Normative Demonstration in Constitutional Democracy: An Expression of Political Love-Recognition

Despite significant research on protests and crowd phenomena, there is little understanding of the functioning of demonstrations in democratic constitutional states. Researchers have primarily focused on protest activity and collective action without specifically examining the unique characteristics of demonstrations. In this article, I examine the distinct concept of normative demonstration as a method of participating in the process of democratic opinion formation. Normative demonstrations are a link between normative democratic theory and the political theory of recognition and provide a concrete example of struggles of recognition being linked by social psychological mechanisms to "good" democratic outcomes. These social psychological phenomena, found in crowds, manifest as an expression of political love-recognition which attains its political nature through uniting with a normative claim in the context of a demonstration. This understanding of demonstrations, as an expression of political love-recognition, fundamentally challenges the delineation of the political in the political theory of recognition and provides a conceptual framework for reconciling the democratic purpose of a demonstration and its physical anti-deliberative methods, to understand how demonstrations can contribute to furthering democracy.No embargoAcademic Major: Political Scienc