According to a traditional account, representative government qualifies as a species of democracy because, even though the officials govern, they must represent the people’s will. Provided that the legislative institutions ensure that officials are responsive to citizens’ preferences, representative government involves no democratic lapse. The people rule but indirectly.
As usual, the devil is in the details. How can society enforce the requirement that officials be responsive to the citizens? The traditional account highlights electoral pressures: elected officials must deliver results that respond to constituents’ interests or else be voted out. However, work on public ignorance and political judgment suggests that the people are systematically incompetent and profoundly uninformed about even the most elementary political matters. Even if elected representatives could be responsive to their constituents’ preferences, it is not clear why they should be. Garbage in, garbage out.
A family of views concludes that real-world democracy instantiates nothing like representative government. Democracy is defined as an arrangement for delivering something else, such as stability, efficiency, or civic peace. Because it is rooted in what it regards as cold facts, this approach is known as realism. It is often associated with the positive view that democracy is no more than a (mostly) peaceful ongoing competition among elites for political power; for that reason, realism is thus sometimes called the elitist theory of democracy. Realist-elitist views stand in opposition to views of mass democracy, which retain the idea of democracy as representative government.
Lisa Disch writes as a “realist who has faith in mass democracy” (p. 140). More precisely, Making Constituencies aims to repurpose the term realism for non-elitist democratic theory. Although Disch is critical of the elitists’ political ignorance finding (p. 53), her core argument is that elitism presupposes a standard that “sets representative democracy up to fail” (p. 35). Rather than vindicating the electorate’s competence, she calls for a fundamental rethinking of democratic representation (p. 1).
This rethinking invokes a closely related pair of conceptual shifts: what Disch calls a mobilization conception of political representation (p. 1) and a constructivist view of political constituencies (p. 4). The latter is the thesis that constituencies are not “given” (p. 21) as groups awaiting uptake but rather are the effects (p. 33) of political action. Constituencies are created (p. 15) and constituted (p. 131) by acts of representation. Hence, the mobilization conception of representation: various political agents endeavor to “call” a constituency “into being” (p. 4) by marshaling popular attention and framing conflict in ways that lead people to regard themselves as a group. Representatives thus do not reflect the interests or preferences of citizens; rather, they “define groups, produce interests, and forge identities” (p. 136).
One advantage of this view is that it releases defenders of mass democracy from the competence debates. Once the “bedrock norm” (p. 34) of brute political interests is surrendered, mass democracy is no longer imperiled by political ignorance. As Disch puts it, “rather than leap to indict voters for what they cannot do,” we need to reexamine popular assumptions about “what voters need to be able to do” (p. 138). That is, this release clears conceptual space for alternative queries: What does the current state of our democracy bring out in citizens (p. 72)? To what extent are constituencies in line with democratic norms of equality and fair play (p. 33)? What institutional changes are possible that could mobilize citizens into more authentically democratic alliances (p. 105)?
Disch’s focus on the production of political identities is insightful. On her view, the gravest threat to mass democracy is not ignorance or even manipulation but sorting (p. 139). Crucially, Disch understands sorting not only as the partitioning of social spaces into partisan enclaves and the subsequent intensification of divisiveness (p. 135), but also as a force that sediments political identities (p. 136) that have been forged within a monotone discursive environment (p. 105). Disch’s prescription is a plural social setting that permits competing mobilizations to shape the demos, thereby allowing society to recapture the “radical democratic practice” of “building ‘unsuspected’ links that bring unlikely social and political actors within the realm of the ‘thinkable’” (p. 124).
In emphasizing the need for plural and conflictual democratic spaces, Disch allies herself with the tradition of radical democracy associated with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (p. 122). I am sympathetic to this approach to democratic theory. Still, difficulties remain.
Disch fluctuates in her formulation of constructivism. Often, she claims that representation “makes” (pp. 1, 138) or “forms” (p. 53) constituencies, but sometimes it merely “shapes” them (pp. 21, 77). Elsewhere, representation is weaker still: it “participates in constituting” (p. 4) and has a “hand in” (p. 48) making constituencies. What representation creates also shifts. Acts of representation variously “call forth” social identities (p. 135), “solicit groups and constitute interests” (p. 19), and “create the social order” (p. 121). In yet another articulation, it is the people, not the acts of representation, that “shape their interests and demands” (p. 16). These are not obviously equivalent. The thesis that something is “not found but made” is so crucial to the book that this variation is disorienting.
Lest this register as a fussy philosopher’s complaint, observe that the variation has some unwelcome effects. Disch rejects the “interest-first” model of representation (p. 1). That model can be said to be exclusivist in that it holds that responsiveness is the only democratically appropriate model of representation. Thus, one could refute the “interest-first” view by identifying another kind of democratic representation. Disch does not pursue this kind of inclusivist strategy; rather, she advances an alternative exclusivist account of representation. She argues that representation can never involve responsiveness to a constituency that has developed interests independently of the act of its construction.
It is not clear to me that representation never involves responding to antecedent group interests, even though I am also convinced that democratic representation involves more than that. My suspicion is that Disch’s shifting between formulations of her constructivism may have driven her to an unnecessarily strong articulation of her central thesis, one that is not warranted by her arguments. At any rate, if there is some reason why it is necessary for her to present constructivism as an exclusivist account of representation, the book does not specify what it is.
A related difficulty regards Disch’s discussion of manipulation. A critic may argue that if constituencies are made rather than found, then mobilization is merely a polite term for manipulation, propaganda, gaslighting, threats, and so on. Once the idea of responsiveness is jettisoned, then it seems as if mobilization is simply power and there is no “bedrock” (p. 35) by which to evaluate its exercise.
In addressing this criticism, Disch enlists Robert Goodin’s characteristically astute 1980 book, Manipulatory Politics. There, Goodin argues that it is far more difficult to get a firm grasp on what manipulation is than political theorists tend to assume. Then he argues that, once an appropriately nuanced conception is devised, manipulation poses less of a problem than is usually supposed. Disch notices the concern that a 40-year-old analysis might be obsolete (p. 98); still, she embraces Goodin’s conclusion that manipulation is a “misplaced worry” (p. 91), because citizens are not as susceptible to it as the critic suggests.
Disch sees the concern about manipulation as focusing on how mobilization can mislead or generate constituencies rooted in falsehoods about their interests. She says the advantage of Goodin’s analysis is that it can “decouple observations of manipulation from assumptions about interests” (p. 99). She thus treats the manipulation concern as tethered to competence.
It strikes me that the worry about manipulation targets something else. Regardless of how prevalent manipulation might be or how susceptible citizens are to it, Disch’s constructivism hollows the concept. The constructivist cannot countenance constituencies mobilized around distorted views of their interests or fictional self-conceptions. Yet this is the intuitive diagnosis that one might deploy in discussing, say, the Proud Boys.
Disch may have this kind of example in mind when she mentions representation by misdirection, which involves deceptive mobilization that “impoverishes individual’s political judgment” (p. 100). She thus attempts to draw attention away from “the truth or falsehood of individual beliefs” and toward “systemic conditions for public-opinion and judgment formation” (p. 105). However, this maneuver fails because one cannot make sense of impoverished judgment without eventually invoking beliefs, evidence, warrant, and other metrics of competence.
Disch could counter that her account nonetheless is preferable to the alternative I mentioned. Perhaps it is. But Disch must go further. On her account, the intuitive diagnosis is incoherent because it is rooted in a “foundationalist fantasy” (p. 35). The argument of the book does not support this more sweeping assessment.
Still, Making Constituencies is a rich exercise in radical democratic theorizing. Of particular interest is the seamless ways in which Disch weaves together empirical and conceptual work from both historical and contemporary voices. Importantly, the diverse elements that Disch deploys in building her view do not always harmonize. In this sense, Making Constituencies manifests the kind of plurality that she attempts to center in our thinking about democracy.
