Populism and the Politics of Rights

The Dual Attack on Representative Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID6243246
AuthorsRainer Knopff (University of Calgary, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume31
Issue4
Pages683-705
Publication date1998-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-4239 • E-ISSN: 1744-9324
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0008423900009604
OpenAlexW2063014397
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited18

In Canada as elsewhere, representative democracy is under attack by both populists and rights advocates. The populist challenge comes mainly from Preston Manning's wing of the Reform party. The rights-based challenge is grounded on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These two challenges are different in obvious ways, but from the point of view of representative government—and ultimately of liberal democratic constitutionalism—what they have in common outweighs their differences. What they have in common is the appeal to a mystical being or icon beyond ordinary politics. In effect, the People or Rights become what God was to pre-liberal theocratic politics: a transpolitical trump on ordinary political division, a way of placing opponents “beyond the pale,” a demand for unattainable purity in public life and policy. While bills of rights and populism appear to flow, respectively, from the liberalism and the democracy of liberal democracy, they are, in fact, vehicles for precisely the kind of politics liberal democracy was designed to overcome. Representative government, not populism or entrenched rights, was at the heart of the “new science of politics” designed to make liberal democracy possible. Representative institutions, properly arranged in a system of checks and balances, were a way of blending liberalism with democracy, giving each its due, but indirectly, so that neither would be taken to self-destructive extremes. Populism and the judicialized politics of rights threaten to dissolve this salutary blend, at the cost of liberal democratic constitutionalism

Classical liberalism · Constitutionalism · Democracy · Law and economics · Liberal democracy · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Populism · Representative democracy · Sociology · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Political Systems and Governance · Public Administration

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