The Crisis of Representation and Populism: A Comparative Reading of Mouffe and Rosanvallon
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.
Keywords
Populism, Democratic Representation, Crisis of Representation, Political Legitimacy, Democratic Theory
Ethical Statement
During the preparation of this manuscript, the author used ChatGPT by OpenAI. The standard ChatGPT model available at the time of use was used solely for limited language editing, improving clarity and readability, and checking the fluency of academic expression. The tool was not used to generate the article’s conceptual framework, scholarly argument, analysis, interpretation, sources, or conclusions. The author reviewed and edited the text in full and takes complete responsibility for the final content of the publication.
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