In 2001-2002, Great Britain, the birthplace of modern democracy, gave the world another institution grounded on the popular vote: the television show Pop Idol, which allowed audience members to vote on their favorite amateur singer. Although Pop Idol was suspended after its second season, it nevertheless spawned wildly successful imitations throughout the globe, including the US (2002), Australia (2003), Canada (2003), and China (2005), among many others.

Where ever they go, Pop Idol spin-offs inevitably inspire comparisons with the democratic process — a phenomenon frequently referred to as “Idol Democracy.” For instance, the press quickly noted that more votes were cast in American Idol’s season finale this past March than have been cast for any single candidate in any US presidential election (Ronald Reagan came closest, in 1984, with 54.4 million votes). Similarly, when 400 million viewers watched (and 8 million text message votes were cast in) the August 27th finale of the second season of China’s spin-off, Super Girl (超级女声), both Chinese and foreign pundits were quick to ask whether this might herald the beginning of a true democratic reform. (For instance, the Economist reported that “A front-page headline last week in the state-run [English-language] Beijing Today put the question with astonishing frankness: 'Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?' [see also here and here ). Finally, one of the most intriguing examples of a marriage of Idol voting and democracy can perhaps be found in the 2004 British ITV show, Vote for Me, which used a Pop Idol approach to select ten potential parliamentary candidates.

Although the implications of this sort of Idol-inspired “dial-in democracy” are not without interest, I will focus here instead on the way in which the Pop Idol shows underscore two other, somewhat more troubling, facets of modern democracies.

First of all, the emphasis in the Idol shows is not merely on the process of selection, but equally importantly on the parallel process of elimination and exclusion. While the selection of elected representatives within a democracy usually also involves a process of rejection (of those candidates who were not selected), more significant is the fundamental process of exclusion on which the democratic process is necessarily grounded. Most obviously, voting rights are limited to citizens, and the bounds of citizenship are tightly policed, both internally, with the exclusion of criminals, minors, etc.; as well as externally, with the exclusion of non-citizens and undocumented aliens. (Not to mention the necessary exclusion, as Jodi Dean implies, of rival models of what form democracy itself might take).

Second, the emphasis, in the Idol shows and their brethren, on the disappointment and frustrations of the rejected contestants, mirrors quite precisely the emphasis on feelings of injury and exclusion which underlie many forms of contemporary identity politics. As Wendy Brown argues in States of Injury,

Politicized identity emerges and obtains it unifying coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion: a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that thus reinstalls the humanist ideal — and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal — insofar as it premised itself upon exclusion from it.

One of Brown’s central arguments in Injury involves a critique of the way in which minority groups’ struggles to regain certain rights can have the effect of ultimately constraining the limits of the identities which those groups are trying to affirm (as well as sanctioning the role of the law in adjudicating those rights).