An Agonistic Theory of Democratic Parliamentarism. The Case of the Walloon Parliament

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most discussed political theorists of recent years. One of her most important theoretical contributions is her critique of deliberative democracy for its inability to think the political in terms of antagonism and dissensus. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine to what extent Mouffe’s theory of democracy, which she calls “agonistic pluralism” and which she proposes as an alternative to deliberative democracy, can be used to think about the role of the parliamentary institution in a democratic polity. To this end, we mobilize a qualitative method based on the realisation of fifteen semi-structured interviews in order to analyze the case of the Walloon Parliament, with the aim of showing how democratic parliamentarism realizes the staging of the antagonism which, according to Mouffe, founds the domain of the political.