The Minimalist Conception of Democracy as informed by The Works of (original) (raw)
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When President Trump won the electoral college and lost the popular vote, public discourse turned its eye to evaluating this seemingly undemocratic process as part of American democracy. This essay aims to add to this discourse by arguing that, under Dahl and Schwartzberg's definitions, modern democracy cannot be understood as a procedure that aggregates individuals' preferences and uses them to generate collective decisions. This essay will attack two pillars of this definition: one, that the procedure sufficiently aggregates peoples' preferences, and two, that collective decisions meaningfully reflect peoples' preferences.
The concept of democracy is central to our contemporary political vocabularies, yet agreement on how to conceptualise democracy is far from widespread. 1 As Adam Przeworski has recently remarked: 'Perusing innumerable definitions, one discovers that democracy has become an altar on which everyone hangs his or her favorite ex voto.' (Przeworski, 1999: 24). Certainly we can say that democracy is a form of government that appeals to an idea of popular sovereignty and, hence, an answer to the question 'who rules?' -but to flesh out this answer will very quickly mire us in controversy. This point is of more than merely academic interest for two reasons. First, how we understand the concept of democracy guides our practical reflections on how to design or reform democratic institutions, it generates criteria governing what we can reasonably expect from democratic government and it animates our debates concerning political legitimacy.
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This collection builds on Robert Dahl's observation that there is no single theory of democracy; only theories. Beyond the broad commitment to rule by the majority, democracy involves a set of contentious debates concerning the proper function and scope of power, equality, freedom, justice and interests. This anthology assembles the works of classical, modern and contemporary commentators to show the deep and diverse roots of the democratic ideal, as well as to provide materials for thinking about the way some contemporary theories build on different traditions of democratic theorizing. The arguments addressed here appear in the voices of authors who have championed influential theories concerning the opportunities and dangers associated with democratic politics. Our goal in drawing these authors together is not to promote a particular way of looking at democracy, but rather to assemble key materials which will enable the reader to carry on an informed discourse on the meaning and purposes of democratic principles and practices.
What is Democracy? A Reconceptualization of the Quality of Democracy
Works on the quality of democracy propose standards for evaluating politics beyond those encompassed by a minimal definition of democracy. Yet, what is the quality of democracy? This article first reconstructs and assesses current conceptualizations of the quality of democracy. Thereafter, it reconceptualizes the quality of democracy by equating it with democracy pure and simple, positing that democracy is a synthesis of political freedom and political equality, and spelling out the implications of this substantive assumption. The proposal is to broaden the concept of democracy to address two additional spheres: government decision-making – political institutions are democratic inasmuch as a majority of citizens can change the status quo – and the social environment of politics – the social context cannot turn the principles of political freedom and equality into mere formalities. Alternative specifications of democratic standards are considered and reasons for discarding them are provided
Philosophical Forum, 2008
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to be made nothing, have no place in it." V. S Naipaul "All human action lies under the shadow of prospective regret." John Dunn 1 These remarks have as their primary focus three books which have been chosen, not because there is a single theme, or even a small number of common themes, that can be extracted from all three, but to illustrate the variety of concerns, occasionally overlapping, often disjoint, that they reveal. Of course, what they do have in common is worries about democracy: How it can be sidestepped, how it can be improved as a provider of the good life, how it can be strengthened (or weakened) at home and spread (or not spread) abroad? The three books in question, in order of discussion are: The Myth of the Rational Voter. Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan, What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government by Stein Ringen, and The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 by John Brenkman. 2 Reading books, a fortiori writing them, requires a certain melioristic streak. This needed, and probably should not, amount to full-blown optimism. Whether we face mere epistemic or indeed epistemological opacity, inexorable but unusable causality, randomness, or Taleb's black swans, 3 room for improvement remains 10 Ibid. 11 Perverseness in Raymond Boudon's sense. See his effets pervers et ordre social (Paris: Presses
It is already a commonplace to say that recent political events (usually the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections are brought into discussion) shed a skeptical light on the quality of citizens' inputs in the democratic process. For some, especially those working in the public choice tradition, these recent civic displays didn't come as news. The idea that citizens of large democracies hardly have any incentives to acquire and process political information is not a marginal prediction of this research programme, but one of its cornerstones. Given this fact, there is a feeling, especially in the ranks of public choice researchers, that contemporary democratic theory seems hardly ever bothered to engage with the empirical literature that seeks to picture how real existing democracies function and how citizens actually behave when it comes to such matters as voting or debating politics. Recent books and articles that take an issue both with this idealized account found in some conceptions of democracy and, to a certain extent, with democracy itself should, then, come as no surprise. Jason Brennan's Against Democracy (2016) stands out in this literature as a work of primarily normative democratic theory that offers a qualified argument for the superiority of a form of epistocracy over democracy.