Content area
Full Text
Hans Asenbaum is a PhD Candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW, United Kingdom ([email protected])
I am indebted to Graham Smith for relentless support, advice, and inspiring conversations. For helpful feedback, I would like to thank Matthew Fluck. I am also very grateful to John Dryzek, Selen Ercan, Nicole Curato, Simon Niemeyer, Lucy Parry, and everyone who participated in the seminar at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, and to Dorotheé de Nève and her team at the University of Giessen. Moreover, this article has benefitted from inspiring comments of three anonymous reviewers, which I am very grateful for.
I need to become anonymous. In order to be present.
The more I am anonymous, the more I am present.
Tiqqun, 2008
INTRODUCTION
Anonymity is an essential feature of liberal democracies around the world. The secret ballot constitutes the central legitimation mechanism. Anonymity is also crucial in a wide array of modes of political participation ranging from campaign funding to textual political debates in newspapers, manifestos, pamphlets, and graffiti. Additionally, the importance of anonymity in political participation increases as the mask becomes a focal point for social movements like Anonymous, the Black Bloc, the Zapatistas, and the Pussy Riot movement. This trend is amplified in the digital era, where anonymous expression in online newspaper forums and in activism via social media becomes an everyday practice (Asenbaum 2018). Given the crucial role of anonymity in the practices of democracy, its lack of conceptual grounding in democratic theory is surprising (cf. Gardner 2011, 939).
In contrast to the absence of anonymity in democratic theory (with Moore 2017 being a recent exception), there is a plethora of diverse, empirically driven literature discussing anonymity in various forms of political participation. This literature, however, suffers from a lack of theoretical attention to its main subject of research. Eric Barendt's book Anonymous Speech (2016), for example, discusses anonymity in various forms of political participation but fails to provide a definition of anonymity. The meager traces of definitions that are found in the literature on anonymity in political participation suffer first from a lack of acknowledgment of...