Institutions and the problem of trust: A Bahá'í perspective on Multiparty Adversarial Democracy
Channel: Association for Bahá’í Studies
Date: 2022-09-21

Michael Sabet - 2022 ABS Conference

Multiparty Adversarial Democracy (MAD), the form of democracy that dominates political practice in the modern world, is proving to be an inadequate model for political institutions grappling with humanity’s ever-complexifying challenges. This presentation focuses on two of MAD’s premises – the non-perfectibility of the human being, and the untrustworthiness of institutions – that limit both the effectiveness of institutions, and the quality of individuals’ and communities’ democratic participation in MAD. That party system, which conceptually might mitigate these consequences, ends up creating further pathologies. The deliberative conception of democracy presents a plausible alternative to MAD. It will be argued that in order for it to displace MAD, institutionalized deliberative democracy must be rooted in a cultural lifeworld conducive to its flourishing; however, MAD itself contributes to the eradication of such a lifeworld. This presentation first explores Gandhian swaraj as a means to creating a lifeworld that radically rejects the first premise of MAD by centering the moral development of the individual. We next turn to the experience of the Baha’i community, rooted in a conceptual framework in which both premises of MAD are radically rejected, to show how such a lifeworld can ground an institutional system that is culturally and procedurally democratic.