July 2, 1964 file photo, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House in Washington. The Democratic Study Group played a crucial role in securing the legislation.
Despite all the talk of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘will of the people’, perhaps the most striking feature of Britain’s fevered debates about Brexit is an absence of any real questioning of the meaning of democracy itself. Engagement with the idea of democracy is typically cut short by framing our politics in terms of a tension between ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’, or even more starkly between ‘populism’ and ‘technocracy’, whereby a politics of rights to be exercised against government is set against a politics of popular sovereignty, or, in Barnett’s formulation, rights and regulation appear as a ‘fourth branch of government’.
But this might be a false dichotomy. If ‘democracy’ is set against ‘liberalism’, what are we to do with (among other things) the ‘right to know’? It is clearly a right to be exercised against government, and thus seems obviously ‘liberal’. But it is also typically identified as democratic, and supports the democratic goods of accessibility of information, participation, and association. If there is a problem here, it is a problem at the level of contested conceptions of democracy.
