This article discusses critically the consensus-based account of peoplehood, inherited from Hobbes and Rousseau, whose central tenet is that scattered individuals coalesce into a people when subjected to a single will. It claims that, because this account of peoplehood is indexed on unity, it is difficult to reconcile with a democratic perspective. The article contends that Rancière’s dissensus-based account of peoplehood—according to which the people is constituted through the staging of its internal division—is more in line with democratic expectations. To further buttress this claim, it addresses a recurrent critique: since dissensus is episodic, it would prove unable to provide a people with a sustained democratic agency. It turns to Lea Ypi and Jonathan White’s discussion of partisanship practices and presents them as a possible institutionalization of dissensus. The article’s second section showcases the relevance of the dissensus-based account of peoplehood by applying it to the claim that the lack of support for the European Union is due to the absence of a European people. It argues that the dissensus-based account of peoplehood breaks the current conceptual deadlock regarding whether (or not) the European Union can rely on a European people by shifting the critical focus on the lack of venues and mechanisms to express dissent within the EU.

This article examines the links between legitimacy, politicisation and the rise of political dissensus in the context of the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). In particular, it assesses democratic, technocratic and procedural legitimacy against the vertical, inter-level relations between EU institutions and national authorities in the elaboration of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), with a particular focus on the case of Italy. The article shows that the implementation of the RRF tends to centralise powers in national executives and their technical-administrative structures to the detriment of national legislatures. This gives rise to a “legitimacy disequilibrium” in the implementation of the RRF characterised by a strong technocratic and a weak democratic legitimacy. Challenging the coordinative Europeanisation literature, the article thus argues that the implementation of the RRF is potentially subject to dynamics of politicisation. As a matter of fact, the observed legitimacy disequilibrium resulting from the implementation of the RRF is open to politicisation from party actors in the member states, thus assuming salience in national public debates. Finally, the article illustrates how the politicisation of NRRPs can become a factor in the wider process of political dissensus in the EU, involving contestation by different types of actors (EU institutions, member state governments and national parties), operating at different levels (EU and national), and with different aims.

Democracies in Europe fail to take adequate climate mitigation measures. In response, not only legal, but also illegal acts of climate protesters are multiplying in Europe. This paper examines the criminalisation of climate protests in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Against the overarching concept of dissensus to which this special issue is dedicated, this contribution reflects on the role of judges who deprive the disobedient from the opportunity to communicate about their motives. The paper pays particular attention to the case of David Nixon in the UK, in which the judge prohibited Mr. Nixon from sharing his motivation or mentioning climate change in the court room. This demeans civil disobedience to an ordinary criminal act and deprives democracy of its self-correcting potential.

Democracy and liberal democracy, in particular, are at a turning point and the European Union constitutes a fertile ground to study this phenomenon. Although there have been many studies on the crises of democracy, this article aims to make a contribution by concentrating on the nature of the dissensus over liberal democracy. While there is a broad academic consensus that dissensus is “the essence of politics” (Rancière, 2010), it has been rarely studied per se. This is precisely the ambition of this article: to understand the growing dissensus over liberal democracy, or put differently, the lack of consensus over liberal democracy. This article proposes an empirical definition of dissensus supported by a typology of ideal types. The article is organised as follows: Section 2 depicts the phenomenon under consideration and questions whether dissensus can be studied through the lenses of well-established concepts in political science, namely opposition and contestation. Section 3 proposes an empirical definition of dissensus as well as a typology, both coined to enable researchers to understand how the nature of the conflict over liberal democracy and the heterogeneity of actors’ goals can lead to four types of dissensus: mild, constructive, disruptive and destructive. These four ideal-types are then explained and illustrated by concrete examples in references to the principles of liberal democracy and its practice.

The article identifies four strategies that political actors use to constrain the space for dissensus on liberal democracy in hybrid regimes during legislative drafting. The composition of the legislative commissions in charge of drafting reforms reveals the strategy deployed by powerful actors to shape the political reforms in accordance with their preferences, while undermining democratic accountability mechanisms. The article illustrates the adaptation of these strategies of control of dissensus on liberal democracy depending on the goals of the actors involved and the different political systems in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova.

The deconstruction of the Constitution is an expression of extra-systemic dissensus directed against the current political order and strongly antagonising political actors within the state and in relations with the EU. In the article, we argue that the political changes in Poland do not herald a new type of constitutionalism, but rather constitute its deconstruction. The main actor subject to deconstruction is the Constitutional Tribunal (CT). Consequently, the deconstructed CT became an important instrument for further deconstruction of the Constitution, notably evident in the dispute over the primacy of the Constitution over European law. The deconstruction of the Constitution has its roots in the lack of sociological legitimacy of the Polish Constitution and its portrayal by certain right-wing political parties as failing to establish a level playing field in the political game.

Much has been written over the past decade about the rise and success of far-right parties as key actors of dissensus over liberal democracy. Less attention, however, has been devoted to similar transformations taking place within civil society. This article examines the role played by think tanks in Poland and Hungary in building a new illiberal field. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, we theorize four core functions performed by illiberal think tanks: mediating, building, disseminating, and legitimizing this emerging field. Using Twitter data, we analyze how these illiberal think tanks operate as crucial nodes in connecting national, European, and American intellectuals and actors. Through their work and accumulation of cultural and academic capital, they contribute to fostering dissensus over liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

This article examines the abiding “one China” contention between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan), focusing on their 2008–2016 cooperation and the ensuing political stalemate. It does so by investigating the PRC's and the ROC's respective legal frameworks and the positions of the major political actors, including the Chinese Communist Party and both Taiwan's Kuomintang and its Democratic Progressive Party. While the PRC maintains its “one-China principle,” and the ROC's legal system retains some “one China” elements, the idea of “one China” has been in flux in Taiwan. The traditional conceptualization of “one China” has been increasingly challenged in Taiwan's democratic era by the rise of a countervailing Taiwanese national identity and opposition to the PRC's insistent agenda to absorb the island. These dynamics are rapidly minimizing the appeal and political utility of any “one China” notions in China–Taiwan relations.

A predominant assumption in studies of deliberative democracy is that stakeholder engagements will lead to rational consensus and to a common discourse on corporate social and environmental responsibilities. Challenging this assumption, we show that conflict is ineradicable and important and that affects constitute the dynamics of change of the discourses of responsibilities. On the basis of an analysis of social media engagements in the context of the grand challenge of plastic pollution, we argue that civil society actors use mobilization strategies with their peers and inclusive-dissensus strategies with corporations to convert them to a new discourse. These strategies use moral affects to blame and shame corporations and solidarity affects to create feelings of identification with the group and to avoid disengagement and polarization. Our research contributes to the literature on deliberative democracy and stakeholder engagement in social media in the collective constructions of discourses on grand challenges.

This article argues that the concept of deliberation is construed too narrowly in political corporate social responsibility (CSR) and that a concept of deliberation for political CSR should err toward useful speech acts rather than reciprocity and charity. It draws from the political philosophy, labor relations, and business ethics literatures to outline a framework for an extended notion of deliberative engagement. The characters of deliberative behavior and deliberative environment are held to generate four modes of engagement: strategic deliberation, unitarist deliberation, pluralist deliberation, and deliberative activism. The article concludes by arguing that political CSR will be better positioned to realize its potential by moving away from primarily consensus-centered objectives to a more responsive range of deliberative goals and practice.