Post-electoral democracy : a proposal for expanded political subjectivity

Abstract

In an interdependent world, this sensation that not everyone who should be here is here, that our constituencies should be completed with other criteria of inclusion, that there may be some who have been illegitimately excluded from our group points to a triple inclusion―spatial, temporal and natural―that we should undertake: the inclusion of our neighbors, of our descendants and of the environment. None of these three “votes” enough. One of the principal challenges of contemporary democracies is how to reintroduce these subjects in our systems of representation and decision-making. If this hypothesis is correct, then we have a true democratic deficit and the habitual question about whether democracy is possible beyond the national state should be reformulated to ask instead whether democracy is possible without including those who are outside the national state, or more concretely, whether we can continue calling a political system a democracy if it does not internalize the interests of its contemporaries, does not anticipate the rights of future generations or does not recognize in some way the political subjectivity of nature.