Contentious Pluralism: The Public Sphere and Democracy

Citation:

Guidry, John A., and Mark Q. Sawyer. 2003. “Contentious Pluralism: The Public Sphere and Democracy.” Perspectives on Politics 1 (2): 273–89.

Authors: John A. Guidry, Mark Q. Sawyer

Abstract:

What do peasants in eighteenth-century England, African Americans in Reconstruction-era Virginia, mothers in Nicaragua and Argentina, and contemporary transnational activists have to do with one another? They all illustrate instances where marginalized groups challenge a lack of democracy or the limitations of existing democracy. Democracy is both a process and a product of struggles against power. Both the social capital literature and literature that focuses on democracy as a product of institutions can undervalue the actions of regular people who imagine a democratic world beyond anything that actually exists. The four cases examined in this article demonstrate that marginalized groups use a variety of performative and subversive methods to uproot the public sphere from its exclusionary history as they imagine, on their own terms, democratic possibilities that did not previously exist. In so doing, they plant the seeds of a more egalitarian public politics in new times and places. This process is "contentious pluralism," and we ask political scientists in all subfields to look to popular movements and changing political structures as they explore the promise of democracy and to rethink the gap between democracy as an ideal and the ways in which people actually experience it.

Topics: Governance, Political Participation Regions: Americas, Central America, North America, South America, Europe, Northern Europe Countries: Argentina, Nicaragua, United Kingdom, United States of America

Year: 2003