Democratic Innovations and the Challenge of Mobilizing Hope

• In Event: New Theoretical and Conceptual Developments in Democratic Innovations

Abstract

Democracy ideally empowers people to vote, engage, and talk with others. Related political practices enable various and, at times, innovative institutions and processes that represent and mediate collective aspirations. These institutional arrangements, whether new or old, play a structuring role as they organize collective experiences while, at the same time, contributing to the work of collectively navigating uncertainty and indeterminacy. From that standpoint, democratic innovations carry multiple promises ranging from normative considerations about the meaning of democracy to more procedural ones about how people can influence decision-making. These innovations rely on a sense of possibility reflective of an experience of hope based on the uncertainty of being and acting with others. This hope can be democracy-supporting when understood as worldly, relational, and collective. However, it also comes with the inevitable risk of disappointment intrinsic to the complexity and contingency of collective decision-making and the biases, power relations, and structures that guide (or hinder) collective actions and aspirations. Although disappointment might undermine democratic systems when generalized, its interaction with hope is a characteristic of the vulnerability and openness of democratic politics. Hope implies possibility rather than assured certainty and cannot be dissociated from the risk of failure. Conversely, disappointment requires the initial presence of aspiration and a perceived possibility of success. By representing an alternative to ongoing disappointments with legacy institutions of representative democracy, democratic innovations capture the fragility of this interaction. My main question is thus the following: what are hope and disappointment presupposing of democratic politics to avoid unwarranted optimism or fatalism? In addressing this question, I propose introducing theories of hope and disappointment to recent work on institutional design in democratic theory by conceptualizing their political experiences as constitutive dimensions of political agency. In doing so, I adopt a systemic lens as these experiences unfold against multiple temporalities and within different sites of politics. I argue that they rely on collectively constituted projects and interests that can be taken up or rejected by different constituencies in ways that organize and re-organize collective agency and future-making activities in democratic politics. I illustrate this argument with examples from climate assemblies by noting the challenge of enabling spaces for more disruptive articulations of hope and sustaining collective action beyond the formal life of these processes. My claim is that since the constant interaction between hope and disappointment sustains the openness of democratic politics, mobilizing hope in democratic systems also requires designing for disappointment. This conceptual framework seeks to contribute to debates on institutional design and questions of failures and possibilities in democratic systems.

Author

• Antonin Lacelle-Webster, Yale University