Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: Samuel Bagg’s “The Dispersion of Power”

July 22, 2024 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: Samuel Bagg’s “The Dispersion of Power”

Author Meets Critics: Samuel Bagg’s “The Dispersion of Power”

Friday, September 6, 10:00am – 11:30am
Author Meets Critics

Participants:
(Chair) Melissa A. Schwartzberg, New York University
(Presenter) Simone Chambers, University of California, Irvine
(Presenter) Lucia Rubinelli, Yale University
(Presenter) Samuel Moyn, Yale University
(Presenter) Eric Beerbohm, Harvard University
(Presenter) Samuel Ely Bagg, University of South Carolina

Session Description:
Samuel Bagg’s new book, “The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy” (Oxford, 2024), is a major contribution to democratic theory. The work characterizes resistance to state capture as the primary goal of electoral democracy, against dominant contemporary accounts, which tend to emphasize collective authorization. Specifically, Bagg’s concept of democracy centers on the dispersion of power and the fostering of healthy competition among groups. In his view, democracy aims to resist monopolies, to establish countervailing powers, and to redistribute resources. The book’s recommendations for institutional reforms to promote contestation nicely align with the conference theme, particularly with respect to the renovation and reimagination of democracy.

This author-meets-critics panel brings together leading scholars of democracy from a wide range of perspectives to respond to Bagg’s work: Eric Beerbohm (Professor of Government, Harvard), Simone Chambers (Professor of Political Science, University of California-Irvine), Samuel Moyn (Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence, Yale Law School), and Lucia Rubinelli (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale). Melissa Schwartzberg (Silver Professor of Politics, NYU) serves as chair and moderator.

Against Bagg’s emphasis on contestation, Eric Beerbohm defends a joint-agentic account of democratic decision-making, which emphasizes acting in concert. Drawing on her own work in democratic theory, Simone Chambers suggests that Bagg discounts too quickly the possibility that people can exercise a dispersed form of sovereignty, and that, like Beerbohm, suggests that democratic control may be a coherent view of joint authorship rather than an uncoordinated action to curb the abuse of power. Sam Moyn, an historian of liberalism, casts a skeptical eye on the ways in which Bagg assimilates liberalism and democracy as means of contesting power. Finally, Lucia Rubinelli, a scholar of constituent power, considers the possibility that Bagg’s critique of popular agency as a defining characteristic of democracy may further undermine the power of the people more generally.