Identity politics and democracy

Blog post by Monika Mokre, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
 
Identity politics were something like a buzz word in the 2024 US election campaign. On the one hand, media speculated why Kamala Harris did not play the ‘identity card’ of her multiethnic origin in a similar way as Barack Obama did. On the other hand, Republicans accused Harris precisely of using her minority identity as a campaign token and reject, at the same time, any kind of anti-racist or gender politics as identity politics of an elite neglecting the problems of the majority population.

Identities and their political usage, thus, might influence the outcome of elections and, in this way, play a role for the most important participatory practice of representative democracy. Their impact, however, goes far beyond ballot box agendas. When democracy is government of the people, for the people, and by the people, identity politics pose the paramount question if there is, in fact, a ‘people’ or if the citizenry consists of fundamentally irreconcilable subgroups

Since the beginning of the millennium, attempts can be found to complement representative democracy with more direct co-decision possibilities of the population. Besides forms of direct democracy, such as referenda, deliberative practices play an increasingly important role here. The most prominent and widely used deliberative form are mini-publics representing the demographic structure of the population and discussing salient political issues. Ideally, such mini-publics should find a consensus on conflictive issues through rational debates.

Arguably, this ideal of deliberation becomes unattainable if the legitimacy of political activities or positions is exclusively based on experience. While different interests can be negotiated, different experiences cannot. At the same time, identity politics shed light on important drawbacks of deliberation – the exclusion of forms of expression and, thereby, also of positions, interests, and experiences on the base of the claim for rationality.

As I explore in my Identities article, ‘Negotiating identities. On identity politics and deliberation’, two theoretical questions underpin this tension: the question for universalism versus difference, and the question for essential versus constructed (and changeable) identities. From the side of marginalized groups, universalism and its assumed colour-blindness has frequently been criticized as fundamentally exclusionary. It is precisely against implicitly universalist concepts that identity politics have been developed. At the same time, however, many theoreticians criticizing universalism also reject essentialism and hold up a constructivist theoretical agenda understanding identities as constructed by society and, thus, changeable. In this vein, Gayatri Spivak differentiates between a theoretical concept of constructivism and the political necessity of ‘strategic essentialism’, i.e. of upholding and confirming an identity as a means of resistance against the implicit exclusions of universalism. While universalists, such as Juergen Habermas, presuppose that deliberative settings can be organized in a way excluding power relations and enabling a discourse on eye level, it is plausibly argued from the perspective of identity politics that this ideal cannot be reached as real-world differences play a role in every political setting. Thus, the question arises if deliberation can be made possible without holding up the concept of universalism.

Maybe, a way out of this dilemma can be found by understanding the electorate not as ‘one people’ but as a multitude of persons in a territory with differing experiences and interests. These differences, however, do not have to be antagonistic and do, thus, not necessarily, forestall deliberations. Still, one would have to adapt two criteria concerning procedures and outcome: Rationality as a discursive requirement would have to be replaced by the acceptance of different discursive formats and ways of expression. And the outcome of deliberations should be defined as enhanced mutual understanding but not necessarily as consensus. In this way, deliberative practices can contribute to productive debates between citizens and inform politicians about the positions of their electorate.

Democracy – as every other political system – can be understood as a form of dealing with conflicts. If we all had the same interests, we would not need politics at all. Such conflicts can be acerbated as it happens in every electoral campaign, or they can be made productive. In this vein, identity politics in deliberation can play a much more constructive role than they did in the 2024 US electoral campaign.

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​Image credit: Diverse Group, by j4p4n, Openclipart.

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Read the Identities article:
​Mokre, Monika. (2024). Negotiating identities. On identity politics and deliberation. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2393041

Read further in Identities:

​National identity politics and cultural recognition: the party system as context of choice

Migrants away from the polls: explaining the absenteeism of people with sub-Saharan African origins in the 2022 French presidential elections

Identity Politics and the Politics of Identities