Description
In times of crisis, politicians often appeal to fear. Since we are moving worldwide from one (health, climate, migration, financial, economic and so on) crisis to another, fear tends to become an ever-present feature of contemporary political discourse. Politically speaking, it can be advantageous to invoke fear, because it may mobilize people and unite a social group by distancing it from other groups inside or outside society, deemed strange and dangerous (for instance, Muslims, asylum seekers or elites). At the same time, fear may be detrimental to democracy, since it can be very difficult to engage in a rational exchange of arguments when the political debate is dominated by highly emotive language. This raises the question if there is any room for appeals to fear and crisis in democratic political debates. In our chapter, we explore this question by looking at the political debate on the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. After having described the rhetorical means used by politicians to create an atmosphere of crisis and fear in society, we evaluate how these appeals to pathos, in particular fear, affect the democratic quality of the political debate. In our evaluation, we depart from two models of democracy: the model of deliberative democracy (Benhabib, Habermas and others) and the model of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe and Laclau). As a supplement to these opposing models, we advocate a rhetorical conception of democracy in which debate is encouraged and emotions play an important sustaining and supporting role.| Period | 28 Mar 2024 |
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| Event title | Representative Democracy in Crisis: Critical Narratives on Representative Democracy in Europe |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Sofia, BulgariaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |