The imaginary of the democratic vote: a conceptual contribution to cultural political sociology

This article explores the cultural dimension of voting as a practice at the core of representative democracy. It is a contribution to political sociology and not to normative political theory, yet it takes from the latter the inspiration to resist a reduction of the act of voting to a part of a mechanism informing political decision-making, and, more generally, social coordination. Instead, the article views voting as part of a society’s semiotic household. To this end, the concept of the “imaginary” will be introduced, as it seems capable of rendering the semiotic processes through which voting links up to more general structures and imaginations of society, because the notion covers theoretical suggestions as to how concrete practices are connected to overarching structures of meaning. In particular, the article argues that practices of voting unfold their meaning potential within a broader array of adjacent practices like pre-election opinion polls and post-election rationalizations. Thereby, it is the distinction between majority and minority that informs the processes of voting-related semiosis.