Post-Liberal Democracy? Moving beyond the populism versus liberalism dichotomy

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Shangai

Conferencia; The Crisis of Western Democracy; 2018

Fudan University

The triumph of democracy over its openly authoritarian adversaries established a novel political scenario in the democratized world characterized by the confrontation between liberal and populist democracy. While both models express opposite ways of arranging electoral democracy, they share nevertheless some common assumptions to the extent that they can be considered alternative variants of an electoral approach to democratic representation. To overcome the apparent standoff between two allegedly contrasting visions of democracy is necessarily to develop a stronger understanding of democratic accountability than the one provided by those models. A democratic notion of accountability should consequently be predicated on both post-liberal and post-populist presuppositions.