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What is anti-pluralism?

K. Walz

Published 2025 in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the issue of possible early warning signs for democratic regression has become increasingly relevant. In this regard, the focus is often on how democracy-threatening actors can be identified as early as possible. Within this debate, one term has recently emerged again, as various contributions suggest that anti-pluralist actors are in the driver’s seat of democratic backsliding. However, anti-pluralism in this literature usually remains completely undefined, or at least undertheorized. This study intends to contribute to clarifying the theoretical dimension of these issues by specifying anti-pluralism as a concept and discussing its relationships to competing concepts for identifying actors threatening democracy. The conceptual analysis shows that anti-pluralism is best understood as the negation of the benefits of societal diversity and thereby also the functional and normative necessity, purpose, and merit of pluralism as a structure principle. Furthermore, it can be shown that anti-pluralism is a feature of various other isms that are commonly used as indicators to identify actors threatening democracy. I conclude that while anti-pluralism is not necessary for actors to threaten democracy, it is sufficient to identify potentially threatening actors and has advantages over competing markers such as populism and extremism.

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