Protest and the Democratic Order

Abstract

The introduction of this special issue elaborates a research perspective on the meaning and function of political protest in the context of democratic orders. Starting from the consideration that protest and democratic orders form a close interrelationship, we ask how and to what extent democracy is imagined, negotiated, and problematized within protest, and how democratic orders and politics shape the formation of protest. To this end, we argue for a combination of Democratic Theory and Social Movement Studies. Interweaving these two traditions allows for empirically saturated and theoretically sound interpretations of recent episodes of contention. With this research perspective, we not only gain a deeper understanding of protest dynamics, but also of contemporary social and political transformations within modern democratic societies.

Manifesting the revolutionary people: The Yellow Vest Movement and popular sovereignty

“…This kind of back-and-forth between political theory and social reality is part of problem-based political theory, where the validity of a political theory is tested by its pragmatic ability to solve empirical problems (Mansbridge, 2023;Warren, 2017). In this case, my aim is to make sense of recent popular upheavals and how the movements themselves made sense of their actions, using the resources of both democratic theory and social movement studies (Gobbi et al, 2022). Epistemologically, such an endeavor presupposes the belief in a shared capacity to use concepts, or at least the existence of a continuum between professional and lay or everyday uses of political concepts, particularly when it comes to making normative judgments (Boltanski, 2011;Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006)what proponents of grounded normative theory call "epistemological inclusion" (Ackerly et al, 2021).…”