In the above post I tried to summarise Canovan's arguments without analysing them, but the content of chapter 5 is clearly important in any discussion of populism.
Before analysing Canovan's arguments with respect to populism, there's a number of points on which I would criticise Canovan generally. As I've said before while I can understand her deliberate intention to limit the discussion of the people with the liberal democratic framework I think it ends up creating issues. For instance, towards the end of the discussion on whether popular sovereignty can be understood Canovan states.
Either the people are simply an aggregation of individuals with no capacity for collective sovereignty, or else they form a corporate body that can exist and act as other corporate bodies do. In the latter case, they are 'the people' only as members of the whole, not as individuals; there is no way in which they as 'the people' can hang to either their individuality or to their reserve authority. As 'the people', the individuals are subsumed within the corporate whole, and the whole including the individuals is subsumed within the acts of the representatives of the whole
However, as Canovan points out in the very next paragraph
And yet, inescapable as [the arguments above] may seem, they are at odds with political experience.
...the imagined sovereign people as is emerged momentously .... stubbornly continued to be collective and individual, present and in reserve.
I certainly agree with the second paragraph but the first paragraph only stands if you limit yourself to a relatively narrow sphere of political thought. Any communist and/or anarchist would immediately point out that the individual is
not subsumed by society but in actual fact an individual is only able to fully become an individual as part of a society, thus the supposed contradiction traced does not exist and hence there is no conflict with political experience.
The examples Canovan uses to evidence the emergence of popular sovereignty in practice are revealing. There is no mention of the Russian revolution, the Paris Commune or the Spanish Revolution.
This limitation to liberalism also effects the discussion of the second question. Direct democracy is pretty much relegated to holding referenda, so the conclusions Canovan draws are hard to argue against. But even within the liberal democratic framework direct democracy is much richer than referenda, what about the early union movement, what about co-operatives or in more modern times initiatives such as the open source movement.
Interestingly, while Canovan notes a number of (perfectly correct) reasons why referenda are flawed as measures of government by the people, she does not mention the fact that the result of most referenda need to be carried out by a representative government, so even if the referenda did represent an exercising of popular sovereignty the practical measures taken by representatives may/would not do so. Canovan is correct that 'direct democracy' can only be partially identified (at best) with the exercising of popular sovereignty in liberal democracies, but that is because in liberal democracies 'direct democracy' can only be partial! Similar comments apply to the discussion of deliberative democracy (the forms of which Canovan outlines any communist would say forms a crucial aspect of direct democracy). Fundamentally by accepting the liberal separation of politics and economics the discussion of how popular sovereignty can be exercised in practice with democratic structures is limited.
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However, with regard to an analysis of populism - and particularly the modern populism we are seeing in liberal democracies - Canovan's arguments provide more understanding and the limitations are less evident (or at least hidden). I'd certainly not disagree with the contention that referenda in modern democracies often do not provide an exercising of popular sovereignty, despite the fact that they have been involved by populists as such.
Canovan's thesis also clarifies why populism is inescapable within liberal democracy. liberal democracy invokes the agency of the people as one of its foundations, yet (despite the contentions of Habermas and the like) it deliberately wants to push any exercising of popular sovereignty to a relatively minor sphere of politics, as such those that demand a greater role for
the people are able to attack liberalism at its foundations.