Symposium

Abstract

Jeffrey Green's The Eyes of the People (EOP) outlines a basic distinction between two models of popular power in a democracy. On the one hand, there is what Green calls the vocal model, which has dominated the way popular power has been conceptualized since the rebirth of democracy at the end of the eighteenth century. According to this model, the People is understood as a legislative voice-as a set of preferences waiting to be translated into laws and policies. EOP demonstrates that despite the diversity of approaches to democratic theory, the vocal model has informed virtually all philosophies of democracy. For example, it informs not only democratic idealists of the nineteenth century, like Mill and Tocqueville, but equally contemporary models (like aggregationists and deliberative democrats) who, even if more skeptical about popular self-legislation in any simplistic sense, continue to envision the People as a vocal, decisional force. The problem with the vocal model, Green explains, is twofold: failing to account for the fact that most citizens most of the time are not engaged in political decision making, it is disconnected from reality; second, it is hegemonic because, leading ordinary citizens to exaggerate their political capacity, it blinds them to the distinction between an elite with special decision-making authority and the great many without power. It is not surprising, then, as Green notes, that the very notion of the People has come under pressure in recent years, as numerous scholars of democracy (e.g., pluralists), unwilling to treat the People as a monolithic vocal being, have argued for jettisoning the concept altogether.But rather than abandon the idea of the People, Green develops a competing model of popular power, which he calls the ocular model-or also the plebiscitary model. Within the ocular model, the People-the mass of everyday citizens in their collective capacity-is conceived as a spectating rather than decision-making being: it watches leaders and other elites who appear on the public stage. If the central ideal of the vocal model is autonomy (the People's self-authorship of the laws), the central ideal of the ocular model is

From the theater to the hippodrome: A critique of Jeffrey Green’s theory of plebiscitary democracy and an alternative

“…Although Green captures the asymmetry between leaders and citizens well, disclosing the problems of the participatory view, the characterization of the citizenry as completely passive is problematic (cf. Abbey, 2014;Fitzgerald, 2015aFitzgerald, , 2015bTønder, 2015), and rather outdated in a political environment strongly shaped by the internet (Landemore, 2014), especially by social media. Simply put: when citizens are sitting in front of a screen, it may be the screen of a computer, not necessarily that of a television.…”

“…The popular gaze, an empowered form of sight, becomes the organ through which this power is exercised. This means that Green envisions something like an inverted panopticon (Botting, 2014), a 'synopticon' (Green, 2014), where constant surveillance by the many conditions the conduct of the few. His proposed critical ideal that replaces autonomy is that of candor, referring 'to the extent to which the conditions of a leader's public appearance are outside the control of the leader him-or herself' (Green, 2010, p. 181).…”

“…The above notion of the People is the second problematic point of Green's theory. As some critics have already explored (Abbey, 2014;Schwartzberg, 2014), envisioning the (capitalized) People as a single collective entity is empirically untenable and theoretically dubious, since it downplays the role of pluralism and partisanship. Naturally, Green does not deny political pluralism, but he seems to hope that the glue that would hold together the People is stronger than adhesion to leaders and group-mentality.…”