abortion referendum
votes respectively, it is unclear what impact the micro-deliberative stage had
on the outcome. In the latter case, the assembly recommendation – to abolish
the constitutional ban on abortion entirely – actually exceeded expectations of
how radical a change it might prompt. But in both instances, and certainly in
the former, it was the referendum campaigns rather than the convention/assembly
deliberations that galvanised the public. How much voters actually knew or
cared about the preceding small size deliberative stages was unclear.
This is why, together with Stephen
Tierney, I previously argued
that democratic legitimation and an approximation of demotic authorship requires
both the micro and the macro levels, both small scale deliberative exercises
like citizens’ assemblies and large scale ones like referendums. One allows for
the intense exchange of views under conditions of reciprocity, to which
participants come open to changing their mind but also endowed, at least to an
extent, with agenda-setting powers; the other entails societal debate on a
single question that will take the majority’s pulse and (if done right) engender
acceptance of the outcome of the vote. The latter is obviously appealing to
populists; the latter less so.
Why does all this matter to the authors’
argument then? They acknowledge that populists don’t seem to have, at least so
far, made use of these deliberative innovations. (269) To Tushnet and Bugaric,
however, the main criterion for evaluating these innovations as instruments of
democratic empowerment is comparative vis-à-vis existing representative
institutions. As long as innovations lead to “more democracy than we have now”,
they are presumed to be both compatible with existing structures and desirable.
(271) However, this undifferentiated account of direct and deliberative
mechanisms misses an important distinction, one that matters to populists. As
Tierney and I have argued, the two “pursue different goals, operate based on
different dynamics, and are more suited towards producing certain types of
goods and not others.” (860) Because of this, direct and deliberative
democratic tools are better thought of as complementary but nevertheless
different, with the better focus on their sequencing so as to harness their
respective and combined potential. It is not coincidental that Tushnet and
Bugaric can find numerous examples of populist recourse to the referendum but
not of democratic innovations. The majoritarianism of the former can sit ill at
ease with and even undo the gains of small-scale deliberative structures. So
long as it is majoritarian decision-making the populists are after, they won’t
be likely to find much use for mechanisms of deliberative rather than direct
democracy.
Dr Silvia Suteu, Associate Professor, University College London, UK, s.suteu@ucl.ac.uk.