Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

We argue that a reinvention of the plebeian tribunate should play a key role in addressing the challenges stemming from increasing concentrations of, and inequalities in, social, political, economic, and cultural power in liberal democracies. Addressing these challenges, which negatively affect parliamentary representation, requires a form of institutional innovation that gives voice to non-elites who are ruled but do not rule. We propose revisions of the composition and tasks of the tribunate that are tailored to these current challenges. Our fully randomly selected tribunate emerges as a vehicle not only for contesting concentrated power but also for articulating lines of conflict, disruptive agenda-setting, and political experimentation. Our proposal contributes to developing realist democratic theory. We argue that the reinvented tribunate not only meets realist commitments to avoiding moralization and idealization but also demonstrates the underexploited capacity of realism to inform institutional innovation and thus contribute to substantial political analysis.

Keywords

realism in political theory tribunate democratic innovation

Introduction

In this article, we propose a reinvention of the plebeian tribunate to strengthen democracies’ capacity to respond to widespread discontents, which arguably have to do with the shifts in, and the concentration of, political power (e.g., Gilens and Page 2014; Hacker and Pierson 2010), cultural power (e.g., Reckwitz 2020), and economic power (e.g., Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020) in contemporary European and North American states. The tribunate would be a supplementary assembly selected by lot from the inhabitants of the polity, with the function to give the voices of ordinary people, those most likely to face disadvantage and oppression, a greater weight in public opinion formation and decision-making. The overall goal of this article is to show how the plebeian tribunate may be turned into a democratic innovation with considerable potential to help contemporary democracies deal with concentrated power as a complex phenomenon that permeates political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions in ways that are not yet fully transparent. We depart from previous accounts of the tribunate, which have already shown that the tribunate has a considerable potential to disperse concentrated power (Arlen and Rossi 2021; Jörke 2016; McCormick 2011), criticize their limitations, and spell out a reinvention of the tribunate tailored to contemporary challenges. While the split between ordinary people and the holders of concentrated power, central to the idea of a tribunate, may at first glance seem like an abandonment of democratic equality, we seek to show how it can strengthen not only oppositional and conflictual elements crucial for democracy (Medearis 2015) but also contribute to fostering solidarity and collective action.

Our reinvention of the tribunate responds to two shortcomings of prevailing interpretations of the tribunate. First, previous accounts of the plebeian tribunate rely on a simplistic understanding of the divide between “plebs” and “elite” and how it affects the problem of concentrated power. By defining eligibility based on the criteria of income/wealth and education, they inscribe a too-narrow conflict focus into the political space created by the tribunate. If contemporary democracies want to use the tribunate as a tool for addressing potentially new lines of conflict between the “plebs” and the “elite,” which are not entirely absorbed by traditional class divisions, they should not select participants on the basis of criteria determined by an income/wealth-based understanding of class. We argue that random selection from the entire population is a more suitable selection technique for the tribunate. A group of people selected by lot from the whole of society is likely to be inclusive of various sorts of discontent and can serve the articulation of tensions between the many and the elite few without predetermining what the most important line of conflict is.

Second, current proposals leave much of the potential for the plebeian tribunate to influence political processes untapped. Most advocates of the tribunate focus on the competences of the tribunate to veto the legislative process. In anticipation of the complexity of lines of conflict between the non-elite and the holders of concentrated power, as well as among the non-elite, we argue that the tribunate should realize a heuristic task—that is, serve the articulation of lines of conflict. By expanding the tribunate’s set of tasks in this way, we recognize that the non-elite lacks a homogenous class identity and is crisscrossed by multiple lines of conflict. The potential of the tribunate to disperse concentrated power could be better exploited if the disruptive task of the tribunate were not only be interpreted negatively, in terms of veto, but also constructively, in terms of agenda-setting. In addition, the tribunate should serve a creative task and be able to experiment with non-elite ideas for organizing social life. This task would enable the tribunate to disperse power not only through influencing what is discussed in the legislative process but also through influencing the terms of public debate—that is, by shaping perceptions of what is seen as a feasible way of organizing social life differently than in the status quo.

Although the main focus of this article is the debate on possibilities for enriching the institutional settings of contemporary democracies by means of updated versions of the plebeian tribunate, the argument is also relevant for two broader scholarly debates. One is the debate on means to endow novel democratic institutions with meaningful political influence without granting them legislative competences. The combined heuristic, disruptive, and creative tasks would make the reinvented tribunate far more than an advisory body. It would have some considerable potential to overcome a common weakness of deliberative mini-publics, which have been criticized as politically toothless because they often allow governments to “cherry pick” between their recommendations (Harris 2019, 53; Smith 2009, 93).

The second debate to which the article contributes is the nascent field of realist democratic theory. The literature on political realism has exploded in recent years (see, e.g., Galston 2010; Hall 2020; Horton 2017; McQueen 2017; Prinz and Rossi 2017; Rossi 2019; Sleat 2018; Westphal and Willems 2023), but contributions by realists to democratic theory are still rare. By taking up and developing the idea of a plebeian tribunate, we argue that pushing realism into the direction of democratic theory need not mean limiting the promise of democracy (Achen and Bartels 2016; Frega 2020). Instead, the reinvented tribunate contributes to spelling out how a realist approach to democracy can reinvigorate confidence in democratic responses to key challenges facing contemporary democracies.

The article is structured as follows. The first section will specify the problem current concentrations of power and related discontents pose to democracies. The second section will introduce the tribunate as a candidate for democratic innovation and set out our critique of prevailing interpretations of the tribunate. The third section will show how this critique amounts to a novel understanding of the representative nature of the tribunate. The fourth section will present a novel agenda for how the tribunate can fulfill its function, which consists of the heuristic, disruptive, and creative tasks. The fifth section will address some questions related to the implementation of a tribunate serving these tasks. The sixth and final section will reflect on our insights for developing a realist democratic theory.

“Populist” Discontents and the Need for Contestation

Contemporary democracies are characterized by increases in the concentration of power. The economic resources of wealth and income are increasingly unequally distributed (Piketty 2014). In addition, the concentration of power is present in cultural and political relationships. In modern societies, people are divided not only on the basis of unequally distributed material resources but also on the basis of lifestyles and cultural capital (Reckwitz 2020). In view of the many cultures of understanding of the quality of democracy (Sabl 2015), the political symptoms of increasingly concentrated power find expression in at least the following ways: in unequal responsiveness to constituents’ existing beliefs or interests relative to their wealth; in the limitation of political conflict to positions benefiting those economically or culturally at the top; or by falling short of a variety of democratic ideals—for example, by contradicting republican nondomination requirements (Rahman 2017). Studies on the unequal responsiveness of political decisions in contemporary democracies demonstrate that current representative political systems do poorly in preventing socioeconomic inequalities from translating into political inequalities (e.g., Gilens 2012; Peters and Ensink 2015; Schakel 2021; Schäfer 2012). Political decisions, which set the rules for all, reflect the interests of those who already benefit from concentrated economic and cultural power. If we do not assume, as proponents of responsiveness typically do, that people have set interests and beliefs but rather view representation as a dynamic process of claim-making (Saward 2006; Young 2002), political symptoms of the increasing concentration of power are still to be found in the limitation of conflict to positions that are broadly congruent with the interests of economic and cultural elites (Crouch 2004; Hacker and Pierson 2010; Schäfer and Zürn 2021, ch. 4).

Contemporary democracies have so far proven ill-equipped to process, let alone address, discontents related to such concentrations of power. The unequal political responsiveness of political decisions in contemporary democracies indicates that representative institutions, which rely on a framework that claims universal and equal representation, have difficulty with accommodating deep divisions. They are closer to being complicit in the creation and maintaining of concentrated power than to being effective tools to make concentrated power a subject of political debate. This has led to a situation in which many citizens who feel left behind and have lost trust in the established political parties (Grzymala-Busse 2019; Mair 2013) either abstain from politics or give their vote to right-wing populists. The discontent of those who vote for right-wing populists is often explained with the cultural, economic, and political factors that feed into the described concentration of power (e.g., Azmanova 2020; Burgoon et al. 2019; Grzymala-Busse 2019; Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou 2016; Hernández and Kriesi 2016; Kaufmann 2016; Norris and Inglehart 2019).

The current situation, in which citizens’ discontent with the effects of concentrations of power are politicized almost exclusively through support for right-wing populism, is clearly detrimental to democracy (Schäfer and Zürn 2021). Right-wing populists undermine democratic norms and principles—that is, by fostering hostility toward democratic procedures and intermediary institutions, which they perceive to be in the way of direct realizations of the will of an allegedly homogenous people. Instead of providing solutions to the problem of concentration of power, right-wing populists advance a political agenda with xenophobic, anti-migrant, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ+ components that targets already marginalized groups of society (Cohen 2019; Moffitt 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019, 8; Yılmaz 2012). Despite their anti-elite rhetoric, right-wing populists prioritize exclusionary politics, which reinforce concentrated power, over credible attempts to tackle the structural shifts in power relationships that foster oligarchic tendencies in contemporary democratic societies.

In a situation in which citizens’ discontents are being politicized in a way that is detrimental to democratic norms and principles, democracies face the challenge of creating alternative channels for contestation. The unequal political responsiveness of political decisions illustrates that democracies’ current institutional means are insufficient to avoid oligarchic tendencies (Winters 2011). Contemporary democracies should recognize this and probe possibilities to create novel channels for contestation and the dispersion of concentrated power. Otherwise, they would risk perpetuating a situation in which the exclusionary politics of the populist right is the greatest beneficiary of citizens’ grievances about a sociopolitical constellation that produces what democracies have always promised to avoid—the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

The goal of this article is to develop a novel proposal for what such a channel for contestation might look like. We do so by drawing upon the model of the plebeian tribunate. Once revised in fundamental respects, the tribunate can be a potentially effective tool for democracies to address the challenge outlined previously.

The Plebeian Tribunate Model as a Democratic Innovation

The plebeian tribunate is a useful starting point for thinking about a possible institutional innovation that might help deal with the political task described in the previous section for two reasons. First, the tribunate is historically connected to attempts to control oligarchic concentrations of power. In ancient Rome, the tribunes, who were elected by the assembly of the plebeians, had the power to veto official acts, “in particular, policies favored by the noble-dominated senate” (McCormick 2011, 93). We do not want to trivialize differences between ancient Rome and contemporary democracies. The senate was explicitly oligarchic, whereas modern parliaments claim not to be. The historical plebs were closer to today’s middle class than to the excluded slaves, non-Roman subjects, and women, which means that specifying the contemporary equivalent of the plebs is a challenge in itself. The historical plebs also had “natural” veto powers by, for example, walking out of Rome or withholding military service. Further, despite the deep chasm between them, it would seem that the plebs trusted the patricians in Republican Rome to an extent that supersedes current levels of trust in politicians and political institutions (McCormick 2001, 309–11). But despite differences to current circumstances, the example of the original Roman tribunate provides inspiration for developing a class-specific institution, which gave the inferior class means to disturb oligarchic political decision-making processes.

Second, the tribunate starts from the divide between the many and the elite few rather than from a unity of the people. While critical commentators charge proposals to revive the tribunate with anachronism (e.g., Urbinati 2011, 167–68), we believe that the highlighted characteristics render the tribunate an especially promising tool for addressing the problem of concentrated power. Modern representative democracy, with its focus on universal suffrage, has not prevented the formation of strong stratification (Winters 2017). An updated version of the tribunate that reflects the divide between the many and the elite few does not have to contradict the idea of political equality and, unlike Machiavelli, does not have to give this divide an ontological status (Vergara 2020a).¹ We agree with Arlen and Rossi (2021, 40) that “the tribunate model offers one roadmap for moving beyond class neutrality, without jeopardizing hard-fought modes of formal equality.” By acknowledging the existence of the divide between ordinary people and the holders of concentrated power and by bringing it to politics, the tribunate would render visible a part of social reality that political institutions based on formal equality tend to disguise. While the tribunate cannot be a comprehensive solution to the problem of concentrated power, it may be a powerful catalyst of political processes that help expose, politicize, and possibly disperse facets of concentrated power.

Contemporary proponents of the tribunate model argue that democracies could address the problem of unequal political responsiveness of current representative institutions by adopting its logic of institutionalized class conflict (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 40–42). McCormick (2011) proposes a “college of tribunes” that would consist of “fifty-one private citizens, selected by lottery” and excludes political and economic elites from eligibility (183). Such a college of tribunes, which McCormick designs as an innovation of the U.S. political system, would have the power to veto a piece of congressional legislation, an executive order, or a Supreme Court decision; to call a national referendum; and to initiate an impeachment proceeding per year (McCormick 2011, 184). Following McCormick, Arlen and Rossi (2021) argue that an update of the Roman tribunate could counter the oligarchic tendencies in democracies more generally. In contrast to McCormick, they propose not one single plebeian assembly but “an interconnected set of plebeian assemblies” (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 42; see also Vergara 2020b) that would be tasked with reviewing political activities in different policy areas “in which personal access to massive, concentrated wealth can be deployed for discretionary public influence” (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 41). They thereby seek to tailor anti-oligarchic institutions to different mechanisms of unequal, wealth-based influence—for example, gaining office, lobbying officeholders, or influencing the public through media ownership (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 43). In view of the multiplication of tribunate assemblies, Arlen and Rossi propose to split their powers—with assemblies that scrutinize the gaining of office having the power to initiate impeachment and other assemblies having the ability to initiate one veto and referendum per year. In contrast to McCormick’s proposal, only one veto can be placed across the different branches of government.

We think that these important proposals, notwithstanding their differences, exhibit common weaknesses that severely limit the extent to which the updated versions of the tribunate proposed could strengthen democracies’ capacity to respond to the problem of concentrated power.

The first weakness concerns their understanding of the nature of the divide between the “plebs” and the holders of concentrated power. The “plebs,”—that is, the non-elite or ordinary people who are vulnerable to being disadvantaged or oppressed by concentrated power in democratic societies—are understood as comprising a “specific group” united through a “socioeconomic identity” determined by criteria of income/wealth and education (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 44). For one thing, this understanding of class neglects the internal divisions, for example, in terms of cultural views or social positioning, of those who can be grouped together based on the criteria of income/wealth and education. In addition, it assumes that income/wealth and education constitute the “socioeconomic fault line that cuts across the polity” (44) and thereby excludes that the discontents that currently emerge at the intersections of concentrated economic, cultural, and political power might give rise to new lines of conflict that do not neatly match the divisions among separate socioeconomic profiles. Because the overly simplistic understanding of the problem of concentrated power is directly reflected by the selection technique that current proposals favor, we must rethink the composition of the tribunate in order to turn it into an instrument that could help contemporary democracies deal effectively with the complex phenomenon of concentrated power. Previous criticisms of McCormick’s composition of the tribunate were driven by a concern that the exclusion of wealthy citizens would conflict with equal freedom central to liberal constitutionalism (Landemore 2020, 50; Vergara 2020a, 227–28). In our view, these criticisms overlook a problem that is more pertinent in terms of the objective to install an institution with the capacity to disperse concentrations of power: a tribunate grounded in an income/wealth-based understanding of class fails to recognize the internal diversity of plebeian voices and the complexity of concentrated power.

The second weakness of the current accounts is that they leave much of the potential for the plebeian tribunate to influence political processes untapped. More precisely, they limit the powers awarded to a tribunate mostly to the power to block or discipline, like vetoing and impeachment. They also envisage an agenda-setting power, but this agenda-setting power is defined rather narrowly, in terms of both frequency and form. McCormick (2011, 184–85), as well as Arlen and Rossi (2021, 42), want to grant the tribunate, or the system of plebeian assemblies, the competence to call a referendum.² We argue that it is desirable to extend the agenda-setting competences, because doing so would equip the tribunate with a broader set of tools to influence the political process. In section four, we will show what it may mean to determine agenda-setting competences beyond the competence to call a referendum partly by drawing on Arlen’s (2022) work on citizen tax juries. In addition, we will argue that agenda-setting is not the only possibility to endow the tribunate with a more constructive and overall more influential role in the political process.

We recognize that both McCormick and Arlen and Rossi note that their proposals are neither fully developed nor meant to comprehensively address the negative effects of the oligarchic concentration of wealth on democracy. The overall focus on blocking, combined only with a comparatively narrowly defined agenda-setting competence, misses the opportunity to give the perspectives of the non-elite a more direct impact on the institutions of representative democracy. As a consequence, neither McCormick’s neo-Roman tribunate nor Arlen and Rossi’s modification of it allow the tribunate to fully exploit its potential to contest concentrated power. The tribunate must play a more active role in the political system to be able to influence what is debated in politics and what proposals for reforming the status quo are perceived as feasible political options. These observations lead us to theorizing the tribunate in a novel way.

Reinventing the Tribunate: Representation and Selection

We first want to address the representative character of the tribunate and ask what follows from our criticism of the way in which current accounts picture the tribunate as an institution tasked with bringing to politics the voices of a “specific group” (Arlen and Rossi 2021, 44) as determined by traditional class criteria.

In his original proposal, McCormick (2011) imagines the tribunate as comprising a group of “fifty-one lottery-selected non-wealthy citizens” (183). Arlen and Rossi (2021) stick with that number and propose that each of the assemblies that constitute the network of tribunates should be composed of fifty-one citizens (42). We are less interested in numbers here, or what the advantages of a network of tribunates over a single tribunate may be. Instead, we want to zoom in on the question of how the tribunate should be representative of the non-elite, if we abandon the too-simplistic understanding of the problem of concentrated power that we identified in the current proposals.

While the advocates of the tribunate are right to argue that contemporary democracies could benefit from an institution that represents the perspectives of the non-elite, they make the mistake of predetermining the line of conflict that separates the elite from the non-elite by selecting participants on the basis of income/wealth and education. A reinvented version of the tribunate can best accommodate the understanding of concentrated power as a complex phenomenon, and of the non-elite as an internally diverse group, if it abandons the idea that tribunes should be selected on the basis of particular socioeconomic criteria and tasked with mirror-representing the interests of a fixed social group. Alternatively, the tribunes should be selected in a way that is agnostic about what lines of conflict separate the non-elite from the holders of concentrated power. Instead of being tasked with mirror-representing the interests of a fixed social group, the tribunate should represent the non-elite by challenging and transforming the conflict bias of contemporary representative democracies, on the basis of political processes unconstrained by previous definitions of how the non-elite should understand itself—for example, as a group united by certain economic or educational properties.

We borrow the term “conflict bias” from Lisa Disch’s (2021) engagement with E. E. Schattschneider, according to which the framing of lines of conflict in the representative institutions of democracies is crucial for overcoming exclusion and the disengagement of groups (Disch 2021, ch. 4). Schattschneider (1975) highlights that “all forms of political organization have a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others” (69) and argues that the inclusiveness of a political system depends on the extent to which it succeeds in preventing that bias from becoming too strong and the number of suppressed conflicts too large. For Schattschneider, the nonparticipation of large parts of the citizenry does not indicate a lack of interest in politics but “reflects the suppression of the options and alternatives that reflect the needs of the non-participants” (quoted in Disch 2021, 80).

Schattschneider’s argument has explanatory force as regards the situation in contemporary democracies. As much as it would be short-sighted to interpret nonparticipation as indicating people’s political incompetence or lack of interest in politics, it would also be short-sighted to explain the support for right-wing populists with citizens’ antidemocratic attitudes. Such attitudes may be the central motivation to vote for right-wing populists in individual cases, but the broader political phenomenon requires a more complex explanation. The overly narrow conflict bias of representative institutions in contemporary democracies is an important part of such an explanation. To avoid alienation from the political system, contemporary democracies should therefore enable the articulation of novel lines of conflict centered on concentrated power inside their institutional settings. We understand articulation as a process that creates social meaning by linking elements of the social in novel ways (DeLuca 1999, 335). We use the term articulation here because it helpfully expresses that lines of conflict never simply exist as necessary effects of social facts but are always the products of performative political acts. The articulation of novel lines of conflict is thus the process in which novel forms of understanding and ordering the conflictual character of social life are formed through the performance of contestations and the construction of political identities.

We propose a redefinition of the representative nature of the tribunate based on this understanding of conflict bias and the articulation of conflicts. A key purpose of the tribunate should be to challenge and transform the existing conflict bias of contemporary representative democracies by articulating lines of conflict that render their conflict systems more inclusive of the perspectives of the non-elite. Both the definition of the properties of non-elite political identity and, relatedly, answers to the question of what aspects of the multifaceted phenomenon of concentrated power should be placed on the political agenda are created through the political processes shaped by the activities of the tribunate. In this sense, the updated version of the tribunate would break with the mirror-conception of representation and represent the “contemporary plebs” in a more radically political sense: it would not merely mirror it but create it as a collective.

This understanding of the tribunate’s representative nature demands a revision of the selection procedure. The tribunate should be as inclusive as possible of views that could contribute to forming a non-elite political identity and avoid a selection based on criteria like income/wealth and education. We argue that random selection from the inhabitants of the polity would be the best tool for meeting this goal. As Landemore (2020, 42) argues, taking a random sample of the larger population is particularly suitable for the composition of an assembly of democratic representatives in situations in which “there is ex ante uncertainty as to what the relevant diversity should be.” If we want the tribunate to be an assembly that articulates lines of conflict in the previously described sense, this is precisely what we face: uncertainty about what the “relevant diversity” is. Random selection from the inhabitants of the polity acknowledges this uncertainty to the extent that it is likely to bring together a group of people with very different social, economic, political, and cultural backgrounds.

Importantly, this increased diversity of selected tribunes would not diminish the capacity of the tribunate to represent non-elite perspectives. Given the radically unequal numbers of the elite and ordinary people in the societies of contemporary democracies, it is highly unlikely that random selection will create a group composed of top earners, members of corporate boards, or media owners. To be sure, extending the sample from which tribunes are selected to the whole of the population would mean that the tribunate will not necessarily be composed of the worst off, the most disadvantaged or oppressed in society (irrespective of difficulties of determining who would count as most disadvantaged, see, e.g., Vergara 2020b, 230). For example, among the selected tribunes may be people who have a low income but an above-average education, as well as people with marginalized cultural views who have an average or maybe above-average income. But even if the social positioning of individual tribunes may be non-uniform in terms of degrees of disadvantage and privilege, the overall group of tribunes drawn by lot from the entire population will be non-elite in the sense of sharing a vulnerability to being disadvantaged or oppressed by holders of concentrated power.

In light of our criticism of the current proposals, a random-selection procedure that brings together representatives of the non-elite, but abandons preselection based on traditional class criteria, has two main advantages. First, the tribunate will be inclusive of a great diversity of social identities. This diversity equips the tribunate with a rich pool of non-elite experiences and viewpoints that the activities of the tribunate can tap into in order to identify different facets of the complex phenomenon of concentrated power. Second, the fact that they are selected as representatives of ordinary people, rather than as representatives of a particular social class, will shape the self-understanding of tribunes in their role as political actors. Tribunes who understand themselves as representatives of a diverse group of ordinary people, rather than of a homogenous social class, are unlikely to think that any particular view or preference can be equated with the interest of the “plebs.” In this sense, the modification of the selection procedure that we propose would have an important prefigurative effect on the activities of the tribunate. It would increase the likelihood that tribunes see the necessity of entering a political process in which lines of conflict between the “plebs” and the elite are articulated rather than mirrored. Such a process, we argue, is most likely the key to a representative performance that is capable of contesting and dispersing multiple facets of concentrated power and can thereby do justice to its complexity.

Arguments for random selection are not new of course. Proponents of deliberative mini-publics usually argue that participants should be randomly selected from the population (e.g., Grönlund, Bächtiger, and Setälä 2014). Although our argument for a revised version of the tribunate thus has some substantive overlap with these proposals, it is distinct in two respects. The first distinction is in terms of justification. While many proponents of deliberative mini-publics value random selection as a fair selection procedure that allows each citizen an equal opportunity to participate in politics (Smith 2009, 79–80), we understand random selection as a means to bring together ordinary people capable of representing the “plebs” as a heterogeneous collective. The second distinction is in terms of implementation. Deliberative mini-publics usually use stratified samplings “to ensure that citizens from politically salient social groups are recruited” (Smith 2009, 81). In fact, previous accounts of the tribunate remain very close to this sampling idea; the only difference being that they abandon the diverse list of sampling criteria favored by proponents of deliberative mini-publics, which includes criteria such as “geographical district, gender and age” (Smith 2009, 81), and opt for reducing the list to the criteria of income/wealth and education. Based on our critique of this selection technique, we argue that the stratified sampling approach should be abandoned altogether.³ Any preselected sampling criteria would predetermine what is relevant for the divide between “plebs” and “elite.” This step not only radicalizes the randomization of selection in comparison to both previous interpretations of the tribunate and established arguments for the implementation of deliberative mini-publics.⁴ It is also conducive to the expanded range of political tasks of the tribunate which we will spell out in the following section.⁵

Reinventing the Tribunate: Political Tasks

In the following, we consider how taking on a range of political tasks enables the tribunate to fulfill its function to give the voices of ordinary people, those most likely to face disadvantage and/or oppression, a greater weight in public opinion formation and decision-making. We shall outline three main tasks: the heuristic task, which looks at the political purpose of the articulation of novel lines of conflict touched on previously; a disruptive task; and a creative task. This section allows us to spell out what exactly we should expect of the tribunate or, more specifically, of the political processes that it performs.

The Heuristic Task: Publicly Articulating Lines of Conflict (and Steering Them into Political Processes)

Adapting Smith and Owen’s (2011) claim that tribunates increase the visibility of (ideological) conflicts and conflict lines, we argue that tribunates should have a kind of heuristic task in times where we are either stuck with conflict biases that no longer match underlying discontents, or we lack clarity about the conflicts that underlie new political forces. Social and political conflicts often have political effects without it already being clear what the exact conflicts are (classically, Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Usually, we first see a voicing of dissatisfaction with the status quo and then begin to understand it by working out the underlying lines of conflict. Contemporary democracies face a situation in which dissatisfactions with concentrated power are voiced in such forms and forums that they do not feed into the articulation of novel lines of conflict between the elite and ordinary people. Because this situation prevents a productive political processing of the relevant dissatisfactions, democracies need institutional mechanisms that further the articulation of lines of conflict—that is, political processes in which ordinary people can link their different experiences and dissatisfactions and thereby create the political identity of “contemporary plebs” on the basis of which they can intervene in politics and transform the current conflict bias.

The tribunate would meet its heuristic task by enabling the articulation of grievances and struggles by bringing together under-represented voices of randomly selected inhabitants of the polity in a public forum with the purpose of forming a non-elite agenda. While the tribunes would neither need to synthesize these grievances into one master conflict nor reach “intersectional” understanding of the connections between their own grievances to fulfill the heuristic task, its goal to formulate an agenda for consideration by the respective established house(s) of parliament would lead the tribunate to concentrate on articulating grievances as conflicts and ranking them.⁶ By doing so, the tribunate would already contribute to the dispersion of power, because this specification of grievances is a prerequisite for collective activities undertaken to disturb the dominance of the powerful over public discourses and political debates (e.g., via changing the “conflict bias”) (Klein 2022).

We recognize that the grip of concentrated power and the success of strategies of wealth defense (Winters 2017) have, to a significant extent, to do with the hold they have established over people’s imagination of possible political positions and forms of public participation. Bagg (2022, 407–09) argues that this means that institutional innovations like tribunate-like assemblies will only scratch the surface of public discourse and leave underlying oligarchic dynamics in place. While we propose an institutional innovation, we do not view it as a stand-alone mechanism for addressing current discontents. Rather, we view the institutional innovation as an important step—as a sort of catalyst—for a larger process of change, which would eventually need to lead to transformed beliefs and self-understandings in the population, that manifest in solidarization and collective mobilization.

This important step has to do with a contrast to the tribunate in the Roman Republic—namely that people today do not, as Bagg (2022, 408) rightly notes, “see themselves primarily as members of a well-defined socio-economic class.” They might instead view themselves along lines of other identity markers (ethnicity, age, gender, etc.). This fact makes the creation of non-elite or anti-oligarchic solidarity difficult, which would, however, be necessary to turn the factual division between the many and the elite few—in terms of, for example, wealth, income, political influence, etc.—into a political tension. In other words, “class-based solidarity and mass-elite tension must be created rather than presumed” (Bagg 2022, 409). Bagg concludes that this means that institutional innovation through tribunate-like assemblies is unhelpful or unnecessary for creating solidarity among the non-elite and/or tension between them and the holders of concentrated power. We would like to contest this conclusion (see also Klein 2022).⁷ We thereby seek to counter the defeatist view that solidarity is now exceedingly difficult to achieve due to the multiplication of markers of identity. Just because the tension between the many and the elite few might not be built around one marker of identity does not mean that new formulations of lines of conflict could not converge into such a tension.

The Disruptive Task: Countering Concentrated Power

The disruptive task of the tribunate refers to its capacity to contest and disperse concentrated power. While McCormick (2011) and Arlen and Rossi (2021) put emphasis on the thwarting power of the veto, our approach conceptualizes the disruptive task of the tribunate with a wider scope. While thwarting would be focused on individual laws or appointments, disruption aims to have wider consequences on the dispersal of concentrated power, touching on its structural dimension. If we were to phrase it in terms of Lukes’ (2005) three faces of power, the thwarting interpretation stops at the first face of power, decision-making. Our focus on the disruptive task of the tribunate brings in the second and third faces of power—respectively, agenda-setting and acculturation/ideology. The veto might already perform a limited disruption because it might upset patterns of decision-making which reproduce concentrated power. However, as this is only reactive, we propose to add an expansive agenda-setting task to the tribunate, which ties into its heuristic task. In doing so, we build on the more limited proposals for an agenda-setting task already present in McCormick and Arlen and Rossi (see above), as well as on the agenda-setting task developed in Gordon Arlen’s proposal for citizen tax juries, anti-oligarchic mini-publics (Arlen 2022, 207). The tribunate would have the duty to present an agenda of up to the ten most pressing (neglected) conflicts to the established (houses of) parliament every year. This agenda may contain policy proposals. The parliament would need to consider this agenda in public session and respond within a certain timeframe, for example, six months (as Arlen 2022, 207, suggests). This agenda-setting would perform a disruptive task because it would provide a counterpoint to the mainstream political agenda, which could disperse power in the sense that it could serve as a catalyst for public discourse and will formation in directions possibly unforeseen and unintended by parliamentarians. This catalyst effect would be supported by the fact that the tribunate’s agenda-setting could combine subjective and objective perceptions of conflict and concentrated power more readily than the established parliament.

The tribunate would also be disruptive with regard to the third face of power. The third face of power is about the (noncoercive) influencing of ways of thinking—in other words, about acculturation and ideology. We noted above that the hold of concentrated power is now partially sustained by ideological entrenchment. Without affecting the ideological dimension, the dispersal of concentrated power would seem to be impossible, which is why, under its creative task (see below), our modified version of the tribunate would promote experiments in living. These experiments shall have the potential to support the dispersal of ideological power because they show the possibility of living differently. After all, challenging the hold of ideologies is, arguably, not mainly about the cognitive content of beliefs but about the practical reproduction of the conditions that enable taking on these beliefs (see, e.g., Celikates 2018; Raekstad and Gradin 2020).

The focus on wider disruption ties in with our suggestion of a more complex understanding of “plebs.” We argued previously that it is important to seek dispersion of power in different dimensions, not just in terms of wealth and official political power. It is also essential to speak to the forms of ideological control, which includes the prevalence of elite discourses about culture.

The Creative Task: Approximating Solutions to Conflicts Through Experimentation

The tribunate is well-suited to develop ideas for how the identified conflicts could be dealt with in practice—for example, to identify actions that might remedy the conflicts or at least facilitate addressing and processing them in productive ways. Beyond possible contributions to the dispersal of ideological power, there are at least two additional reasons why the tribunate should be given opportunities to develop and test ideas for potential responses to conflicts and not be limited to heuristic and disruptive tasks.

First, the search for effective responses to current discontents will benefit from a pluralization of spaces, where ideas for social and political change can be developed. Given that the established institutions of democracies have failed to adequately represent the non-elite, they should not be entrusted with exclusive competence to propose possible solutions to the conflicts that the tribunate articulates and steers into the political process. It can be expected that the tribunate would produce proposals for change that speak more directly to the preferences of non-elite people, which often do not get sufficient public attention and support in other parts of the polity.

Second, opportunities to develop ideas for possible solutions to conflicts and to realize projects that test these ideas can contribute to a sense of the collective agency of the tribunate. If the collective will formation that takes place in the tribunate is translated into collective decision-making on potential policies, the self-understanding of the contemporary “plebs” can be put to constructive ends. To be clear, we do not envision the tribunate as a substitute for the decision-making of the parliament; we are not proposing competences for general lawmaking. However, asking the tribunate to address the question of possible solutions to conflicts enables democracies to tap into ideas for change that might not be formulated elsewhere. It also encourages the members of the tribunate to consider policies that might serve interests that they have in common, independent of the differences that divide them.

What competences would the tribunate need to fulfill the creative task? We suggest that it should be endowed with scholarly research support and a budget that it can use for launching pilot projects or experiments in which the tribunes could implement, on a small-scale level, what they think might be effective solutions to relevant conflicts. What we have in mind here is something like the experiments that have been undertaken in different countries to test the effects of a universal basic income (Bastagli 2020). If the tribunes had the competence and the means to launch experiments on social and political reform measures that they think could form part of effective political responses to the grievances that they discuss, they would be able to actually test their ideas in practice. By showing possibilities of living differently, rather than just recommending them, the tribunate would contribute to a dispersal of ideological power in the sense that practices that the experiments invent might broaden the range of options for change that are perceived as feasible in the context at hand. In addition, the tribunate would also create new conditions for subsequent political debates about their proposals for social and political change. Consider a situation where the tribunate uses its agenda-setting competence, which we discussed in the previous section, to demand a parliamentary debate on a particular proposal for change that it has previously tested in an experiment. It will be much more difficult for parliamentarians to simply dismiss that proposal as unrealistic or even harmful if insights gained through the experiment demonstrate that such negative assessments have no reliable basis.

The Internal Procedures of the Tribunate

In terms of the internal procedures of the tribunate, a central question is how the interactions should be organized to facilitate communication among the participants in order to enable them to work jointly on the outlined tasks. Although we cannot deliver blue-print models, we at least want to indicate what conducive procedural tools could look like. It is crucial to consider that the group of people that the tribunate would bring together is likely highly diverse in experiences and views.

Before we turn to the procedural tools that might be suitable to deal with this challenge, we want to highlight that it would be overly pessimistic to assume that its internal diversity would prevent the tribunate from operating successfully. Empirical research on the effects of deliberation in forums set up for citizen participation shows that face-to-face communication often has the effect that people abandon their negative perceptions of others and sometimes even create a shared identity (Knobloch and Gastil 2015). Such effects of face-to-face communication can be observed even in forums that are composed of people with opposing views on fundamental moral questions (Goi 2005). The forums examined in such studies differ substantially from the tribunate in terms of composition and tasks, but there is no obvious reason why the experience of a direct interchange with people who have views different from one’s own should not have similar effects on the participants of the tribunate. Furthermore, the tribunes have a unique incentive to work across their differences—namely the chance to actually make a difference to how politics is done. In contrast to traditional mini-publics, which usually only have advisory tasks, the tasks that we outlined would endow the tribunate with the power to intervene in political debates and decision-making. The prospect of being able to use that power might encourage tribunes to search for a common ground among themselves. Putting in place suitable internal procedures will make it more likely that the design of the tribunate contributes to facilitating such communication across divisions.

Especially in the beginning, when the tribunes face the task of exploring the various views and experiences that they bring to the procedure, storytelling might be a useful tool. Storytelling is a potentially productive mode of deliberation, where parties face the challenge of making their experiences accessible for others (Young 2002). The tribunes could be asked to give accounts of what they view as deficits in the status quo and what, if anything, makes them feel disadvantaged or oppressed. In such a procedure, they may identify similarities or even overlaps between their views and experiences. Most importantly, the very process of sharing experiences of disadvantage or oppression, including the emotional aspects of it, may foster a sense of commonality among tribunes even if they identify meaningful differences between their stories. After all, what participants of the collective storytelling procedure may discover is that they share the political identity of the non-elite, suffering from concentrations of power embodied in the status quo.

At later stages of the procedure, when the tribunes must agree on courses of action to realize their agenda-setting or creative task, storytelling does not suffice. What is needed are modes of deliberation and negotiation that enable the tribunes to settle on topics or policy proposals that they want to place on the parliamentary agenda or determine experiments with social innovations that they want to implement. What the best procedural means is for achieving this goal, probably depends on the context and factors such as the nature of disagreements at stake and the scope of commonalities already discovered. However, what seems certain is that the portfolio of procedural tools available to the tribunes would be too thin if it only included the search for consensus or decision-making through majority vote. Given the expected diversity of views and experiences, consensus is likely to be out of reach, at least in many situations. Majority vote, on the other hand, might cause frustration among the losing parties and cause divisions among the tribunes. Such divisions would render it less likely that the sort of collective activities are undertaken that would be needed to feed tensions between the non-elite and the holders of concentrated power into the political process.

For these reasons, compromise-oriented procedures might be particularly valuable for the practical functioning of the tribunate. Compromises can come in very different forms, but their central feature is that they result from mutual concession-making and thus embody arrangements that realize all of the involved views to some extent (see, e.g., Bellamy and Hollis 1999, 65–67; Weinstock 2013, 539). By negotiating compromises, the tribunes could already gain experience in what it takes to act collectively to challenge concentrations of power, even if they do not agree on what the most relevant expression of concentrated power in society is. In addition, allowing the tribunes to select multiple items for the agenda-setting task, instead of requiring them to determine one topic or policy proposal, would significantly increase the chances for addressing this task through compromise—one group of tribunes might agree to place an item on the list that they do not consider essential if the other group agrees to add an item that they find essential.

While the internal procedures of the tribunate seem to share features of the internal procedures of deliberative mini-publics, it is important to be clear about the differences. In general, deliberative mini-publics are organized to facilitate “high quality deliberation” (Smith and Setälä 2018, 300). Participants are provided with information on the topic at stake and expected to engage in inclusive and fair argumentative processes, in which everyone justifies their views to the others and the group as a whole seeks “reflective and deliberative political problem-solving” (Smith and Setälä 2018, 303). An orientation toward storytelling and compromise, which we suggest may be crucial for the internal procedures of the tribunate, does not square easily with these goals. While storytelling can render individual perspectives and experiences accessible to others, it lacks the mode of justification that is so central to the procedures of deliberative mini-publics. And compromise is more or less absent from the literature on deliberative mini-publics. This absence is unsurprising because where parties compromise with each other, they accept their disagreement and treat each other as providers and recipients of concessions. In deliberative mini-publics, however, participants are supposed to act as reason-givers and be open to change their views in the light of reasonable arguments or justifications. In brief, the procedures of deliberative mini-publics are designed to enable, at least in principle, the identification of generalizable views, whereas the tribunate needs procedures that enable the tribunes to form a partial—that is, non-elite—political identity on the basis of which they can act collectively along the heuristic, disruptive, and creative tasks. Therefore, storytelling and compromise appear insufficient or even problematic if assessed on the basis of the procedural goals commonly associated with deliberative mini-publics. To the extent that they are conducive to the determination of commonalities under conditions of heterogeneity and disagreement, they are highly suitable orientations for the internal procedures of the tribunate.

Insights for the Debate on Democratic Innovations and Realist Democratic Theory

We want to end the article by highlighting how the proposed reinvention of the tribunate offers new impulses to both the debate on democratic innovations and the debate on realism in normative political theory. Our proposal that we have developed in the spirit of realist political thought shows that realism can be more than a critique of moralism or a framework for reconsidering methodological approaches in normative political theory. Our argument for the reinvented tribunate demonstrates that realism can be a mode of substantive political analysis.

We argued that theorists of democratic institutional innovations should look beyond the much-discussed means of deliberative mini-publics to respond to some of the most urgent challenges facing contemporary democracies, such as increasing concentrations of power. More specifically, our argument for the reinvented tribunate shows that such a response requires institutional innovations that enable transformations of the “conflict bias” (Schattschneider 1975). It is by creating an institutional context focused on articulating the experiences and views of non-elites that the tribunate might transform the conflict bias of the status quo and open unforeseen possibilities for addressing and transforming concentrations of power.

In terms of theorizing democracy, the reinvented tribunate would not mainly aim to repair the insufficient implementation of key liberal democratic concepts like representativeness or to supplement the existing set of representative institutions in contemporary democracies—for example, by limiting itself to the provision of well-considered advice. Rather, its goals distinguish the tribunate from ideas that are central to a liberal understanding of representation, such as legitimation by mandate and universal equal representation through lawmaking. The reinvented tribunate’s focus on concentrated power connects the theorizing of democratic institutional innovation to the task of articulating lines of conflict in democracies under the shadow of oligarchy and thus makes space in the political process for institutionalizing conflict between non-elites and holders of concentrated power in a novel way.

This focus makes the reinvented tribunate of particular interest to those who seek to theorize democracy in a realist vein. Although realism in political theory is a heterogeneous movement (Rossi and Sleat 2014), it can be characterized by a set of shared minimal positive and negative commitments. The positive commitments are to viewing politics as about power relations, and thus as always at least potentially conflictual, and to analyzing such relations of power in context. The concomitant negative commitments are to avoiding idealization and moralization. Our interpretation of the tribunate would spell out one way of developing the negative and positive commitments of realism into a realist democratic theory.

In terms of the negative commitment, the design of the tribunate breaks with the idealization of citizen equality and the moralization of cleavages. More specifically, the heuristic task of the tribunate avoids idealization and moralization, precisely because it aims at articulating lines of conflict through political contestation rather than moral judgments. The tasks of the tribunate connect to pragmatist conceptions of democracy, which also eschew a moral justification of democracy in favor of stressing the superior conflict management of democratic decision-making (e.g., Bagg 2018; Knight and Johnson 2011). In as far as we conceive of the tribunate as an institutional innovation tasked with enabling societies to address the conflicts that threaten to drive them apart, it could serve as a catalyst for a realist understanding of democracy as primarily a political value, tied to managing conflicts and creating broadly accepted forms of political order, rather than realizing moral ideals (Hall and Sleat 2017; Jubb and Rossi 2015a, 2015b).

In terms of the positive commitment of realism, the heuristic and disruptive tasks of the tribunate especially require focus on the diagnosis of power relations, which is at the heart of realist political theory. The tribunate would thus be especially suited to contribute to a diagnosis of power relations, both through the articulation of lines of conflict and through targeting disruptive measures. In brief, the tribunate’s emphasis on the articulation of lines of conflict, the disruption of concentration of power and oligarchic politics, and the ability to experiment with alternatives all contribute to a view in which “democracy’s distinctiveness is its ability to diffuse power, rather than its instantiation of some moral ideal” (Rossi 2017, 418).

The upshot of our argument for translating realist political theory into a realist theory of democracy is twofold. First, our reinvention of the tribunate exemplifies how to make institutions tasked with the diffusion or dispersion of power and the managing of conflict, rather than the transition from conflict to consensus, central to theorizing democracy. In this regard, it connects to the growing literature seeking to adjust democratic theory in a realistic, but not pessimistic, way to the threat of oligarchic power (Arlen 2019, 2022; Bagg 2022; Green 2016; Rahman 2017). Second, our reinvention of the tribunate sketches the benefits of an understanding of democracy, which is at the same time more minimal and more expansive than liberal democracy. It is the mixture of being more minimal in the sense of focusing on the dispersion of power—and not prioritizing moral ideals—and being more expansive in terms of considering socioeconomic relations or economies of recognition, as part of the potentially problematic concentrations of power that would enable the transformation of currently prevalent “conflict bias” in liberal democracies.

Although our argument reflects key premises of realist political thought and demonstrates the underexploited capacity of realism to inform substantive political analysis, we do not think that our case for the reinvented tribunate is of interest to self-declared realists only. On the contrary, we believe that democratic theorists of different backgrounds might have reason to view our proposal as worthy of consideration. For example, theorists of democratic innovations who are dissatisfied with the often-criticized toothlessness of deliberative mini-publics (Harris 2019, 53; Smith 2009, 93) may find the set of political competences that we ascribe to the tribunate stimulating. A tribunate endowed with competences serving its heuristic, disruptive, and creative tasks would eliminate possibilities for governments to simply cherry pick between the recommendations made by the tribunes. In addition, democratic theorists who emphasize the importance of conflict, power (dispersion), and contestation in politics might be able to relate to our proposal. For example, McCormick (2001, 2011), Vergara (2020a, 2020b), and Hamilton (2014) have already shown that institutions like the plebeian tribunate, which seek to disperse concentrated power, resonate with republican political thought. A second group of theorists for whom our proposal might be relevant are agonists. Because agonism views conflicts as ineradicable and potentially conducive to democracy (Mouffe 2000), and agonistic institutions seek to increase the visibility of disagreement and conflict (e.g., Paxton 2020; Westphal 2019), our proposal could be interesting for agonists as well.

These exemplary connections showcase a benefit of employing realism as a mode of substantive analysis: it leads to arguments and proposals that others can engage with, critically or affirmatively, independently of their membership with the realist family in normative political theory and thus expands the group of those who might find these arguments interesting beyond self-declared realists.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We presented drafts of this article at a Political Theory Workshop at the University of Amsterdam in September 2021; at the Democracy Cluster of the PCE Research Programme at Maastricht University in April 2022; at the Political Theory Colloquium at the University of Münster in June 2022; at MANCEPT in September 2022; at a conference on political realism at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2023; and at the “New Directions in Democratic Theory” Workshop of the OZSW at Utrecht University in June 2023. We would like to thank all participants for their immensely helpful comments. Special thanks are owed to Enzo Rossi, Uğur Aytaҫ, Paul Raekstad, and Hans Sluga for detailed written comments. Last, but not least, we thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their insightful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The original drafting of this work was supported by a research fellowship (WE 6812/1-1) from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The revision process was supported by the research project “Cultures of Compromise,” which is receiving funding from the program “Profilbildung 2020,” an initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The sole responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the authors.

ORCID iDs

Janosch Prinz

Manon Westphal

1.

The emphasis on the break between rulers and the ruled offers an unusual take on differentiated citizenship, not based on (ascriptive) group identity (see ).

2.

McCormick’s (2011) interpretation of Machiavelli’s constitutional proposals (chapter 7) would allow for a broader reading of the agenda-setting task of the tribunate, which he later linked to the ancient Athenian Boule assembly (, 42–45). However, the possible details of such a broader reading are not spelled out.

3.

Vergara, too, claims to embrace random selection for her institutional reform proposal, which contains a tribunate. However, she retains an exclusion criterion. She asserts that the criterion that separates the modern plebs from elites is holding office (, 243–45). We abandon any exclusion criterion in order to make the uncertainty about the lines of conflict in a society a key element of non-elite political identity formation in a tribunate. However, given that the number of office holders is small compared to that of non-office holders, the likelihood that a tribunate will include a significant number of office holders is low even in the absence of a formal exclusion criterion.

4.

A concern might be that pure random selection is difficult to achieve as long as participation is not mandatory: if selected persons can decide whether to accept the invitation to participate in the tribunate, those who belong to the worst-off groups in society may likely not respond. We recognize this problem. A more detailed description of the tribunate would have to include elements that address this concern. For example, tribunes should receive a generous salary comparable to that of members of parliament. Such a salary may be an incentive for less well-off people in particular to perform the role of a tribune.

5.

We want to be clear that we do not argue that pure random selection is the generally superior selection method for democratic institutions. In line with the understanding of a “‘new’ mixed regime” (, 408–10), we believe that different selection methods can be suitable for different types of institutions. For example, we neither question the usefulness of electoral procedures for legislative institutions nor argue that stratified samplings are inadequate for any sort of democratic innovation. Instead, we argue that a plebeian institution, which should be one element of a democratic mixed regime, will be best equipped to contribute to the dispersion of concentrated power in contemporary societies if it is composed through pure random selection rather than random selection based on samplings determined by income/wealth-based class criteria.

6.

The tribunes could draw on their own research service to further investigate their grievances, discussed later in the article.

7.

This process could, for example, find expression in the struggles in the tribunate over composing an agenda to send to the regular chambers of parliament, which we discuss in the next section.

Author Biographies

Janosch Prinz is assistant professor of social and political philosophy at Maastricht University. His research is located at the intersection between normative and empirical forms of inquiry. He aims to bridge methodological and disciplinary divides between normative-analytical, critical-reflective, and interpretive political thought. His articles on realism in political theory, methodology in political theory, and democratic legitimacy have recently appeared in Constellations, Journal of Social Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, and CRISPP.

Manon Westphal is a postdoctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary research project “Cultures of Compromise” at the University of Münster. She works on democratic theory, agonism, and political realism. Her research focuses on challenges related to pluralism, disagreement, conflict management, and questions of institutional design. Her research has recently been published in CRISPP, Social Theory and Practice, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Res Publica.

References

Achen

Christopher H.

Bartels

Larry M.

2016. Democracy for Realists. Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Adkins

Lisa

Cooper

Melinda

Konings

Martijn

. 2020. The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity.

Arlen

Gordon

. 2019. “Aristotle and the Problem of Oligarchic Harm: Insights for Democracy.” European Journal of Political Theory 18 (3): 393–414.

Arlen

Gordon

. 2022. “Citizen Tax Juries: Democratizing Tax Enforcement after the Panama Papers.” Political Theory 50 (2): 193–220.

Arlen

Gordon

Rossi

Enzo

. 2021. “Must Realists Be Pessimists About Democracy? Responding to Epistemic and Oligarchic Challenges.” Moral Philosophy and Politics 8 (1): 27–49. doi:10.1515/mopp-2019-0060.

Azmanova

Albena

. 2020. Capitalism on Edge. How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Bagg

Samuel

. 2018. “The Power of the Multitude: Answering Epistemic Challenges to Democracy.” American Political Science Review 112 (4): 891–904.

Bagg

Samuel

. 2022. “Do We Need an Anti-Oligarchic Constitution?” European Journal of Political Theory 21 (2): 399–411. doi:10.1177/1474885121996281.

Bastagli

Francesca

. 2020. “Universal Basic Income and Work.“ In Exploring Universal Basic Income: A Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence, and Practices, edited by Gentilini

Ugo

Grosh

Margaret

Rigolini

Jamele

Yemtsov

Ruslan

, 99–122. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

10.

Bellamy

Richard

Hollis

Martin

. 1999. “Consensus, Neutrality and Compromise.” In Pluralism and Liberal Neutrality, edited by Bellamy

Richard

Hollis

Martin

, 54–78. Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge.

11.

Burgoon

Brian

Noort

Sam van

Rooduijn

Matthijs

Underhill

Geoffrey

. 2019. “Positional Deprivation and Support for Radical Right and Radical Left Parties.” Economic Policy 34 (97): 49–93.

12.

Celikates

Robin

. 2018. Critique as Social Practice. Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

13.

Cohen

Jean

. 2019. “Populism and the Politics of Resentment.” Jus Cogens 1: 5–39.

14.

Crouch

Colin

. 2004. Post-Democracy. Malden, MA: Polity.

15.

DeLuca

Kevin

. 1999. “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 32 (4): 334–48.

16.

Disch

Lisa Jane

. 2021. Making Constituencies. Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.

17.

Frega

Robert

. 2020. “Democracy and the Limits of Political Realism.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (4): 468–94.

18.

Galston

William A.

2010. “Realism in Political Theory.” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (4): 385–411.

19.

Gilens

Martin

. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

20.

Gilens

Martin

Page

Benjamin I.

2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 564–81.

21.

Goi

Simona

. 2005. “Agonism, Deliberation, and the Politics of Abortion.” Polity 37 (1): 54–81.

22.

Green

Jeffrey

. 2016. The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

23.

Kimmo

Grönlund

Bächtiger

André

Setälä

Maija

, eds. 2014. Deliberative Mini-Publics. Involving Citizens in the Democratic Process. Colchester: ECPR Press.

24.

Grzymala-Busse

Anna

. 2019. “The Failure of Europe’s Mainstream Parties.” Journal of Democracy 30 (4): 35–47.

25.

Hacker

Jacob S.

Pierson

Paul

. 2010. “Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States.” Politics and Society 38 (2): 152–204.

26.

Halikiopoulou

Daphne

Vasilopoulou

Sofia

. 2016. “Breaching the Social Contract: Crises of Democratic Representation and Patterns of Extreme Right Party Support.” Government and Opposition 53 (1): 26–50.

27.

Hall

Edward

. 2020. Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Hall

Edward

Sleat

Matt

. 2017. “Ethics, Morality and the Case for Realist Political Theory.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 278–95. doi:10.1080/13698230.2017.1293343.

29.

Hamilton

Lawrence

. 2014. Freedom is Power: Liberty through Political Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

30.

Harris

Clodagh

. 2019. “Mini-Publics: Design Choices and Legitimacy.” In Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance, edited by Elstub

Stephen

Escobar

Oliver

, 45–59. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.

31.

Hernández

Enrique

Kriesi

Hanspeter

. 2016. “The Electoral Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe.” European Journal of Political Research 55 (2): 203–24.

32.

Horton

John

. 2017. “What Might it Mean for Political Theory to Be More ‘Realistic’?” Philosophia 45: 487–501.

33.

Jörke

Dirk

. 2016. “Political Participation, Social Inequalities, and Special Veto Powers.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (3): 320–38. doi:10.1080/13698230.2016.1144857.

34.

Jubb

Robert

Rossi

Enzo

. 2015a. “Political Norms and Moral Values.” Journal of Philosophical Research 40: 455–458.

35.

Jubb

Robert

Rossi

Enzo

. 2015b. “Why Moralists Should be Afraid of Political Values.” Journal of Philosophical Research 40: 465–468.

36.

Kaufmann

Eric

. 2016. “It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid: Brexit as a Story of Personal Values.” LSE British Politics and Policy. Bllogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/personal-values-brexit-vote/.

37.

Klein

Steven

. 2022. “Democracy Requires Organized Collective Power.” Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (1): 26–47.

38.

Knight

Jack

Johnson

James

. 2011. The Priority of Democracy. Political Consequences of Pragmatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

39.

Knobloch

Katherine R.

Gastil

John

. 2015. “Civic (Re)socialisation: The Educative Effects of Deliberative Participation.” Politics 35 (2): 183–200.

40.

Landemore

Hélène

. 2020. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

41.

Lipset

Seymour Martin

Rokkan

Stein

. 1967. “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction.” In Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives Seymour, edited by Lipset

Martin

Rokkan

Stein

, 1–64. New York, NY: Free Press.

42.

Lukes

Steven

. 2005. Power. A Radical View (Second Edition). London: Palgrave.

43.

Mair

Peter

. 2013. Ruling the Void. The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy. London: Verso.

44.

McCormick

John

. 2001. “Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites With Ferocious Populism.” American Political Science Review 95 (2): 297–314.

45.

McCormick

John

. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

46.

McCormick

John

. 2023. Machiavelli und der populistische Schmerzensschrei. Berlin, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag.

47.

McQueen

Alison

. 2017. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

48.

Medearis

John

. 2015. Why Democracy is Oppositional. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

49.

Moffitt

Benjamin

. 2017. “Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern Europe.” Politics and Governance 5 (4): 112–22.

50.

Mouffe

Chantal

. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London and New York, NY: Verso.

51.

Norris

Pippa

Inglehart

Ronald

. 2019. Cultural Backlash. Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Paxton

Marie

. 2020. Agonistic Democracy. Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times. New York, NY: Routledge.

53.

Peters

Yvette

Ensink

Sander J.

2015. “Differential Responsiveness in Europe: The Effects of Preference Difference and Electoral Participation.” West European Politics 38 (3): 577–600.

54.

Piketty

Thomas

. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

55.

Prinz

Janosch

Rossi

Enzo

. 2017. “Realism as Ideology Critique.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (3): 348–65.

56.

Raekstad

Paul

Gradin

Sofa Saio

. 2020. Prefigurative Politics. Building Tomorrow Today. Cambridge: Polity.

57.

Rahman

Sabeel K.

2017. Democracy against Domination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

58.

Reckwitz

Andreas

. 2020. The Society of Singularities. Cambridge and Medford, OR: Polity.

59.

Rossi

Enzo

. 2017. “Stanley on Ideology, or How to De-Moralise Democracy.” Global Discourse 7 (2–3): 414–19. doi:10.1080/23269995.2017.1285629.

60.

Rossi

Enzo

. 2019. “Being realistic and demanding the impossible.” Constellations 26 (4): 638–52.

61.

Rossi

Enzo

Sleat

Matt

. 2014. “Realism in Normative Political Theory.” Philosophy Compass 9 (10): 689–701.

62.

Sabl

Andrew

. 2015. “The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide.” Perspectives on Politics 13 (2): 345–56.

63.

Saward

Michael

. 2006. “The Representative Claim.” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (3): 297–318.

64.

Schäfer

Armin

. 2012. “Consequences of Social Inequality for Democracy in Western Europe.” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 6 (2): 23–45.

65.

Schäfer

Armin

Zürn

Michael

. 2021. Die demokratische Regression. Berlin, Germany: Suhrkamp.

66.

Schakel

Wouter

. 2021. “Unequal Policy Responsiveness in the Netherlands.” Socio-Economic Review 19 (1): 37–57.

67.

Schattschneider

Elmer Eric

. 1975. The Semisovereign People. A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York, NY: Wadsworth.

68.

Matt

Sleat

, ed. 2018. Politics Recovered. Realist Thought in Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

69.

Smith

Graham

. 2009. Democratic Innovations. Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

70.

Smith

Graham

Owen

David

. 2011. “Machiavellian Democratic Innovations: McCormick’s People’s Tribunate.” The Good Society 20 (2): 203–15.

71.

Smith

Graham

Setälä

Maija

. 2018. “Mini-Publics and Deliberative Democracy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, edited by Bächtiger

André

Dryzek

John S.

Mansbridge

Jane

Warren

Mark

, 300–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

72.

Urbinati

Nadia

. 2011. “Republicanism: Democratic or Popular.” The Good Society 20 (2): 157–69.

73.

Vergara

Camila

. 2020a. “Populism as Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment.” Journal of Political Philosophy 28 (2): 222–46. doi:10.1111/jo12203.

74.

Vergara

Camila

. 2020b. Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

75.

Weinstock

Daniel

. 2013. “On the Possibility of Principled Moral Compromise.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 16 (4): 537–56.

76.

Westphal

Manon

. 2019. “Overcoming the Institutional Deficit of Agonistic Democracy.” Res Publica 25 (2): 187–210.

77.

Westphal

Manon

Willems

Ulrich

. 2023. “Doing Realist Political Theory: Introduction.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (3): 319–34.

78.

Winters

Jeffrey A.

2011. Oligarchy. Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

79.

Winters

Jeffrey A.

2017. “Wealth Defense and the Complicity of Liberal Democracy.” Nomos 58: 158–225.

80.

Yılmaz

Ferruh

. 2012. “Right-Wing Hegemony and Immigration: How the Populist Far-Right Achieved Hegemony through the Immigration Debate in Europe.” Current Sociology 60 (3): 368–81.

81.

Young

Iris Marion

. 1989. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics 99 (2): 250–74.

82.

Young

Iris Marion

. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Tribunate as a Realist Democratic Innovation

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

“Populist” Discontents and the Need for Contestation

The Plebeian Tribunate Model as a Democratic Innovation

Reinventing the Tribunate: Representation and Selection

Reinventing the Tribunate: Political Tasks

The Heuristic Task: Publicly Articulating Lines of Conflict (and Steering Them into Political Processes)

The Disruptive Task: Countering Concentrated Power

The Creative Task: Approximating Solutions to Conflicts Through Experimentation

The Internal Procedures of the Tribunate

Insights for the Debate on Democratic Innovations and Realist Democratic Theory

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Author Biographies

References