Rethinking Political Competition

Competition is central to modern democratic politics. Yet the concept of political competition typically elides two contrasting visions of politics: that of politics as a game, and politics as war by other means. This tension is masked by the common tendency to contrast ‘competitive’ models of democracy, associated with party competition and electoral politics, with ‘cooperative’ or ‘consensualist’ models of democracy. This project sets out to reframe competition within democratic theory, showing the hidden tensions within the ways it is currently used in ‘minimalist’ accounts of democracy, and the normative potentials of competition within deliberative theories of democracy (which are typically framed as anti-competitive). This innovative conceptual analysis of political competition will then be applied to the case of online public deliberation in the networked public sphere, in which the line between democratically productive competition and democratically destructive conflict is becoming increasingly hard to draw. 

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