Election law and democratic theory

Election law is the body of law by which a society implements its commitment to democracy. Any meaningful evaluation of the suitability or effectiveness of a society's election law therefore requires some inquiry into the nature of the society's democratic commitments-the theory or conception of democracy to which it subscribes. Virtually all such theories are rooted in philosophical liberalism but nevertheless come in many varieties. Reconstructing a society's democratic commitments can be complicated by its failure to articulate or even to reflect upon them. In the United States, that difficulty is compounded by a long history of evolution in American conceptions of democracy, as well as by the presence of a long-standing, competing strand of illiberal and antidemocratic thought, culminating in the sudden, recent turn to right-wing populism. This populism claims to be motivated by a democratic wish to serve the interests of the people, but its conception of the people is narrow and exclusive, and its conception of elections is decidedly illiberal and undemocratic. The kind of populism now associated with the Republican Party is thus not a plausible alternative to the inherited conceptions of liberal democracy to which the U.S. Constitution is demonstrably committed.