Dissensus over liberal democracy: concept-building and typology

Abstract Democracy and liberal democracy, in particular, are at a turning point and the European Union constitutes a fertile ground to study this phenomenon. Although there have been many studies on the crises of democracy, this article aims to make a contribution by concentrating on the nature of the dissensus over liberal democracy. While there is a broad academic consensus that dissensus is “the essence of politics” (Rancière, 2010), it has been rarely studied per se. This is precisely the ambition of this article: to understand the growing dissensus over liberal democracy, or put differently, the lack of consensus over liberal democracy. This article proposes an empirical definition of dissensus supported by a typology of ideal types. The article is organised as follows: Section 2 depicts the phenomenon under consideration and questions whether dissensus can be studied through the lenses of well-established concepts in political science, namely opposition and contestation. Section 3 proposes an empirical definition of dissensus as well as a typology, both coined to enable researchers to understand how the nature of the conflict over liberal democracy and the heterogeneity of actors’ goals can lead to four types of dissensus: mild, constructive, disruptive and destructive. These four ideal-types are then explained and illustrated by concrete examples in references to the principles of liberal democracy and its practice.