The Crisis of Representation and Populism: A Comparative Reading of Mouffe and Rosanvallon
The Crisis of Representation and Populism: A Comparative Reading of Mouffe and Rosanvallon

Summary/Abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of Chantal Mouffe’s and Pierre Rosanvallon’s approaches to populism through the framework of democratic representation. Rather than treating populism as a self-contained political phenomenon, the discussion situates it within the broader transformations that have reshaped representative institutions in contemporary democracies. For Mouffe, populism constitutes a political intervention aimed at bringing back into view forms of conflict that have been depoliticised under neoliberal hegemony. Rosanvallon, by contrast, understands populism as a simplifying dynamic that narrows the institutional, plural and mediated structures through which democratic representation ordinarily operates. The article demonstrates that this divergence illuminates a wider theoretical debate about the limits, functioning and institutional conditions of representation in contemporary democratic settings. From this perspective, populism appears less as a mere symptom of democratic crisis than as a phenomenon that renders visible the boundaries and structural tensions inherent in representative politics.

• Details
• Contents