Book Review: Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions, by Claudio López-Guerra

• Date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606887
• Author: Ben Saunders
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

858 Political Theory 43(6)

6. Bickford, Dissonance; Dobson, Listening, 36.

7. Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Coles, Rethinking Generosity; Connolly, Ethos;

Connolly, World of Becoming; Connolly, Identity/Difference; Jacques Derrida,

Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Dobson’s neglect

of agonistic democracy might stem from his misunderstanding of it. He writes

that “agonists cannot know what they are agonizing about without listening out

for contending points of view” (Listening, 97). This way of posing the problem

identifies agony as the fundamental experience of this sort of agonistic politics,

but one does not get that sense from reading agonistic democrats, who affirm

contestation, uncertainty, contingency, and risk. Something about those experi-

ences may be agonizing, but Dobson’s characterization remains inapt.

8. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization.

9. Coles, Rethinking Generosity. In fairness, Dobson does briefly discuss receptiv-

ity (Listening, 20), but this also undermines his claim that Bickford is the only

political theorist who has emphasized listening.

10. Listening, chap. 4.

11. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001).

12. Listening, 172.

13. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2009).

14. Listening, 64–66.

15. Ibid., 67.

16. Ibid., 68.

17. Ibid., 69.

18. Ibid., 68.

Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions, by Claudio

López-Guerra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Reviewed by: Ben Saunders, University of Southampton, Southampton, United

Kingdom

DOI: 10.1177/0090591715606887

Conventional orthodoxy regards the franchise as a fundamental right.

Indeed, many democratic states seem under pressure to enfranchise groups

hitherto commonly excluded, including non-resident citizens, non-citizens

residents, (older) children, and prison inmates. In this provocative book,

Claudio López-Guerra argues that many of our conventional beliefs about