Elites, Parties, and Democracy: Transnational Debates in Political, Legal, and Social Theory

The course embraces a trans-Atlantic and trans-historical perspective to examine how representative democracy has transformed throughout the long 20th century — from the advent of mass politics and the rise of party machineries to the present — and how political and social theorists (historical and contemporary) have drawn on various intellectual traditions and conceptual repertoires to understand such transformations. By doing so, the course offers a succinct history of democratic theory (from the dawn of party democracy to its apogee and its current crisis) and unearths resources for studying the challenges to party democracy in our hyper-polarized present — specifically the ubiquitous personalization of politics, the proliferation of populist leaders, the convergence between populism and technocracy, the ambivalent relationship between elites and democracy, and the implications of all the above for the theory and practice of popular sovereignty.