Analysing legislative performance: a plebeian perspective

Legislative performance can be understood in terms of results (the quality of the laws enacted) or in terms of the literal performativity of legislators (the quality of their appearances on the public stage). This article examines two different ethical frameworks for evaluating legislative performance in this latter, performative sense: a deliberative model, which restricts just political performances to deliberative exchanges among citizens, and a plebeian model, which expands just political performances to include those where political and economic elites endure special burdens as a condition of their elevated status. Given certain drawbacks of the deliberative model and parallel advantages of the plebeian model, I endorse the plebeian approach to political performativity. The article concludes by elaborating one of the key contrasts between the two models with regard to political communication, namely the plebeian model's embrace of a distinct form of legislative disruption. Beyond the way deliberation itself disrupts non-communicative forms of power and beyond the way protests physically disrupt governmental processes, plebeianism invokes a third kind of disruption – non-deliberative speech – intended to rebuke and humble leaders rather than reach mutual understanding about issues. Keywords: plebeianismdemocracyperformativitydeliberative democracydisruptionnon-deliberative discourse Notes Valerius Maximus, 6.2.6, in Malcovati, Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta, 128.5,418. Hajer, Authoritative Governance, 8. Lasswell, Politics. Hajer refers to "a tradition in political science that takes seriously the role of language and dramaturgy, of discourse and settings. That literature is subtle but has somehow always remained peripheral in the discipline." Authoritative Governance, 12. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Closely related to the denigration of the spectacle as undemocratic is the assumption, nicely detailed and persuasively rejected by Manow, that "democracy has no imagery", that it dispenses with all matters of embodiment and performance. See Manow, In the King's Shadow, 9. Alexander, The Performance of Politics, esp. xii, 15; Pels, "Aesthetic Representation and Political Style," 57. Hajer, Authoritative Governance, 3–4; Hajer and Uitermark, "Performing Authority." Maynia recently has defended a notion of "performative democracy", involving mass events (like the tradition of Carnival analysed by Bakunin) where citizens "straighten their backs" – a somewhat vague formulation, but one which clearly indicates, as Maynia argues, episodic moments of rupture or resistance rather than ordinary occurrences in everyday democratic life. Performative Democracy, 4, 5. 9, 52. Indeed, for Edelman, such performativity often amounts to instances whereby democratic politicians produce only the false appearance of satisfying the needs of their constituents, achieving acquiescence from the public rather than their objective welfare. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle. Other studies which emphasize the importance of symbol and ritual to contemporary politics, without asserting the justice of such phenomena, include Merelman, "The Dramaturgy of Politics"; Gamson, Talking Politics; McLeod, "The Sociodrama of Presidential Politics"; and Hajer, Authoritative Governance, 54–6, 89–94, 181–4. For a recent account of this dominant approach, see Enns and Wleizen, Who Gets Represented? See, for example, Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin, eds., Democracy, Accountability, and Representation. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, 78, 223. On the conception of presidential democracies, see Linz and Valenzuela, The Failure of Presidential Democracy. In the United States, doctrines of legal immunity and executive privilege mostly prevent the interrogation of presidents while in office – and there is also precedent, set by President Truman, that ex-presidents cannot be called to testify. In 1953, now out of office, Truman refused to honour a Congressional subpoena that he testify regarding an investigation of espionage, declaring: The doctrine [of presidential confidentiality] would be shattered, and the President, contrary to our fundamental theory of constitutional government, would become a mere arm of the Legislative Branch of the government if he would feel during his term of office that his every act might be subject to official inquiry and possible distortion for political purposes. (Quoted in James Hamilton, The Power to Probe, 169) Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 5–14; Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form; Mansfield, "Modern and Medieval Representation," McLeod, "The Sociodrama of Presidential Politics," 363; Hajer, Authoritative Governance, 53–4; Green, The Eyes of the People, 32–63. To be clear, I understand democratic theories espousing results-based performance as including not only consequentalist approaches that claim that democratic procedures have moral force only to the extent they produce good results, but equally approaches that uphold the representation of the electorate's preferences as an intrinsic good. Both of these are results-based in the sense that they focus primarily on the enactment of laws and policies as the criterion of democratic justice rather than the performative appearance of leaders and events on the public stage. While there is nothing in principle preventing the agonal model from being performative, the most influential purveyors of this theory have emphasized epistemological aspects (like the lack of universalistic, rationalistic solutions to most political problems and, hence, the permanence of agonism in politics) and broad sociological implications (like the need for active mobilization, rather than the dispassionate search for consensus, as the proper mode of addressing most issues), instead of how concrete individual political performances should be conducted. See, for example, Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonostic Pluralism?" The question of what an agonistic mode of political performativity might consist in, beyond "a vibrant clash of democratic political positions," largely has gone unaddressed. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 104. For a partial exception, see Bickford, who advocates listening, among other qualities, as a specific performative trait required for an agonal – or "adversarial" –conception of democracy. Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, 16–19. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 306. Kahane, Weinstock, Leydet, and Williams, Deliberative Democracy in Practice; Warren and Pearse, Designing Deliberative Democracy; Goodin, Innovating Democracy; Ackerman and Fishkin, Deliberation Day. Bohman and Rehg, Deliberatve Democracy, ix; Fearon, "Deliberation and Discussion." For an en exception to this trend, see Pettit's argument for the restriction of certain deliberative contexts to experts and elites insulated from direct popular accountability: Pettit, "Depoliticizing Democracy." Gutmann and Thompson, "Deliberative Democracy Beyond Process"; Christiano, "The Significance of Public Deliberation." See Sanders, "Against Deliberation"; Green, The Eyes of the People, 58–60. Deliberative democracy's restricted notion of performativity stems in part from the restricted conception of the performative that comes from linguistics, especially Austin's notion of "performative utterances" as speech-acts that do not just describe reality but constitute mutually recognized identities and relations. See Austin, How To Do Things With Words. The normal assumption, hardly false, is that non-deliberative politics – shaped by spectacle, theatre, and constant opinion polling – is much more conducive to elite manipulation and abuse. See, for example, Ackerman and Fishkin, Deliberation Day, 18, 112, 199–200, 214, 217. But the inferiority of non-deliberative politics vis-à-vis deliberative politics ought not prevent normative analysis of relatively better and worse forms of non-deliberative politics, especially insofar as the full realization of deliberative norms is not possible. Beyond the clear privileging of the metaphor of sphere over stage in the voluminous literature on deliberative democracy, an explicit argument on behalf of this privileging can be found in Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 361; also see Seyla Benhabib, "Models of Public Space," 79, 95. Benhabib links stage-based models, like the theatrical politics of Hannah Arendt, to the vying for excellence, whereas a deliberative politics, occurring in the abstract public sphere, has as its primary purpose the legitimation of social norms. For attempts to pursue this third way, see Green, The Eyes of the People; Rousseau, often seen as a critic of the spectacular nature of politics, in fact discriminates between morally better and worse forms, preferring, for example, winter balls, civic festivals, and cercles to the commercial theater. See Kohn, "Homo Spectator," 468–471. To be sure, it is also true that deliberative democrats frequently defend deliberation for its participatory features, above and beyond deliberation's alleged capacity to legitimate laws and social norms. See, for example, Barber, Strong Democracy. Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy, 51. See Riker, Liberalism Against Populism; Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values. For an important critical response, see Mackie, Democracy Defended. It is indeed a remarkable feature of contemporary democratic politics that one of the most vital notions of popular empowerment – a government's representation of the electorate – remains open to profound debate among political scientists regarding the degree and direction of its occurrence. On the particular representational issue of whether and to what degree American politicians are responsive to public opinion, the debate probably has only widened in the last decades. See Burstein, "Public Opinion, Public Policy and Democracy." On the inevitable penetration of economic inequality into education, consider the admission of Rawls, normally considered a seminal defender of liberal education that aims to provide equally talented and motivated children the same prospects of success regardless of the socio-economic conditions of their birth: "The principle of fair opportunity can be only imperfectly carried out, at least as long as the institution of the family exists." Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 74. Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic, 73–94; Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 201–345; Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic, 94–121. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy advocates the revival of "plebeian republicanism" (147) which would enhance elite accountability beyond the usual focus on electoral mechanisms through the introduction of institutions – like tribunical political bodies and expanded political trials – that, in addition to protecting the "plebeians of modern republics" (150) from elite domination, would also clearly lead to greater public burdens placed on elites. Schumpeter's competitive–elitist model understands democratization as a process involving the subjection of leaders to "competitive struggle" rather than traditional democratic values. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 271, 290, 293. See note 32. On the contio as a "hierarchical communication situation" but one where elites were exposed to competition and critique, see Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic, 4, 9, 119, 127–8, 132, 165, 170–1. Millar, The Crowd in Rome, 14. As Millar explains, there is scholarly disagreement about the precise functioning of these trials. See Jones, The Criminal Courts of the Roman Republic and Principate, ch. 1, "Iudicia Populi." On the lex repetundarum, which mandated audits of higher magistrates by often lower-class judges, see Livy, History of Rome, xlii.221–22; Crawford, Roman Statutes, 65 (lines 8–9). See MacKendrick, The Athenian Aristocracy. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 110–15; Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 28, 115, 117, 128, 199–203, 215–17, 221, 224–34, 277, 280. See Forsdyke, Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy; Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution, 195. See note 11. On the Greek practice of thorubos (shouting down elite speakers), see Tacon, "Ecclesiastic 'Thorubos'." See Bauman, Political Trials in Ancient Greece. On the idea of this form of compensation, see Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 93, 118, 152. On this prohibition, see May, A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, 372: "The purpose of this rule is to maintain the cut and thrust of debate, which depends upon successive speakers meeting in their speeches to some extent the arguments of earlier speeches; debate is more than a series of set speeches prepared beforehand without reference to each other." On this difference, see Green, The Eyes of the People, 198. On the significance of retrospective investigative audits to the Roman and Athenian republics, see notes 11 and 38; on the practice of shouting down leaders, see notes 36 and 43. For a recent defense of these proposals, see McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy. Of course, deliberative democrats are not necessarily uncommitted to the norm of disruption, but I clarify what is particular to a distinctly plebeian notion of disruption in the fourth section. A plebeian, in the political-economic sense that emerged in the last century of the Republic, was a full citizen who was not part of any aristocratic group and, so, usually lacked high levels of wealth, power, and usually fame. To be sure, the older notion of plebeianism as an hereditary, almost ethnic category lived on (as certain offices, like the Tribunate, were restricted to members of traditional plebeian families, so that Clodius in 59 BCE had to renounce his patrician heritage and seek adoption from a plebeian family in order to attain the office), but plebeianism as I employ the term, and as the term came increasingly to be employed, refers to the multitude, i.e., the mass of ordinary citizens unelevated in status, wealth, or renown. On this rendering of plebeianism, both in the late Republic and early Empire, see Tacitus, Histories, 1.4.3; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.29–31; McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 31; Gelzer, The Roman Nobility, 21; Cicero, Ad Atticus, I.16; Horace, Epistles, II.186. On the restriction of the magistracies to the aristocratic classes, see Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 46; Millar, "The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic," 11, 18; Gelzer, The Roman Nobility, 127; Katz, Democracy and Elections, 14–18. On the non-deliberative quality of the legislative assemblies in which plebeians were restricted to yes–no votes, with effectively no capacity to set the agenda or engage in discussion, see Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies; Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome, 254–55. See note 50. Lijphart, "Unequal Participation: Democracy's Unresolved Dilemma." Verba, Nie, and Kim's landmark, cross-national study on economic equality and participation – with its central finding that "the political advantage of those citizens more advantaged in socioeconomic terms is found in all nations" – has hardly been refuted in the more than three decades since its publication. Verba, Nie, and Kim, Participation and Political Equality, 1. On the plutocratic elements of Scandinavian societies –including their high levels of wealth (as opposed to income) inequality, their reliance on indirect, regressive taxation, and their simple inability to generate a political and educational system that does not in some ways bias the wealthy – see Winters, Oligarchy, 278–80; Beramendi and Rueda, "Social Democracy Constrained," 627. I do not pursue here the plebeian emphasis on the economic burdens placed upon a society's richest citizens – which would serve not just fiscal purposes, but the acknowledgement and partial remediation of the inescapable elements of unfairness afflicting all liberal–democratic societies – but these too are important to plebeianism. On the burdensomeness of question time, consider the first President Bush's reflection on his not having to endure it: Interview on C-SPAN, 1991, available online (http://www.congress.org/news/2011/01/12/would_obama_take_questions). But see the all-too-brief, poorly named, White, "A Brief History of Heckling"; also see Herbst, Rude Democracy. Homer, Iliad, II.224–42. Weber, Ancient Judaism, 267–335. For examples of heckling and related forms of disruption within the contio, see Sallust, Jugurtha, 34.1; Cicero, De Haruspicum Responso, 8; ar. Resp. 8; Gran Licinian, 36.33 C. On the use of the contio as a venue to which a leading magistrate might summon a rival magistrate and engage in a kind of cross-examination, see Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power, 170–1; also see, 4, 119, 132, 165. As Morstein-Marx observes (127), "The right to shout in the contio could even be seen as the mark of freedom itself". Green, The Eyes of the People, 130, 162.