Democracy and Competition: Rethinking the Forms, Purposes, and Values of Competition in Democracy

Alfred Moore is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. He is the author of Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and has written widely on the politics of expertise. His work engages a wide range of themes in contemporary democratic theory, including anonymity and deliberation, democratic non-participation, and the concept of trust. In 2020-21 he held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the project Rethinking Political Competition, and he is currently researching the role of ideas of competition in democratic theory and practice.

Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. His research aims to reimagine democratic ideals and practices in light of realistic assumptions about the dynamics of social inequality and political power His first book, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (OUP, 2024), offers a comprehensive account of why democracy matters and how to make it better. Other recent work applies this framework to questions of institutional design and organizational structure, as well as the political ethics of identity, discourse, mobilization, and party competition.