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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Is democracy worth saving? Responding to the erosion of democracy, philosophical debates have pivoted from analyzing the best forms of democracy to questioning what is so valuable about democracy to begin with, how we can save it, and whether it is indeed worth saving. Contemporary Democratic Theory charts this pivot and surveys the most important new developments in the philosophical, theoretical, and normative examination of the concept of democracy. Comparisons that dominated 20th century democratic theory - between direct democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, and agonistic democracy - are in the 21st century giving way to comparisons between democracy and its challengers: epistocracy, technocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy, and autocracy. Philosophical interest in the canonical figures of democratic theory like Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill is being eclipsed by damage control in the face populism, sinking trust in democratic institutions, failing political parties, and the spread of misinformation. Overarching epochal forces of crisis and threat are pushing democratic theory in new directions and towards new ideas. This refreshing and authoritative text identifies, explains, and evaluates the new directions taken by contemporary democratic theory in challenging times.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Democracy in crisis
What is democratic theory?
Beyond models of democracy
Chapter-by-chapter overview
2 Justifying Democracy
A new vocabulary
Value versus legitimacy
Conclusion
Note
3 Equality
Egalitarian democrats
Equality and disagreement
Deep pluralists
Mutual justification
Public reason and disagreement
Conclusion
Notes
4 Freedom
Freedom as authorship
Hans Kelsen and the freedom to be wrong
Freedom as non-domination
Conclusion
Note
5 Instrumentalism 1: Realism
Realism in democratic theory
Minimalist realism
Realism and non-domination
Partisan realists
Conclusion
Note
6 Instrumentalism 2: Performance Skeptics
Measuring performance
Citizen competence
Technocracy
Epistocracy
Meritocracy
Conclusion
Note
7 Instrumentalism 3: Epistemic Democracy
Condorcet Jury Theorem
Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem
Pragmatism
Epistemic proceduralism
Conclusion
Notes
8 Populism and the People
Populism and democratic theory
Constrained democracy
Left populism
Democratic pluralism
Conclusion
Note
9 Representation
Citizen representatives and the return of sortition
Parties, partisans, and partisanship
Representatives and the constructivist turn
Conclusion
Note
10 Public Sphere
Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere
Technological affordances
Rhetoric
Conclusion
11 Innovation and Disobedience
Democratic innovation
Civil disobedience and protests
Conclusion
12 Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
To Jeff, Max, and Isaac for making it all worthwhile
Contemporary Democratic Theory
Simone Chambers
polity
Copyright © Simone Chambers 2024
The right of Simone Chambers to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4341-0
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932770
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I wish I could say this book was a pleasure to write. I’m just not that kind of writer. But it has been a real pleasure to read and immerse myself in contemporary democratic theory. These might be dark times for democracy but there are bright minds illuminating our predicament with care, intelligence, and commitment. I have thoroughly enjoyed the immersive process, and I want to thank all the authors and scholars who make up this important field of research. I have also enjoyed pestering people about their views on democracy. People have been amazingly generous with their time, including answering unsolicited, and I am sure annoying, emails asking what they mean on page such-and-such of their article or if they could name me three people they admire most working on X. Here is a list of some of my victims: Sam Bagg, Robin Celikates, Maeve Cooke, Julian Culp, Yasmeen Daifallah, Carmen Dege, Lisa Disch, Kevin Elliot, Alessandro Ferrara, Daniel Ferris Hutton, Jennifer Forestal, John Gastil, Rob Goodman, Cathrine Holst, Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti, Steven Klein, Cristina Lafont, Simon Lambek, Hélène Landemore, Maria Pia Lara, Jacob Levi, Alex Livingston, Jane Mansbridge, Eduardo Mendieta, Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça, Alfred Moore, Hartmut Rosa, Enzo Rossi, Martin Saar, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Charles Taylor, Mark Warren, Melissa Williams, Fabio Wolkenstein. Special thanks to Christian Rostbøll, who read an early draft of some chapters and thankfully set me straight.
During the 2020/21 academic year when I first started working on the book, I was fortunate to be invited to join the research project GOODPOL (What is a good policy? Political morality, feasibility, and democracy) led by Cathrine Host and Jakob Elster at the University of Oslo and sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies at Oslo. Despite Covid making physical presence in Oslo impossible, I benefited immensely from the project’s virtual workshops, colloquia, and conferences, even those that took place at 4 am Pacific time. A big thank you must also go to Bill Maurer, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at UCI, who supported my 2020/21 research leave and who has been key in making UCI a happy intellectual home for me.
I wrote most of this book while serving as Chair of the Department of Political Science. This would not have been possible without the help and support of a fantastic administrative team. James Keehn and Zachary Beam are wonderful co-workers and I owe a special debt of gratitude to the amazing Claudia Cheffs, the boss of us all, who keeps the trains running and the clocks on time and makes me look good even when I’m flabbergasted. Also a big thank you to my colleagues and friends Louis DeSipio and Janet DiVincenzo for consistently good advice always served with equally good wine. A special shout-out must go to my wonderful theory colleagues at UCI, Daniel Brunstetter, Kevin Olson, Mary McThomas, and Keith Topper, who suffered through my oversharing of the agonies of the writing process. I want to thank the graduate students at UCI who challenge and push me to think through many half-baked ideas and have been patient test subjects as I try out ideas and fly arguments from the book.
I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and the final draft for helpful, sensible, and doable suggestions as well as Inès Boxman, Louise Knight, and George Owers at Polity Press. It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Polity.
Thank you to Addye Susnick and Gail Ferguson for terrific and much needed copy-editing.
Thank you to my sister Susan for the weekly pep talk and debrief. It has made a difference in so many ways.
Finally, my biggest debt of thanks goes to Jeff Kopstein, who has suffered through this book with good humor, encouragement, and priceless editorial guidance. With immense gratitude and even more love, I dedicate this book to him and our two amazing children, Max and Isaac.
1Introduction
EVERYONE loves democracy. Year after year, the World Values Survey reports on the global desire for democracy. It is a “universal value at this point in history” (World Values Survey 2020). But there is a paradox. The global aspiration for democracy goes hand in hand with sinking confidence that actual democracies can live up to that aspiration (Wike and Fetterolf 2021). Democracy has perhaps always faced one crisis or another (Runciman 2017), but the opening decades of the twenty-first century have seen an intensification of the familiar pressures on democracy alongside new challenges on the horizon. Populism, economic inequality, corrupt and/or unresponsive elites, and citizen apathy and lack of political knowledge are perennial concerns, and these are joined by climate crisis, digital threats to information, and pandemic politics. This book, however, is not about democracy in crisis. This book is about democratic theory in times of crisis. The pages to come survey, explain, and evaluate contemporary democratic theory as a response to real-world challenges facing all democratic orders in the twenty-first century. Overarching epochal forces of crisis and threat are pushing democratic theory in new directions and toward new ideas.
This book is intended as an introduction to democratic theory. Not in the sense (I hope) that it simplifies the material presented but in the sense of introducing an old friend in company. For some readers in that company, it will be a first encounter, and they can pursue any of the topics further through references and citations. For others who are already very familiar with democratic theory or who are the very theorists that I discuss in these pages – because I wrote the book for them, too – I hope it serves as a useful mirror and distillation of what they are up to.
This introduction covers some of the preliminaries and explains the organization of the book. While the book is not about democratic crisis, I read many innovations and new directions in democratic theory in the context of democratic crisis. The introduction therefore begins with a brief overview of the major challenges and threats to democracy in the twenty-first century. The next task is to delineate the book’s subject matter. What is democratic theory? What is it that we study when we study democratic theory as opposed to studying democracy itself? After an outline of what I take theory to be, I then discuss the conceptual organization of democratic theory. A common and for a long time useful way to organize democratic theory was through comparing and contrasting models of democracy, sometimes placed in a historical sequence starting with the ancient Greeks (Held 1987). This book approaches democratic theory differently, and I explain that difference below. Finally, I end this introduction with a quick summary of the chapters.
Democracy in crisis
In the era of democratization and democratic growth that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, social science developed many different indexes to measure democracy. These indexes track and evaluate the robustness of institutions and norms considered essential to any healthy democracy. There are disagreements and differences about what is included and thought important in these instruments. Some, for example, Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/), rely on very basic measures of voting rights, equal opportunity to run for office, and freedom of speech and association, while others, for example, V-Dem (https://v-dem.net/), use more robust and qualitative indicators, but all of them are reporting a decline in the growth and health of democracy across the globe, with the United States, arguably the oldest and most stable constitutional democracy, receiving a downgrading for the first time (Economist 2022). We do not need to identify a point in time when we went from growth to decline (and of course there is still growth in some places and sectors); we only need to note a general consensus that some time in the late 1990s the bloom started to go off the democratizing rose, and scholars and observers of democracy began introducing notes of worry and sometimes alarm about the global health of democracy. This trend was then accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and recession that further weakened trust in democratic institutions.
As I noted, this book is not about democratic crisis. It is not part of the very large and growing literature sounding the alarm bells and cataloguing the signs of decline. But we cannot understand contemporary developments and innovations in democratic theory without the backdrop of democracy in crisis. I want to briefly sketch some of the phenomena fueling concern and anxiety about democracy. This is not a theory or explanation of democratic crisis. Nor do I argue that democracy is in crisis. Instead, I describe the sorts of things people are referring to when they talk about democratic crisis or democratic erosion. I break this down into four perspectives from which to evaluate democracy. As we move through the survey of contemporary democratic theory, the exposition returns to these dimensions of crisis as points of reference.
Institutional/norm perspective
Institutional and norm decline is often what people mean when they talk about democratic backsliding (Waldner and Lust 2018; Diamond 2015). The sliding usually refers to a scale with democracy at one end and some form of authoritarianism, autocracy, or patrimonialism at the other end. There are a lot of potential data points that can fall under the category of backsliding, for example, sinking Freedom House scores, failing political parties, weakening rule of law norms, or voter suppression. Although certain declines can be seen in most democracies (falling voter turnout, for example), the epicenter of this research is the rise of populist authoritarian forces within democracies, especially in places where such forces come to power and begin to chip away at institutions thought to be essential to a healthy democracy. The chipping away is often done in the name of “the people,” thus invoking democratic credentials for what some see as policies that undermine democracy. For example, many populist regimes have weakened the power and independence of constitutional courts, arguing that they have been used by unaccountable elites to block popular measures. This counts as backsliding within most democracy measures because it undermines the rule of law and protection of individual rights thought necessary to sustain a democratic order. The relationship between backsliding and populism has spawned a great deal of debate within normative theory, especially rethinking what it means to appeal to “the people” (chapter 8).
In addition to the threat posed by authoritarian populism, growing levels of inequality, combined with a lack of responsiveness to people’s needs, are also part of the story of backsliding. The global expansion of democracy in the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as the expansion and strengthening of political equality. Social and economic equality, however, has not kept pace, and many think that growing disparities of wealth are beginning to undercut gains in political equality. Thus we see many normative theorists arguing that oligarchization of representative democracy – meaning the rule by the few rather than rule by the many – is the most serious form of backsliding we face (chapters 5 and 9). For many democratic theorists, we should be more worried about the rule of the rich than the rule of the populist authoritarian.
At a more abstract level, observable and documented backsliding raises questions of how we evaluate democracy in the first place. A clear new direction of democratic theory over the last 25 years has been the growing intensity of the debate focused on why we should value democracy in the first place, even under conditions where it is not performing very well (chapters 2 and 6).
Subjective/attitudinal perspective
This book began by noting a global aspiration for democracy. Democracy as a vague unspecified ideal is hugely popular. Prick the surface of this public opinion bubble and people in all democracies are unhappy with their own democratic institutions. Here we see a lot of survey data indicating a decline in trust in elections, politicians, parties, parliaments, and governments (Connaughton, Kent, and Schumacher 2020). This is matched by sinking voter turnout rates and an uptick in protest and contestatory politics. Many people think that democracy is doing a terrible job. Politicians and parties are thought to be out of touch or corrupt; government is thought to be unresponsive to the needs and concerns of ordinary citizens. The declining trust in democratic institutions is tied both to perceived lack of responsiveness as well to poor performance. These forces came to a head in many democracies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Elected governments were perceived as having stumbled into the crisis through a failure of will to regulate financial markets and then a failure to produce effective policy to stem recession and unemployment (Plattner 2015: 7). Declining trust in democracy and democratic institutions is connected to the growth in support for populist parties, but this phenomenon goes beyond the threat of authoritarian populism and affects all stable democracies, even those without a strong populist challenge. Democracy is in trouble when the people, who after all are supposed to be ruling, have lost faith in the system (Mounk 2018).
Uncovering the causes of sinking trust and how we can address and reverse that decline is motivating innovative rethinking about representation, responsiveness, trust, and corruption within normative theory. Research and theory about democratic innovation is at an all-time high with the very term morphing into a disciplinary field with its own associations, conferences, and journals (chapter 11). A radical and controversial response to sinking trust in representatives and oligarchization of electoral institutions is the growing interest in using sortition or random selection to choose citizen representatives to populate citizen legislative assemblies (chapter 9). At the other end of the spectrum are normative theories that seek to rethink traditional institutions. Here there has been an interesting revisiting of political parties, why they are essential to democracy, and how we can revitalize them (chapter 9).
Outcome perspective
A third angle of focus on democratic crisis traces the growing doubt by citizens, technocrats, experts, and academic observers that democracy can get things right and solve the most pressing problems facing contemporary societies. There is of course an overlap with the attitudinal perspective that charts citizens’ sinking trust in democratic institutions and skepticism about job performance. But the output debate goes beyond survey data. This third perspective often assumes that there are objectively right and wrong or better and worse answers to policy questions and that democracy is getting sinking scores on this output scale. Here Aziz Huq articulates this concern: “As contemporary experiences with climate change, pandemic illness, and economic inequality show, democracies are not always good at recognizing serious threat” (Huq 2020: 32). The concern for output can bring about different sorts of normative theory. The climate crisis and pandemic can lead to thinking we need to take these decisions out of the hands of fickle and misinformed citizens or partisan elected officials and into the hands of scientists or technocrats (chapter 6). Output failures have spawned a growing interest in and defense of epistocracy – the rule of the knowledgeable. Nobody is advocating a full-blown philosopher king, but many theorists and philosophers are suggesting that objectively knowledgeable people should have more clout within the democratic system or more decisions should be insulated from democratic determination and handed over to experts (chapter 6). At the same time, the worry about outputs has inspired two types of responses to the champions of epistocracy or technocracy. On the one hand, there is an active anti-epistocratic wave often identified under the label epistemic democrats (chapter 7). Here normative theorists argue that democracy does in fact, or can in principle, get the right answer more often than other regimes and that the output perspective offers a strong defense of democracy despite some (inevitable) disappointments with job performance. On the other hand, there are democratic theorists who argue that evaluating democracy on output measures is deeply misguided as democracy’s appeal and indeed moral superiority stem from the way its procedures treat citizens fairly and as equals, not from getting the right answer (chapters 3 and 4).
Input perspective
The input perspective focuses on the crises of information and competence. There are two sets of problems here that converge in some people’s minds. First, the digital public sphere has made the common problems of manipulation and misinformation more intractable and endemic. Perhaps we are looking at a new structural transformation of the public sphere that bodes very poorly for democracy. “Post-truth” was the 2016 word of the year, and this can’t be a good thing. It is hard to see how democracy can function properly if citizens have no access to trustworthy sources of information or distrust trustworthy ones. Even more alarming is the viral and effective spread of falsehoods that go to the heart of democracy, for example, claiming electoral victory when all evidence points to defeat. This dimension of crisis is fueling a growth of theory surrounding information communication and the new digital public sphere (chapter 10). The democratization of algorithms as well as crowdsourcing content moderation are just some of the new frontiers of democratic theory spurred by the crisis of digital communication.
Parallel to the worry that the digital public sphere is creating such bad information pollution that it is disrupting the most basic processes of citizen opinion formation is a resurgence of common worries about citizen competence. Modern science – especially social psychology and neuropsychology – appears to be piling up evidence that ordinary citizens, or humans in general, are not cognitively cut out to govern themselves in mass democracies. The worry about citizen competence has been around at least since Plato, but there appears to be a growing group of scientists, social scientists, and philosophers who believe that they have hard data (mostly experimental data) that can put the final nail in the coffin of claims to citizen competence. This in turn has breathed new life into minimalist and realist theories of democracy that seek to scale back our expectations about citizen input into the democratic system (chapter 5).
The citizen competence debate is not simply about the dangers of uninformed and easily manipulated voters; it is also connected to new conceptions of representation and in turn new measures of democratic success. Constructivist ideas of representation rely on empirical studies of opinion formation to question the democratic ideal of responsiveness (chapter 9). Responsiveness is the idea that democratic governments function properly when they respond to the authentic and true interests of citizens and function poorly when they fail to respond. The new wave of normative theories of representation suggests that citizens’ views, opinions, and preferences are (to some extent) constructed by representatives themselves, thus reversing the causal direction implied by ideas of input and responsiveness and indeed questioning the ideal of responsiveness as an adequate or realistic measure of democracy.
These then are some of the diagnostic details that underpin and motivate contemporary democratic theory. The next question to address is what is democratic theory?
What is democratic theory?
Every year, thousands of academic books and articles are published about democracy, and the more popular democracy-is-dying book industry is also having a growth spurt. We need to circumscribe our topic to make it manageable and coherent. This in turn requires a short foray into methodology and disciplinary divides in the study of democracy. The type of theory that is primarily surveyed in this book is normative theory. Normative here means very broadly that it is theory interested in an evaluative dimension of a subject matter, for example, why democracy is good or what makes democracy good. Although I discuss theories that are put forward by scholars in various disciplines, the two most central are political philosophy and political theory, the former coming out of philosophy departments and the latter found in political science departments. Each discipline sees the delineation of normative theory slightly differently, with philosophy connecting it tightly to moral philosophy, and political science seeing it as doing the work of conceptual clarification and value justification, leaving measurement and explanation to empirical positivist political science. Although there is something to both these ways of thinking about normative theory, it is worth taking a moment to advocate for an expansive and inclusive idea of normative theory that blurs the edges suggested by both these disciplines.
Within analytic political philosophy, normative often implies moral content. For example, Thomas Christiano and Sameer Bajaj begin their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on democracy by noting that “Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions” (Christiano and Bajaj 2022). Democratic theories that begin from the claim that all human beings are equal, or that we ought to treat all human beings as equal, clearly have a moral starting point from which one would then elaborate what it would mean for essentially equal people to govern themselves in such a way that respects that equality. A great deal of normative democratic theory invokes or presupposes moral categories in this way. We should be careful, however, not to associate normative theory too narrowly with moral theory. Realists, for example, challenge the moral sources of political normativity, which is to say, they question whether morality can offer an adequate basis upon which to make political judgments and evaluations. Realists criticize dominant trends in analytic political philosophy (embodied to some extent in Christiano and Bajaj’s definition of normative democratic theory) which, “through inappropriate idealizations, abstractions, and moralizations present a misleading, if not outright false, account of politics” (Sleat 2018: 2). Realists look for the foundation of democracy and democratic institutions in the management of power and conflict. They are often relentless critical theorists, indicting the oligarchization of democracy not on moral grounds but on instrumental grounds (Arlen and Rossi 2021; Bagg forthcoming). As I discuss in chapter 5, realism has a growing number of adherents and represents an important development in recent democratic theory. To the extent that realism offers grounds for evaluating and prescribing, it is a type of normative theory, despite rejecting moral principles as the foundation for those evaluations and prescriptions.
Within the discipline of political science, normative theory is sometimes used as a catch-all category to demark a tripartite methodological division between formal theory, empirical theory, and scholarship interested in studying the history, meaning, value, and conceptual structure of our ideas of democracy. Formal theory seeks to gain insight into political phenomena using mathematical instruments that model complex choice scenarios. Often referred to as social choice or game theory, formal theory within political science has a great deal to say about democracy, especially dimensions of democracy that lend themselves to formal modeling like voting. Empirical political science focuses on description, explanation, and measurement and often aspires to scientific accuracy and verifiability. The field of democracy studies here is immense.
What falls into the category of normative theory then? Empirical political scientists, in describing the difference between normative and empirical research, sometimes invoke some version of the fact/value distinction. Empirical political scientists deal in facts and aspire to value neutrality. Political theorists work out the value part. I am not going to rehearse the familiar arguments for why positivist social science is not, nor ever can be, value neutral in any strong, deep, or epistemological sense. And to be clear, I think empirical political science really does offer good causal explanations of political phenomena and sorts through the facts in a rigorous, evidence-driven, knowledge-producing way. I am a fan and consumer of empirical political science. So, this is not a criticism of positivism. My complaint is about the assumption that empirical positive political science deals in facts and somehow normative political theory does not, or not in a rigorous way. Associating normative theory with a simplified idea of values or conceptual clarity leads to a failure to see the ways that much of normative theory is deeply entangled with the empirical world of facts, causes, descriptions, and measurements. This, I want to argue, is especially true of the new wave of democratic theory that I chart in this book. As I describe in the next section, responding to failures, weaknesses, and crises of democracy connects democratic theory more closely to studying actual existing democracies than to seeking to build ideal types of democracy toward which we should be striving. Normative democratic theory today is more empirically informed and more closely connected to positivist social science than normative democratic theory of 50 years ago. I cannot prove this, but I hope to make a convincing case for this claim as I survey the last 25 years (or so) of democratic theory.
Where does this leave us in trying to delimit the subject matter of this book? I employ a capacious view of normative democratic theory that initially demarcates my subject matter using loose disciplinary conventions (things that are called political philosophy or political theory) that I insist do not track hard and fast methodological lines. I retain the term normative theory not because all the theories that I survey have a clear prescriptive or moral core but because the theories that I survey usually do not base their persuasiveness primarily on a claim of scientific fact, accuracy, or verifiability, even though they often presuppose, appeal to, incorporate, and rely on many scientific facts. Most of the theories do contain some evaluative standard, however. But that can be a low bar of normativity that many purely empirical studies also meet. A definition of democracy contains an evaluative standard that says, “This here is a democracy and that over there is not a democracy.” And although the assumption that democracy is always a good thing (or that we always want more rather than less democracy) has come under question in recent democratic theory, the study of democracy (both empirical and normative) within democracies has always contained either implicitly or explicitly a normative presumption in favor of democracy. Thus saying this here is a democracy and that there is a tyranny (or an autocracy) is not the same as saying something like this here is tungsten and that there is chromium.
Beyond models of democracy
Colin Bird has noted that democracy is an adjective or perhaps an adverb masquerading as a noun (Bird 2019: 285). What I take him to mean is that, first, starting from the question “What is a democracy?” is too broad and unwieldy, and, second, democracy should initially be thought of as qualifying a certain type of collective decision procedure. In this book I too start with democracy not as a way of life or a whole society but as a method or procedure for making collective decisions. Its etymological root from the Greek means “the rule of the people.” This is not yet a definition of democracy, but the idea of ruling is a good place to start. Democracy might also be conceived as a way of life, or one might want to argue that one cannot maintain “rule by the people” without the broader backing of a democratic way of life (Anderson 2009; Dewey 1954). But, to begin, I focus on democracy as a way in which we govern ourselves. Thus the democratic system is a complex system of collective action, coordination, and decision.
There is a second way I move away from democracy as a noun. Much of my own research has been within the tradition of deliberative democracy. I have often been asked the question, “What would a deliberative democracy look like?” or “How would a deliberative democracy be different from a representative democracy?” It became clear to me that these were the wrong sorts of questions to ask. They were wrong because they assumed that normative democratic theory was about building comprehensive models of democracy that compete. But for me deliberative democracy furnished an interesting and normatively compelling way to study and evaluate any and all democracies. Thinking of it as a model (or as a noun) was not helpful. We need to and indeed already are thinking beyond a models-of-democracy conceptual framework for democratic theory (Warren 2017).
A models-of-democracy approach begins with some institution or element and then builds an ideal typical picture of democracy around that feature or institution (Warren 2017). Common models in our lexicon are direct democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, agonistic democracy, republican democracy, competitive elite democracy, liberal democracy, and of course representative democracy. All the terms qualifying democracy in this list represent important traditions and arguments within democratic theory, but I do not treat them as models, nor do I organize the discussion of contemporary democratic theory along a models-of-democracy framework. I have several reasons for departing from a models-of-democracy approach as a conceptual structure.
First, a models-of-democracy framework tends to think about models as if they were ideologies in competition. This perspective stands behind the question “How would a deliberative democracy be different from a representative democracy?” Contemporary democratic theory is full of disagreement and criticism. As is natural within such intellectual debates, people stake out positions by way of contrast and criticism. And it is sometimes useful to give a name to the position one is staking out. For example, “open democracy” (chapter 9) or “epistemic democracy” (chapter 6) are useful identifiers of types of arguments. But thinking about that disagreement and criticism in terms of models of democracy does a disservice to the complexity of the disputes (Saward 2021). Philosophers who identify as agonistic democrats (chapters 5 and 8), for example, have significant and important disagreements with many of the premises of deliberative democracy (chapters 3 and 10), but these differences do not come with competing blueprints about how we should organize the institutions of democracy. Democracy is a complex system with agonistic elements alongside deliberative elements.
Second, many contributions to and debates within contemporary democratic theory are orthogonal to contrasting and competing models. For example, the last 20 years have seen a revival of interest in rhetoric and its special and problematic place within democratic public spheres (chapter 10). Many of the contributors to this debate can be identified as working within one or another tradition, but the debate itself is not about competing models of democracy. Instead, it is better understood through a systemic approach that sees democracy as a complex system with many different dimensions and components that perform various functions.
Third, models-of-democracy as an organizing structure for discussing contemporary democratic theory sometimes fails to give adequate attention to variation and disagreement within traditions. Republican theories, for example, cannot be thought of as offering a model of democracy in any strong sense. One of the more interesting aspects of republicanism today is how its core concept of non-domination can inspire the liberal views of Phillip Pettit (chapter 4) at the same time as the radical plebeian views of John McCormick (chapter 5). The shared tradition between liberal republicanism and radical plebeianism is interesting, but there are more differences than similarities between these two strands of republican thought.
Finally, the era of models-of-democracy was tied to an era of ideology and optimism. It was tied to an era where the question was essentially “What is the best form of democracy?” and it was not unreasonable to suggest that we were approaching some end point where most of our debates and controversies would all be inside a liberal democratic paradigm aimed at perfecting that way of life (Fukuyama 1992). Today, “How can we save democracy?” is increasingly the default question we face. We still want to improve democracy, but the twenty-first century has seen some shocks to democracy and the spectacle of citizens voting for parties that seem not to care about democratic values or for a form of democracy that is very thin and teeters on the edge of authoritarianism. Rather than models of democracy, then, this book studies democratic theory through the lens of the challenges, problems, and questions facing democratic orders at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These challenges, problems, and questions overlay a deep undercurrent of existential anxiety. We have seen an explosion of doom and gloom studies of democracy with “death” as a recurring motif. This existential anxiety is reflected in a shift from defending the best form or model of democracy to a discussion of why value democracy in the first place. The substantive chapters of the book begin there.
Chapter-by-chapter overview
Chapter 2 begins by introducing the reader to the value of democracy debate. What is so good about democracy? Why do we or ought we to value it above other forms of rule? The debate has evolved to produce two types of answers. One type of answer maintains that democracy’s value is to be found in the procedures themselves more than the substantive outcomes that emerge from the procedures. Here theorists defend the intrinsic value of democracy. The other set of arguments looks at democratic procedures instrumentally or from the point of view of outcome. Here democracy’s value is that it produces peace, prosperity, and stability or better policy, law, and governance than other forms of decision making. The terms of this debate – intrinsic, procedural, outcome-based, and instrumental – are not always clear and so I spend some time laying out their meaning and use in normative democratic theory. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the difference between thinking about democracy in terms of legitimacy versus value. Legitimacy asks why I should obey democratically enacted laws. Value asks why I should prefer a democratic way of making collective decisions. I argue that the second question casts a wider net and is a better reflection of trends in contemporary democratic theory.
Chapter 3 looks at procedural theories of democracy that place equality at the center of democracy’s value. I look at four versions of this argument. The first group starts from egalitarian theories of social justice to argue that democracy is required by justice (Brighouse 1996; Griffin 2003; Kolodny 2014a, 2014b; Viehoff 2014). Pushing back against the apolitical bent of egalitarian distributive theories of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, this group brings democracy back into the conversation about justice. Democracy is said to have intrinsic value “on the grounds that the implementation of democratic procedures is an indispensable means of demonstrating communal recognition of the equal moral status of citizens” (Brighouse 1996: 119). What is most important about democracy is that it is a decision procedure that distributes political power equally and so contributes to a non-hierarchical relation of equality between citizens.
The next three arguments all add disagreement and pluralism to equality to defend the inherent value of democratic procedures. Thomas Christiano also defends a strongly egalitarian starting point in his democratic theory, but he adds the important condition that, although we all want justice, we cannot agree when justice has been done. Therefore, only democratic procedures and not democratic outcomes can publicly affirm equality.
Jeremy Waldron also has an equality/disagreement foundation to his view of democracy but without the strong justice theory (Waldron 1999). Waldron argues that we are faced with three facts of politics: we consider ourselves equals, our disagreements about justice and what is to be done go very deep, and we need to collectively decide what is to be done. This leads to the conclusion that majority rule decision procedures are the only fair procedures under these conditions. In the final section, I discuss the mutual justification view and the special role of public reason in addressing disagreement and pluralism. Drawing primarily on the work of John Rawls and Joshua Cohen, I outline the way that the mutual justification defense of democratic procedures differs from the first three procedural defenses while still keeping political equality as the central value.
In chapter 4, I turn to theories that still focus on the intrinsic value of procedures, but which bring questions of freedom and self-government to the fore. Here equality is not only understood as equal moral status, but also as equally free or equally our own masters. The question addressed in this chapter, then, is how can we reconcile our status as equally free with rulers enacting coercive laws? For the group of theories that I look at in this chapter, democracy is the answer to this question.
I look at two examples of the freedom argument. The first group, which I call Kelsenian proceduralism, has historically identified itself as procedural democracy. Nadia Urbinati is an exemplary figure in this group. Following many insights first articulated by Hans Kelsen, Urbinati and others see parliamentary democracy with strong protections of minority rights as the system which maximizes the freedom of all. Kelsenian proceduralists take a strong stand against any view that evaluates democracy on the quality of the outcome of the electoral/ parliamentary process. Contestatory proceduralism is the second freedom-centered argument that I analyze in chapter 4. I look at Philip Pettit’s neo-republican theory of non-domination as well as Pierre Rosanvallon’s idea of “counter-democracy.” Both these views expand the idea of freedom-ensuring procedures beyond electoral institutions and include a wide variety of pressure points that limit domination. This chapter introduces the challenge of defending democracy on traditional grounds of rule by the people, a challenge that we return to many times in the book.
Instrumental arguments in favor of democracy look at the consequences or outcomes of democracy to assess democracy’s value. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I introduce three types of instrumental arguments. First up, in chapter 5, is realism, then, in chapter 6, I discuss a growing group of theories that give democracy low grades on performance measures, and, in chapter 7, I turn to epistemic theories that argue that democracy does or can produce good-quality outcomes. I devote chapter 5 to realism as it has a growing number of adherents in democratic theory and I often return to this perspective in the book. Instrumentalism is sometimes associated exclusively with democratic theory that is concerned with measuring output in the sense of policy and legislation, but realism is also a fundamentally instrumental assessment of democracy. Realist democratic theory claims that democracy has value to the extent that it mitigates, channels, pacifies, contains, or opposes the violence and conflict that is endemic to politics understood as power struggle. In chapter 5, I review three versions of this argument. The first and most familiar version is minimal realism (Przeworski 1999). Minimalism starts with a Schumpeterian definition of democracy – a very common definition of democracy in empirical political science – as a method of choosing rulers via competitive elections. Joining minimalism to realism results in a theory that values democracy because electoral turnover ensures that losers do not resort to violence to gain power as they have future chances to win the day. Second, I cover realist theories that argue that party democracy institutionalizes legitimate opposition in the form of minority or “loyal” opposition parties, and this is an important defense against domination (Shapiro 2016). Finally, I look at a group of theories I call partisan realists. Like the preceding argument, partisan realists value democracy as a means to curb domination, but this now involves the more radical strategy of targeting the forces of domination and excluding them from power, not just channeling or restraining them. Partisan realists take sides in a way that minimal and non-domination realists do not. In this section, I take up and discuss two versions of partisan realism, agonism (Medearis 2015; Mouffe 2018) and plebeian democracy (Green 2016; McCormick 2019; Vergara 2020a), as examples of this type of argument.
Chapter 6 turns to instrumental views that assess democracy’s value on its output or performance. After discussing some of the challenges that performance-based theories face in measuring and defining good outcomes, I examine a range of democratic theories that are skeptical of democracy’s ability to perform well. All these theories begin from a negative assessment of citizens’ competence, so I too begin with a review of this literature. I sort performance skeptics into three types of solutions they have for improving democracy’s performance: technocratic, epistocratic, and meritocratic solutions. Technocracy involves rule by experts, epistocracy defends rule by the knowledgeable or wise (Brennan 2016; Caplan 2007), and meritocracy is rule by the best sort of people, usually defined as a combination of being knowledgeable and public-spirited or virtuous (Bai 2019; Bell 2015). Epistocratic and meritocratic critics of democracy sometimes propose radical reform measures, for example, excluding some people from the franchise or suggesting that democracy as a whole is wrongheaded. Criticism of these views is widespread, but the fact that they are getting so much attention is in itself a reflection of deep worries about democracy.
On the other side of the performance divide are democratic theorists who argue that democracy is to be valued because it tends to get the right answer. I refer to this group generally as epistemic democrats, and I discuss four examples of this type of argument in chapter 7. All these theories share the intuition that democracy does or, if well-ordered, would tend to produce sound and reasonable outcomes. All epistemic democrats embrace some version of the adage “two (or more) heads are better than one,” also articulated as a confidence in the wisdom of the multitude. But there is wide variation in how theorists defend this claim and which democratic mechanisms they think are at work to produce epistemically sound outcomes. At one end of the spectrum are theories that focus on the miracle of aggregation and pay particular attention to majority-rule voting procedures. Here the Condorcet Jury Theorem has been very influential, and I discuss that influence in the first section (Goodin and Spiekermann 2018: 52). Also on the aggregate side, examined in section 2, is the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem that suggests that experts are not always the best problem solvers and, more generally, that human beings are better at solving problems collaboratively than individually (Landemore 2012). At the other end of the spectrum are theories that see deliberation in both the democratic public sphere as well as assemblies as doing the epistemic heavy lifting. In the third and fourth sections, I outline two versions of the deliberation-centered views, starting with pragmatism (Anderson 2006; Mizak 2008; Talisse 2007) and moving to epistemic proceduralism (Estlund 2008; Peter 2013).
Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11 move on from the value of democracy debate and study democratic theory that is more directly responding to democratic crisis. The rise of populism has been a major theme in normative democratic theory as well as in the empirical study of democracies. We are seeing a vibrant debate about what populism is, what explains its rise, and what dangers, if any, it poses for democracy. In normative democratic theory, the debate often centers on the concept of the “people” and what it means for the people to rule. Chapter 8 investigates this dimension with special emphasis on interrogating the concept of popular sovereignty. I analyze three broad understandings of populism and then connect those assessments to underlying normative views of democracy that I label constrained democracy, left populism, and democratic pluralism. The constrained democracy view worries about illiberal democracy and sees the primary danger of populism as a weakening of constraints, guardrails, and checks on direct plebiscitary and majoritarian power (Mounk 2018). Here the underlying normative theory of democracy is skeptical and cautious regarding strong ideas of popular sovereignty and the will of the people (Riker 1988; Weale 2018). Democracy needs constraint to make it safe for liberal orders.
The second group sees the primary threat of right-wing populism not in creeping authoritarianism so much as in a problematic substantive conception of the people. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe attempt to resuscitate some general themes of populism not on nativist, anti-immigration, or white nationalist terms, but on a coalition of those disempowered and marginalized by the forces of neoliberalism (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2008). Thus the threat and problem with right-wing populism is not that it is populist but that it is right-wing.
The final group I canvas in chapter 8 is concerned about authoritarian-leaning populist attacks on pluralism, opposition, the public sphere, and civil society (Abts and Rummens 2007; Arato and Cohen 2022; Habermas 1996; Müller 2016; Ochoa Espejo 2017; Rosanvallon 2007, 2021; Rostbøll 2023; Rummens 2017; Urbinati 2019). I label this large group democratic pluralists because they place anti-pluralism at the center of their criticism of populism, but also because in developing alternative ideas of popular sovereignty, they stress the multiple and plural institutional means through which citizens exercise that popular sovereignty.
Chapter 9 describes and explains new developments in theories of political representation. The backdrop to this discussion is sinking trust in traditional representative institutions: elected representatives, political parties, and parliaments (Dalton 2004). Sinking trust levels are often thought to be tied to two interconnected senses in which elected representatives fail to represent citizens. The first we might call the populist complaint: elected representatives are heavily drawn from elite sectors and do not look like most ordinary citizens. The second is the corruption complaint: in developing policy agendas, elected representatives are responsive to economic heavy hitters rather than the interests of ordinary citizens.
The first set of theories I cover in this chapter under the heading “Citizen Representatives and the Return of Sortition” argue that electoral democracy, as it was conceived of at the end of the seventeenth century and then handed down to all liberal democratic orders, was never designed to be truly responsive to ordinary citizens (Guerrero 2014; Landemore 2020; Van Reybrouck 2016). Elections are inherently aristocratic, meaning they select a governing elite who are chosen because of their virtue or superior ability, or perhaps oligarchic, meaning that the rich and powerful tend to get elected and rule. In the place of election, here we see the endorsement of sortition, or random selection, as a democratic means of choosing representatives – but now citizen representatives.
The second body of work I canvas might not look like a new direction as it focuses on political parties, an ever-present institution in the study of democracy (Bonotti 2017; Muirhead 2014; Rosenblum 2008; White and Ypi 2016). But, for a long time, normative democratic theory took very little interest in parties. The new turn that I discuss here attempts to breathe new normative life into the salutary function of partisanship in democratic politics. This view is in stark contrast to the sortition view in which partisanship is one of the elements overcome by randomly selected representative assemblies.
The final view reconsiders the standard idea of responsiveness and in doing so rethinks the way we evaluate and judge whether representatives are doing a good job. This new wave of normative theories of representation, dubbed constructivism, suggests that citizens’ views, opinions, and preferences are (to some extent) constructed by representatives themselves, thus reversing the causal direction implied by ideas of input and responsiveness and indeed questioning the ideal of responsiveness as an adequate or realistic measure of democracy (Disch 2021; Saward 2010).
The constructivist turn in theories of representation with which chapter 9 ends highlights the central role of political communication in preference and identity formation. Chapter 10 discusses political communication and the public sphere directly, with special attention to new digital technologies. I begin with an evaluation of the digital public sphere through the lens of deliberative democracy. Drawing on recent contributions to thinking about deliberative democracy in an age of social media, I outline the threats posed by this new media environment (Chambers 2021; Cohen and Fung 2021; Habermas 2022). This analysis begins with the centrality of the public sphere to a properly functioning democracy and ends with deep anxiety about the future of the public sphere in the wake of the digital revolution. In the second section, I turn to democratic theorists who have taken the dive into technology and come away with (relatively) positive recommendations for making the internet more hospitable to truth and democracy (Forestal 2022; Landemore 2021). Finally, I look at the revival of interest in rhetoric in democracy. This too is an old topic going back to the ancient world. Now, however, the study of rhetoric can draw on modern science of opinion formation to open the black box of persuasion. But underlying much of the debate about rhetoric is the question of the relationship between autonomy and persuasion.
The twin topics of chapter 11 are democratic innovation and civil disobedience. Although the former literature is very upbeat about democracy’s future and the latter not so upbeat, I read both areas of research as future-oriented and at least implying hope that actions on the ground, whether they be setting up a citizens’ climate assembly or taking to the street to protest police violence, can make a difference in the life of a democracy.
Democratic innovation has recently transitioned from a collection of case studies to a self-reflective subfield asking theoretical and normative questions about its subject matter (Elstub and Escobar 2019; Smith 2009; Hendricks 2021). What counts as innovation and how we should evaluate innovations are discussed as much as cases of innovation. The normative emphasis is on enhancing and empowering citizen participation in democratic decision making. Although several types of institution are studied as sites of innovation, the deliberative mini-public gets the most attention and theoretical unpacking in democratic innovation literature. As an illustration of this, I discuss the proliferation of citizens’ climate assemblies and their value in a democratic system.
Civil disobedience is not a new topic, but it is seeing new theoretical directions, especially in the wake of the rising street and protest politics of the twenty-first century (Celikates 2016; Delmas 2018; Livingston 2020; Pineda 2021; Scheuerman 2018; Smith 2012). This new direction is highly critical of the liberal or Rawlsian justification of civil disobedience that is interpreted as too narrow, too constrained, and, in some sense, too civil to face contemporary challenges. Two themes preoccupy me in this part of the chapter. The first theme is the role and function of civil disobedience within a democratic system. Drawing on the radical democratic theories of Jacques Rancière and Etienne Balibar among others, Robin Celikates argues that civil disobedience is an expression of constituent power (Celikates 2016). This reading of civil disobedience suggests that authentic democratic action always has an anti-institutional undercurrent to it. This goes against most democratic theory that seeks to perfect and stabilize institutions of democracy. The second theme is what Alexander Livingston calls the “coercive turn” in civil disobedience theory (Livingston 2021). This turn signals a move away from seeing public acts of disobedience and protest as attempts to change the public’s mind about an issue and toward seeing them as about forcing authorities to act. This type of realism ties normativity to efficacy, but efficacy, it turns out, often dictates moderation in means. Although contemporary civil disobedience theory tends to have a capacious and realist view of permissible actions and tactics, there is still a sense that the “civil” of civil disobedience sets limits.
Chapter 12 is a short conclusion that revisits the overarching approach to normative democratic theory that I take in the book. Here I discuss the two framing issues that have determined what I have and what I have not included in the analysis. The first is taking democracy as a way in which we govern ourselves, therefore focusing on the institutions of ruling. The second is reading democratic theory as a response to twenty-first-century challenges and problems. The focus on ruling means that I look mostly at vertical relations between citizens and the state at the expense of horizontal relations between citizens. And focusing on crisis has led me to concentrate on democracy at the nation-state level rather than the global level.
