write the arguments against democracy

Give arguments against democracy.

We can give the following arguments against democracy: (i) leaders keep changing in a democracy which leads to instability. (ii) democracy is all about political competition and power play. there is no scope for morality. (iii) delays are often made because many people have to be consulted in a democracy. (iv) elected leaders do not know the best interest of the people. it leads to bad decisions. (v) democracy leads to corruption for it is based on electoral competition..

• Democracy Is The Best Form Of Government: Arguments For And Against

• There are actually two types of democracy: direct democracy and indirect democracy.
• Democracy was born in Athens, Greece in 5th century BC.
• The 20th century was marked by an expansion in representative democracy.

What is democracy ? You probably hear this term in history or civics courses but take it for granted because it is such a common political system today. In 2013, it was reported that 123 countries in the world can be considered democracies. However, democracies were not always common. This governing system became more popular after World War I . Before the spread of democracy, colonial empires were commonplace. Colonial empires were systems of government that were ruled by kings, queens, or autocratic leaders. World War II was one of the only 20th century periods during which democracies did not expand, but many former colonies declared independence after World War II and shifted to democratic systems. 

Ancient Greek Democracy

Democracy may have become a popular way for countries to govern themselves during the 20th century, but the ideas of democracy were born in Greece . Athens, Greece operated under a democratic system in the 5th century BC, and other Greek cities and towns did the same. The idea was to have a government by the people. Direct democracy, where people met in assemblies and made decisions, was once a popular form of democracy. Direct democracy was more appropriate for smaller communities. Most countries in the world today operate under indirect democracy. People choose representatives to protect their interests in government. In either case, there are arguments for and against democracy. Many people who are for democracy say that this prevents one person from gaining too much power and becoming a dangerous authoritarian. Even so, there are people who are critical of democracy and it is worthwhile to examine why some people feel this way.

Where We Stand Today

A Pew Research Survey found that most people are in favor of a democracy, but some people would be open to alternative modes of government. Their findings show that some people would prefer a direct democracy where people govern themselves directly. However, some people actually support autocratic governments, and many people say they would be open to having a government that is run by experts who are competent. People with different levels of education favor certain types of governments over others. A country’s economic position can also affect people's opinions. Feelings about democracy can change depending on economic circumstances.

Key Definitions  

Here are some terms you should know:

• Monarchy : rule by a single person, usually because they were born into the position.
• Oligarchy : a government run by a few people.  
• Autocracy : a government with a singular head of state, usually with unlimited power.
• Fascism : a type of autocracy that puts the interests of a nation or race above others.  
• Communism : a political theory that fights against the ownership of private property, and in which things are owned by the public and available for use whenever others need them. 

Arguments for Democracy

Countries around the world embraced democracy in the 20th century, most notably after WWI and WWII. Prior to this shift, countries were ruled by oligarchies, monarchies, and self-appointed autocratic leaders. During World War II, the world saw the dangers of fascism and fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Democracy was supported because it allowed people to choose representatives with set term limits. Many citizens had seen how their countries were ravaged due to corruption and inequality caused by the rule of the few. Democracy was seen as a way to make sure no one person had too much power. Many democracies also wanted a free market. Before democracy, few people had control or say in the economy which allowed rulers and those in power to use their economic influence to silence critics or give large rewards to those who followed their lead. Democracies were seen as a way to decentralize the market, but many of the same forces that freed the market were imperative to the development of democracy. People need more resources and education in order to vote and make educated purchases or financial decisions. A free market allowed more people to improve their status, and the economic boom that occurred after WWII created favorable conditions for democracies that were born out of former dictatorships, autocracies, and monarchies.

Freedom of Speech

Experts and citizens often defend democracy because they say it allows people to speak freely and have the ability to criticize leaders they feel might not be doing what the public wants. In fascist regimes, people who criticized leaders were often punished, and many critics were tortured or executed. Philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn was a proponent of the link between democracy and free speech.  

Respect for Human Rights

Pro-democracy arguments also include a greater likelihood of respect for human rights. That is because people must vote to make changes to laws or statutes. Democratic leaders cannot solely make unilateral decisions, and there are often other branches of government that can step in if this occurs. This is supposed to encourage democratic governments to be transparent about their work. 

Checks on Power

Another common argument for democracy is that it allows citizens to be empowered to elect their representatives, which means that everyone is expected to compromise so that no one interest is considered more important. Elections are also a way to make sure leaders know there are limits to their power.

Debate and Exchange of Ideas

Democracies allow citizens to be exposed to various points of view before making their choice. This allows candidates, citizens, and stakeholders to have a proper debate about why they would better represent the people that elect them. Transparency in elections is also meant to promote peace because people are more likely to accept the results of a fairly-won election, even if the candidate that won is not the one they chose.

Arguments Against Democracy

There are also arguments against democracy. The Greek philosopher Socrates made some compelling arguments against democracy by birthright as early as 399 BC. It is important to consider the possible negatives when discussing democracy. 

Charismatic, but Unqualified Leadership

Socrates argued that people need to be equipped to vote during elections instead of going about the process without the right information. Socrates felt that people need to be rational about who they vote for, not that they should not have the right to vote. He warned that people may be swayed by leaders who seem to provide all the right answers or know what to say. Basically, Socrates said that people might vote for someone because of how the candidate makes them feel, not because the candidate is able to do the job correctly.

Democracy Might Devolve into Tyranny

Another Greek philosopher, Plato, was also critical of democracy. He examined five existing government styles and looked at the pros and cons of these systems in his famous book The Republic . His argument is that people become tired of systems such as oligarchy and then succumb to democracy because they are hungry for power. He felt that crumbling democratic societies are more easily able to transition into tyranny once democracy becomes unsustainable. 

There Might Be Reasonable Alternatives

At best, voting for the wrong person means that nothing gets done at the taxpayer’s expense. At worst, people are making an uninformed vote. Modern-day philosopher Jason Brennan echoes many of the warnings of Socrates, but he also created a new term to describe what he perceives as an ideal alternative to democracy: epistocracy. Brennan argues that people need to think about what they expect from the government and then become informed so they can choose representatives that accomplish the tasks their citizens want. He also argues for the “competence principle.” Voters should use their right and power to vote to the best of their ability in order to maintain their right to vote. Brennan also says that Singapore is a modern-day example of a technocracy . In a technocracy, experts run the government. 

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What Are Plato’s Arguments Against Democracy?

The great philosopher was famously skeptical of the rule of the people. What are Plato’s arguments against democracy?

Plato is renowned for his writings on various subjects, including ethics , knowledge , and politics . In his central work, The Republic , Plato delves into the ideal state and its governance. A part of his argument is a critique of democratic government, a form of rule that he viewed as inherently flawed and unsustainable. To understand why Plato had such reservations about democracy, we must explore his classification of government types, his critique of democracy as a regime, and the analogy he employed to argue that ruling is a skill best left to experts.

Plato’s Classification of Five Regimes

In Books VIII and IX , Plato presents a classification of government types, with aristocracy ruled by philosophers being the most ideal and resembling the perfect city-state. Alongside aristocracy, Plato identifies four other forms of government: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. Timocracy refers to the rule of a few individuals who prioritize honor and glory as the highest virtues. Oligarchy involves the rule of a few where wealth serves as the primary criterion for attaining power. Democracy represents majority rule, where freedom and equality hold paramount importance in political positions. Lastly, tyranny represents an entirely unjust form of rule where the whims of a single ruler become law for the subjects.

Plato’s classification suggests a causal sequence where the regimes appear to arise from one another, with a descending order from a value standpoint. It appears as if the ideal regime succumbs to timarchy, which then leads to the emergence of oligarchy and so forth. Timarchy and oligarchy are considered less just than aristocracy, while democracy and tyranny are generally regarded as unjust regimes, with tyranny being the worst form.

Plato’s classification of government types is based on the notion that there is only one good regime and that all others are deviations from that absolute ideal. Aristotle would later criticize Plato’s classification, deeming it insufficiently comprehensive and overly abstract. Aristotle advocated for value realism, asserting the existence of objectively superior regimes while recognizing that practical social realities dictate the feasible forms of government. Nevertheless, Plato’s typology is particularly interesting due to its reflection of his views on democracy.

Is Democracy Unsustainable?

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According to Plato, the emergence of democracy from oligarchy occurs when the poorer class revolts against the wealthy minority. This revolt is typically led by someone who betrays the oligarchic class but possesses the talent to rule and manipulate people, often through persuasive speeches. This individual is known as a demagogue. With a demagogue at the helm, the masses seize power, often through violence, killing some, expelling others, and forcing the remainder to coexist. In this regime, everyone is granted equal rights to everything — it is a regime in which the government is chosen by lot . Naturally, Plato’s description is primarily inspired by the Athenian democracy of his time, and he highlights everything that he considered to be problematic with it.

Democracy, as Plato describes it, is characterized by equality and freedom, but also the right to publicly say whatever comes to one’s mind, as well as the right to lead a life as one wants. Democracy fosters a wide array of lifestyles, and because of that, every other form of government can be found in democracy to a certain extent. This occurs because individuals in a democratic society are not guided by an understanding of what is truly good. Instead, they succumb to the notion that all pleasures hold equal value. Consequently, they lack the ability to discipline their lives and mindlessly pursue the satisfaction of every desire and passion that arises within them or is propagated by demagogues as the common good. Rather than leading to knowledge, this pursuit of freedom distances individuals from wisdom.

Plato argues that democracy lacks restrictions, making it inferior to oligarchy, where certain limitations exist. In a democracy, no one is compelled to rule or be politically engaged if they choose not to be. Freedom is paramount in this regime: even during times of war, a democratic citizen can peacefully abstain from participating in the defense of the city. Additionally, the relationships between ruler and subjects, parents and children, and teachers and students are undefined and often interchangeable in a democratic society. Plato asserts that democracy is always susceptible to the danger of a demagogue who rises to power by pleasing the crowd and, in doing so, commits terrible acts of immorality and depravity. This ultimately leads to the complete collapse of the democratic order, which results in tyranny. Tyrannies arise when powerful groups or individuals separate themselves from the democratic regime and become uncontrollable forces.

The Overview of Plato’s Argument Against Democracy

Plato’s critique of democracy finds its foundation at an earlier point in the Republic , specifically in Book VI. The principle of specialization, which Plato introduces when constructing the ideal city in Book II, contributes to his thesis that philosophers are best suited to rule . In this ideal city, each citizen is assigned a specific role, one that aligns with their abilities and for which they have received training. Whether they are farmers, artisans, doctors, cooks, or soldiers, they are expected to contribute to the community’s well-being solely in their designated capacity. From this foundational principle, an implicit conclusion arises: ordinary workers, constituting the electorate in any democracy, should refrain from involvement in political decision-making. Instead, political rule should be reserved for those who possess the necessary abilities and education that enable them to excel in governance.

Plato’s argument can be summarized as follows: Ruling is a skill, and it is rational to entrust the exercise of skills to experts. In a democracy, power lies with the people, who, by definition, are not experts in ruling. Consequently, Plato concludes that democracy is inherently irrational.

Plato’s Republic delves into the question of how one should lead their life, which is essentially an ethical inquiry concerning individual behavior and existence. However, from the very beginning of the dialogue, it becomes evident that this extends beyond personal conduct and touches upon fairness and justice in the state’s organization. According to Plato, ethical and political issues are interconnected, with the study of governance being an extension of understanding virtuous living.

Throughout the dialogue, Plato defends the analogy between the state and the human soul. He suggests that by envisioning a just and well-structured state, one can gain insight into the nature of justice in an individual’s life. The state is like a magnified version of the soul, allowing us to apply the understanding of justice on a grander scale to an individual level. A properly functioning state, just like a healthy soul, is one where the different parts are perfectly balanced and work in harmony with each other.

Plato emphasizes the internal unity of both the political state and an individual’s personality. Just as the state comprises various parts, so does the human soul. A well-ordered state and a morally upright individual share the trait of harmonious components. Such harmony leads to a healthy and just society, which should be the ultimate aspiration of both individual and collective actions.

Plato’s Analogy: Ruling as a Skill

Plato’s analysis is deeply rooted in the notion of division of labor and the principle of specialization. He concludes that fairness in the state can be achieved when each person fulfills their role according to their natural talents, education, and training. This principle of specialization dictates that members of each social class should focus solely on their designated work and refrain from interfering with the tasks of other classes. The ruling, he claims, should be left to those who possess the knowledge of good — the philosophers.

Thus, Plato’s argument against democracy is ultimately built upon an analogy. He draws attention to the various social roles that contribute to the common good, such as farming, cooking, and house-building. All jobs that serve the common good require specific training and preparation. Similarly, political tasks like selecting officers, participating in the assembly, and presiding over courtroom cases also contribute to the common good. People in these positions require specialized training and expertise to excel at their respective tasks. Therefore, those who acquire the necessary political qualifications are the most likely to perform these tasks effectively, or at least better than others. Consequently, Plato asserts that individuals should refrain from participating in politics unless they have undergone the required training and acquired the relevant political skills.

The Relevance of Plato’s Argument

Despite the fact that Plato wrote with ancient Athenian democracy in mind, the core of his argument can be applied to modern-day democracies as well. Today, there are still those who believe that crowds of people lack political skills and that politics should be left to a select few. In response to Plato’s anti-democratic critique of rule by the many, a defender of democracy might raise an argument put forth by Aristotle in Politics , which has also been revisited in modern times. The essence of this response lies in the belief that a large group can collectively possess greater wisdom than a small one. This notion is analogous to how a group of less wealthy individuals, when united, can collectively become richer than a single wealthy person. By pooling together their limited knowledge, the group forms a vast body of information from smaller bits, yielding a potentially wiser and more informed decision-making process.

A more radical response to Plato’s critique of democracy can be found among democrats who argue in favor of granting political power to individuals, even when they may not be highly qualified to wield it effectively. They emphasize that there are more profound considerations in politics beyond mere decision-making effectiveness. According to them, the process of how decisions are made holds greater moral significance. Thus, they assert that democratic decision-making possesses a decisive advantage solely because of its inherent fairness. Consequently, Plato’s anti-democratic argument remains relevant in contemporary times, and the majority of modern democratic theory revolves around providing diverse responses to counter his viewpoint.

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By Miljan Vasic MA Philosophy, BA Philosphy Miljan is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy whose primary areas of research include political philosophy, social epistemology, and the history of social choice. He is especially interested in various quirks of democracy, both ancient and modern. He holds BA and MA degrees in Philosophy from the University of Belgrade.

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The Case Against Democracy

By Caleb Crain

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.

Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.

First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so.

The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?”

It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation.

By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie.

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In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”

Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character.

Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy feeling of altruism can be had cheap.

Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says Brennan: it’s multiple choice, so hardly expressive. “If you’re upset, write a poem,” Brennan counselled in an earlier book, “The Ethics of Voting” (2011). He was equally unimpressed by the argument that it’s one’s duty to vote. “It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.” In fact, he suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote.

Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated experts have been confident about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous—invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on.

How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get specific, which is understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes. He sketches some options—extra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats with veto power, a qualifying exam for voters—but he doesn’t spend much time considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed by Brennan himself in “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers.

Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s proposal. Suppose I claim that pixies always make selfless, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should entrust our government to pixies. If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts.

While we’re on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that there’s an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women. “Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam,” he admits, but he’s undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites.

That’s an awfully fine distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent. Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something doesn’t tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise.

Like many people I know, I’ve spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in terror. The flawed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion. But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something?

Political scientists have long hoped to find an “invisible hand” in politics comparable to the one that Adam Smith described in economics. Voter ignorance wouldn’t matter much if a democracy were able to weave individual votes into collective political wisdom, the way a market weaves the self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent collective allocation of resources. But, as Brennan reports, the mathematical models that have been proposed work only if voter ignorance has no shape of its own—if, for example, voters err on the side of liberalism as often as they err on the side of conservatism, leaving decisions in the hands of a politically knowledgeable minority in the center. Unfortunately, voter ignorance does seem to have a shape. The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.

It’s possible, though, that democracy works even though political scientists have failed to find a tidy equation to explain it. It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut, letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of candidates’ qualifications and policy stances. Brennan doubts that voters understand party stereotypes well enough to do even this, but surely a shortcut needn’t be perfect to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.” Brennan argues that voters don’t know enough to do this, either. To impose full accountability, he writes, voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards.” Most don’t know all this, of course. Somin points out that voters have punished incumbents for droughts and shark attacks and rewarded them for recent sports victories. Caplan dismisses retrospective voting, quoting a pair of scholars who call it “no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not flood.”

But even if retrospective voting is sloppy, and works to the chagrin of the occasional pharaoh, that doesn’t necessarily make it valueless. It might, for instance, tend to improve elected officials’ policy decisions. Maybe all it takes is for a politician to worry that she could be the unlucky chump who gets punished for something she actually did. Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents’ future happiness as well as their present gratification might be motivated to give them better policies than they know to ask for. In such a case, he predicts, voters will feel a perennial dissatisfaction, stemming from the tendency of their canniest and most long-lasting politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises. Sound familiar?

When the Founding Fathers designed the federal system, not paying too much attention to voters was a feature, not a bug. “There are particular moments in public affairs,” Madison warned, “when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” Brennan, for all his cleverness, sometimes seems to be struggling to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” writing as if voters need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves, when, in most modern democracies, voters usually delegate that task. It’s when they don’t, as in California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, that disaster is especially likely to strike. The economist Joseph Schumpeter didn’t think democracy could even function if voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections. “Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them,” he wrote, in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1942). The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from “political back-seat driving.”

Why do we vote, and is there a reason to do it or a duty to do it well? It’s been said that voting enables one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat. Brennan thinks that such participation is worthless if what you value about participation is the chance to influence an election’s outcome; odds are, you won’t. Yet he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, as when a parent whose spouse willingly handles all child care still feels compelled to help out. Brennan claims that no comparable duty to take part exists with voting, because other kinds of good actions can take voting’s place. He believes, in other words, that voting is part of a larger market in civic virtue, the way that farming is part of a larger market in food, and he goes so far as to suggest that a businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesn’t seem persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil.

More than once, Brennan compares uninformed voting to air pollution. It’s a compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected. But though the incentive for duty may be weakened, it’s not clear that the duty itself is lightened. The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome. It’s worth noting, too, that if judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. Clean air is a commons, an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence; farming is part of a market.

But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands. But the nature of the duty may be similar, because what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes, in an election, democracy itself is in danger. If a soldier were to calculate his personal value to the campaign that his army is engaged in, he could easily conclude that the cost of showing up at the front isn’t worth it, even if he factors in the chance of being caught and punished for desertion. The trouble is that it’s impossible to know in advance of a battle which side will prevail, let alone by how great a margin, especially if morale itself is a variable. The lack of certainty about the future makes a hash of merely prudential calculation. It’s said that most soldiers worry more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about allegiance to an entity as abstract as the nation, and maybe voters, too, feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. ♦

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Against Democracy

Jason Brennan, Against Democracy , Princeton University Press, 2016, 288pp., $18.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691178493.

Reviewed by Thomas Christiano, University of Arizona

Jason Brennan's book is a lively and entertaining exploration of an important pair of questions: (1) how can democracies work when the citizens who are supposed to rule are not very well informed about the substance and form of government and policy? and, (2) can we do better with non-democratic government? The basic difficulty with Brennan's discussion is that he is inclined to proceed from a poorly understood micro-theory of democracy to conclusions about how well democracy works. He doesn't always hold to this -- indeed there are times when he suggests that democracies overall work pretty well and then wonders how this is possible -- but the main thrust of the book starts from the micro-theory, which is simply not strong enough to bear the weight of his argument.

The basic structure of the argument is that individuals in democracies have very little if any power in collective decision-making and so have very little incentive to become well-informed about matters of collective concern. As a consequence, some are simply completely uninformed, while others are informed but highly irresponsible users of information, since there are no opportunity costs. Both of these groups participate in politics, though the second more than the first. These people are all incompetent but for somewhat different reasons. The first group know nothing, while the second, knowing a bit but being carried away by emotions connected with a kind of tribal partisanship, tend towards highly biased ideas and are unwilling to listen to others. Brennan calls these two groups 'hobbits' and 'hooligans' (pp. 4-5). Since democracy is understood to be rule by ordinary people, the idea is that democracy involves rule by hobbits and hooligans (mostly the latter) and the consequence is incompetent rule.

But the problems do not end there. Brennan's further claim is that democracy tends to encourage people who actively participate to be hooligans and thus to turn their political opponents into enemies. People who might otherwise be friends or engage in productive economic interaction turn out to hate each other and thus give up the opportunity to engage in these interactions (p. 230). Hence we have the combination of incompetent rule and lost economic and other associational opportunities. Here, Brennan reverses the two main arguments Mill offered in favor of democracy and returns to Hobbes's and Plato's arguments against democracy. Brennan supports his position with a diverse body of evidence. There are election studies that attempt to measure people's political knowledge and consistently show that political knowledge is sorely lacking among American citizens (pp. 25-26). There is evidence suggesting that the processes of deliberation on which many have pinned hopes of a democratic revival can often actually exacerbate conflict among persons and increase the levels of their biases (pp. 62-67). There is some evidence suggesting the presence of the process called 'group polarization' in deliberative contexts.

Brennan seems to undergird these observations with a version of Anthony Downs' theory of how citizens economize on information-gathering costs. This version of Downs' view asserts that since the chance of having any significant impact on the outcome of an election is so small, people have very little incentive to know much about politics because the value of such knowledge is so heavily discounted by the small chance of an impact. This is thought to explain the hobbits. The hooligans, who are informed to some extent, are explained by tribalism as it applies to persons of one's own political persuasion. This explanation suggests that people develop their views irresponsibly and without regard to other views, while demonizing people of other persuasions. The quality of thinking is pretty low, or so Brennan infers.

To be sure, Brennan recognizes that the above reasoning has limits since he affirms that people generally participate in politics in order to pursue the common good. This introduces a great deal of vagueness into the discussion because though the chance of having an impact is very small, the size of the impact could be enormous to me if I am seriously interested in the common good and think that one alternative has a significant advantage with respect to the common good. How strong is the inclination to be concerned with the common good? If it is pretty strong, then the purported explanation of hobbits and hooligans loses steam. If it is strong with some people and not with others, then we have a lot of uncertain effects. These issues are not pursued or even broached.

Now we might think that the evidence supports the hooligans and hobbits hypothesis but here Brennan tends systematically to overplay the negative evidence and underplay the more positive evidence. The researchers that he refers to in support of his claims tend to take much more nuanced positions than Brennan does. The evidence on deliberation is usually described as "mixed", not as all or even mostly negative. It is negative relative to the hopes of some deliberative theorists perhaps. But the researchers seem to see a fair amount of positive effects of deliberation and they emphasize the sensitivity of the quality of deliberation to context and recommend that the design of deliberative institutions take this into account. Of course, for the most part, researchers on these subjects tend to emphasize how little we still know about deliberative processes. Furthermore, the evidence of deliberative polls and mini-publics, which Brennan mentions and then passes over mostly in silence, has tended to show quite positive effects of having people at least listen to diverse groups of experts.

Brennan also spends far too little time on one form of information-economizing that Downs and more recent political scientists have discussed and analyzed with some care: the process of information shortcuts. People use shortcuts in all walks of life and in every aspect of their lives. Going to the doctor is a shortcut compared to studying for the rest of my life how my body works. Going to a mechanic is a shortcut compared to learning a lot about how cars work. In a society with such a complex division of labor such as our own, economic life and political life would grind to a halt if it were required that people know a lot about the things they depend on. It is well known that people are strikingly ignorant of what is in their toothpaste, their cars, their financial arrangements, and their bodies, just to start an endless list. Does this mean that they act on the basis of no information? No. It implies that they act on the basis of other people's beliefs and statements about these matters while not knowing or even understanding the bases of those beliefs. If they really had to figure those things out on their own, they would not have the time to do their jobs or take care of their families. Furthermore, people rely on other people to act as alarm bells when a given shortcut is not working well. Given each person's reliance on others' beliefs, the big question is this: are economic and political relations between persons arranged so that the shortcuts they use to determine how to act and to signal that some of their other shortcuts are failing can actually help them navigate well through life?

Let us briefly consider the evidence about political ignorance. It tends to show that somewhere between one-third to two-thirds of people give incorrect answers to certain significant questions about politics. The methodology of these surveys can be and has been questioned of course. But even if the methodology is right, the surveys do not show that people's actions are based on bad information. Because, as Downs argues, they may be acting on the basis of their well-informed friends' views or the views of opinion leaders they trust, and so may not be able to answer questions because they rely on others. To be sure, this is risky because the shortcuts may be corrupt, but the system has other shortcuts, sometimes called 'alarm bells', for determining this as well. There are some people who know a lot about some given area and they blow the whistle on charlatans. That this kind of activity is going on and that it is based on a large scale institutional structure that is designed to generate information is made plain by the huge investment in the generation of knowledge that goes on in democratic societies and the great investment made to package that information in ways that are easily digested and useable by ordinary citizens. Newspapers, universities, think tanks, more specialized magazines, academic journals and the operations of political parties and partisan interest groups make no sense unless this process is going on. I do not want to say all is well, but I do want to say that the micro-theory that Brennan utilizes is woefully underpowered for figuring out what is going on in democratic societies. Here I think those theorists who take their inspiration from Downs' idea of rational ignorance should go back and look carefully at the really interesting theory he generates about the processes of information transmission in a democratic society.

Why is all this a problem for Brennan's approach? The answer starts from the observation that the modern democratic societies of Europe, North America, and East Asia have actually been quite successful; and the democratic element in them is a large part of what seems to explain that. First, there is a great deal of data marking out the remarkable differences between reasonably high quality democracies and other kinds of societies. Brennan mentions these but I don't think he takes the full measure of the evidence. Democracies do not go to war with one another and respect the rules of war better than other societies.  They are responsible for the creation of the international trade system, the international environmental law system, and the human rights regime.  In fact, democracies do massively better on basic human rights than other societies, and it appears to be more their majoritarian character that explains this than their systems of checks and balances. Democracies prevent famines and, since the onset of universal suffrage, have developed powerful welfare states that have been enormously productive, have greatly reduced poverty, and have smoothed out the disastrous economic crises that occurred in their more free market ancestor societies.  Further, they have generally protected the interests of workers and lower economic classes, done a better job at producing public goods than other societies and generally have higher rates of per capita growth than their free market ancestors. Most of us hope for much more progress than this, but these achievements are extraordinary and are hard to square with the idea that hooligans and hobbits are at the helm.

Admittedly, Brennan's argument is comparative. He argues that democracy may do less well than what he calls "epistocracy" or rule by experts or knowers. And he pleads that there have been no epistocracies, so we don't really know how the comparison would go. But this is not quite true. We have had experience of societies that thought of themselves as epistocracies. One example is the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and another is the People's Republic of China. Here the ruling elites claim to know better than others the true interests of the members of society (what else could an epistocracy be but a self-proclaimed one?) And these were societies devoted to the welfares of their populations, at least ostensibly. They were mostly disasters on all the grounds mentioned above. The People's Republic of China may do better in some ways. I guess we'll see. But we have other evidence as well. After all, the limited franchise of European societies in the nineteenth century could be and was justified on epistocratic grounds. The wealthy and propertied classes held power while workers and peasants did not. The former group were well educated while the latter were not, and the former group claimed to act for the good of all. What happened? They were much poorer, they experienced famines and slower rates of per capita growth, and they violently suppressed the rights of their working populations. Obviously these societies were in earlier stages of development so the evidence is unclear, but it would be useful to consider these cases as possible instances of the sort of thing Brennan is proposing.

Two things stand out from this comparison. First, democratic societies are pretty competently run and comparatively successful and nonviolent. Second, the success cannot be attributed merely to elites acting well. The success is owed in significant part to the fact that democratic societies are responsive to the interests of their most vulnerable populations. This suggests that the lower economic strata are having some kind of influence on the functioning of these governments that ensures the protection of their basic interests and that they would not see this kind of protection if they were not included. The evidence is not conclusive, but it is enough to make one seriously question the thesis that the society is run by hobbits and hooligans. It does suggest that the rather limited micro-theory on which Brennan relies is probably off course and that a lot more attention needs to be paid to the fine grain of democratic institutions, formal and informal.

The point that democracies work well in part by giving lower income and minority groups power is important to stress. Brennan seems to work on the unargued assumption that democracy doesn't do any good for the less well off and minorities because they tend to be less well informed. It seems plausible to think that less information leads to less power, as Downs asserted. But the macro-level evidence rather strongly suggests that the less well off and minorities are benefitted at least by reasonably high quality democracies. I think this is an essential part of any justification of democracy, whether it is of its intrinsic or its instrumental value. Democracy has intrinsic value to the extent that it distributes power widely to all the sectors of society. The intrinsic value is the value of the equal distribution of the instrumentally valuable political power.

By the way, the symbolic value of democracy as expressing the equal status of persons also depends on this instrumental value. Here Brennan stumbles; he seems to think that there are people who think that democracy can have value merely by having laws that assert that people are equal regardless of the effects on people's lives (p. 128). But the arguments of Rawls and myself assume that the expressive value piggy-backs on instrumental value. The idea is that if having political power enables people to advance their interests, then depriving them of that political power expresses the idea that their interests are of little or no consequence. Now, one might ask: what do the intrinsic value and the expressive values add? They add something because there is a great deal of indeterminacy in determining how much people's legitimate interests are being advanced, even though it is clear that political power does advance interests. The egalitarian intrinsic value presupposes the instrumental value but cannot be entirely replaced by it. The reason for the indeterminacy is another feature that Brennan's discussion gives far too little weight to: the fact that there is a great deal of disagreement about what is a proper way to treat people as free and equal in the substance of policy. As a consequence there is not enough society-wide agreement to determine when people are being treated as equals or not. The way to resolve the society-wide disagreement is by giving people an equal amount of political power, which is known to help people advance their interests. It is no objection to this view to say, as Brennan does, that people are actually concerned with the common good and not with advancing their interests. We can all agree on this and that people have duties to advance the common good, but we can still recognize the ubiquitous facts of persons' biases towards conceptions of the common good that are connected with their own interests and distinctive experiences in society. This is why, while everyone has a duty to advance the common good, they also have an interest in doing this in a context in which they have equal power. And it is why a system that fails to accord equal power is publicly treating some groups as inferiors.

If the above is right, then Brennan's suggestion that the worse off ought to be deprived of the vote or of equal power because they are less well informed seems to involve taking from those who have less and giving to those who have more. Any society that actually does this strongly suggests that the interests of these people matter less, and that suggestion is attached to a high probability that their interests will be neglected at best and at worst pushed aside when there is conflict. One possible solution to the problem of worse off people being less well informed is to design institutions that help them get better informed. Brennan notes but does not do much to try to understand why it is that affluent people are better informed about politics than the less affluent. This is a quite systematic phenomenon in modern democracies. Downs thinks this is partly explained by their superior education, partly by the fact that the opportunity cost of becoming informed is lower for affluent people. But another key factor is that most affluent people receive a lot of free political information (information about politics that is a byproduct of other activities) at work, normally because their work often interacts with the government. Education is a good place to start with, but it will not solve the problem of political information. What is needed are institutions that disseminate what Downs calls 'free information' to ordinary people. Many working class people have had this kind of free information to some extent through unions, especially in the third quarter of the twentieth century. But in the US, the UK and France, unions have been losing a great deal of ground, which may be why right-wing nationalists have gained more ground in these societies than in northern European societies. The point here is not that there is an easy fix but rather that there are things that have been done and can be done to improve the information of less affluent people, and their interests are genuinely at stake in this.

Brennan employs another argument that briefly shows up at different points in his discussion without receiving much critical attention. This is the argument that political power involves having an impact on other people while economic activities are primarily self-regarding. So even if people are ignorant in economic life as much as they are in political life, economic ignorance only affects the person who is ignorant (p. 238). But this is profoundly implausible. External effects of action are ubiquitous in economic life even though they are not very much in evidence in the a priori world of the early chapters of a book on "basic economics". Furthermore, since economic interaction takes place entirely in imperfect markets, asymmetries of information and inequalities of bargaining power give some people the power to determine much more of the content of the agreements they enter into than others. And the cumulative effects of many other people's actions in a market on my well-being is enormous. If they act stupidly or corruptly, as in the last economic crisis, this has a great impact on everyone's lives. I suppose the leaders of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union thought that this was adequate reason to try to have experts run the economic system. But the experience of epistocracy in the case of markets was as bad as the case of epistocracy with regard to public goods.

In sum, Brennan asks a really important question, but he doesn't frame it very well. He relies on a very simple micro-theory to suggest that democracies are not very successful societies and then asks whether epistocracy can do better. The right question is: how is it possible for democracies to work reasonably well, even for the worst off, when they must make use of an extensive division of cognitive labor that requires that the driving power of the system not be very well informed? Perhaps if we can figure out the answer to this question, we can also figure out how to make democracies work better.

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Epistocracy: a political theorist’s case for letting only the informed vote

A political theorist’s provocative idea for how to fix democracy.

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In 2016, Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan published a controversial book, Against Democracy . He argued that democracy is overrated — that it isn’t necessarily more just than other forms of government, and that it doesn’t empower citizens or create more equitable outcomes.

According to Brennan, we’d be better off if we replaced democracy with a form of government known as “epistocracy.” Epistocracy is a system in which the votes of people who can prove their political knowledge count more than the votes of people who can’t. In other words, it’s a system that privileges the most politically informed citizens.

Brennan’s proposal sounds like a grandiose troll, but it’s not. His book is a serious critique of the moral and structural foundations of democracy.

The book got a bit of attention from the usual suspects when it first came out , but it didn’t go much further than that, and I confess I completely missed it at the time. I have strong objections to Brennan’s proposal, but his argument is interesting enough to justify a discussion. So I reached out to him a few weeks ago and asked him to make the case for “epistocracy.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Why is an “epistocracy” preferable to a democracy?

Jason Brennan

We know that an unfortunate side effect of democracy is that it incentivizes citizens to be ignorant, irrational, tribalistic, and to not use their votes in very serious ways. So this is an attempt to correct for that pathology while keeping what’s good about a democratic system.

We have to ask ourselves what we think government is actually for. Some people think it has the value a painting has, which is to say that it’s symbolic. In that view, you might think, “We should have democracy because it’s a way of civilizing and expressing the idea that all of us have equal value.”

There’s another way of looking at government, which is that it’s a tool, like a hammer, and the purpose of politics is to generate just and good outcomes, to generate efficiency and stability, and to avoid mistreating people. So if you think government is for that purpose, and I do, then you have to wonder if we should pick the form of government that best delivers the goods, whatever that might be.

There’s a lot to unspool there, and I’m with you so far — we should care most about outcomes. But first, let’s clarify a key point on which your argument rests. You seem to believe that voting is a form of power. When citizens vote, they’re exercising power over others, and if they wield that power arbitrarily or incompetently, they’ve negated their right to vote. Is that a fair characterization?

Yes, I call this the “competence principle.” The idea is that anyone or any deliberative body that exercises power over anyone else has an obligation to use that power in good faith, and has the obligation to use that power competently. If they’re not going to use it in good faith, and they’re not going to use it competently, that’s a claim against them having any kind of authority or any kind of legitimacy.

I’ll circle back to the competence principle in a second. Tell me why we should expect the citizens you exclude from the democratic process to submit to rule by epistocrats. Do you not expect resistance to such a proposal?

Two points here. First, there’s this idea that only democracy can be seen as legitimate, and that if you have a nondemocratic system, people will rebel against it. I’m not that worried about that. When you read studies about conformity, or studies about deference to authority, or about how people in nondemocratic countries perceive their governments, you find that people tend to think whatever system they have is legitimate.

Russia has a very corrupt system, and yet people there have surprisingly positive views of their government. People in China tend to view their government as legitimate, even when they’re being surveyed outside of China and they’re not going to get caught or hurt if they say something negative about their government.

So, if anything, I think what makes people think their government is legitimate and authoritative is simply that they’re used to it.

That said, not every form of epistocracy involves excluding people. You could, for example, have a system where you only get to vote if you pass a test, and that’s probably the worst way to do it. But there are other ways to do epistocracy that don’t involve this kind of exclusion.

Are there any examples of epistocracies, today or previously, that you can point to as successful models?

Technically speaking, no. There was a time in British history ( from around 1600 until 1950 ) where people who had college degrees would get an extra vote, but this was a stupid idea. It pains me to say this as an educator, but it turns out that university education has very little impact on how much people know. In general, college-educated people know more than non-college-educated people, but it’s not the college that’s making the difference.

People love to celebrate ancient Athens as a wonderful example of direct democracy, but they’re really talking about a form of epistocracy. That’s because only a very small number of people were actually voting, and they were the most educated members of society — the people who had the most political knowledge and the time to spend working on politics.

When you look at Singapore, I would call that more of a technocracy than an epistocracy, but you do have a system that is being run by elites for the common good.

Is there any fair way to determine who is and isn’t competent? Whoever defines the criteria has an immense amount of power in society, and the potential for abuse seems almost unavoidable. Although I know you’re against voting tests, I’m thinking here of racist literacy tests and poll taxes used in the Jim Crow South to keep black people from voting. Do you not worry about this kind of abuse?

Yeah, I do. Every kind of political system is abused, and we should guard against that. Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. But when you vote, you do three things.

First, you tell us what you want. You cast your vote for a politician, or for a party, or you take a position on a referendum, whatever it might be. Second, you tell us who you are. We get your demographic information, which is anonymously coded, because that stuff affects how you vote and what you support.

And the third thing you do is take a quiz of very basic political knowledge. When we have those three bits of information, we can then statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it was fully informed.

Under this system, it’s not really the case that you have more power than I do. We can’t really point to any individual and say you were excluded, or your vote counted for more. The idea is to gauge what the public would actually want if it had all the information it needed.

Okay, I’ve got a few issues with that, but let’s stick to the original question, which is who determines the criteria? Who decides what goes on that test?

People will try to manipulate that test for their own benefit. Republicans might want to make the test exclude certain groups; the Democrats will want to make the test exclude certain groups, or weigh certain issues.

So here’s my paradoxical-sounding idea: Let democracy decide what goes on the test. Randomly select, say, 500 citizens. Pay them a bunch of money and pass a law that says they can take time off from work without any kind of detriment to their career. Let them deliberate with one another, let them work together. They get to decide what’s going to go on the test. And then we use that test to weigh votes.

Why should we expect them to know the answers to this imagined test?

This sounds weird, but it’s really not. If you survey people and ask them what it takes to be an informed voter, they say the same kinds of things I would say, but you quickly find out that many of them don’t know the answers.

If I ask my 10-year-old son what he should look for in a spouse, he’d be surprisingly good at giving you a sensible answer about what makes for a good spouse. But no one thinks he’s competent right now to actually pick a spouse, or get married.

Voters know in the abstract what they ought to know; they just don’t actually know the things they think they should.

Let’s return to the “competence principle.” Why does the right to competent government trump other fundamental rights, like the right to participate in the democratic process?

I think the real question is why should we assume there’s a right to participate in democratic process? It’s actually quite weird and different from a lot of other rights we seem to have.

We have the right to choose our partner, to choose our religion, to choose what we’re going to eat, where we live, what job we’ll do, etc. While some of these things do impose costs on others, they’re primarily about carving out a sphere of autonomy for the individual, and about preventing other people from having control over you.

A right to participate in politics seems fundamentally different because it involves imposing your will upon other people. So I’m not sure that any of us should have that kind of right, at least not without any responsibilities.

But voting is not merely about imposing our will upon another. A lot of democratic theory holds that participation in the political process empowers the individual. Now, you claim this is wrong because the individual’s vote is meaningless and therefore voting is really about group empowerment. But isn’t it true that the individual is empowered when a group that shares their interests gains more political power? Isn’t the individual empowered through the group?

I would say that if a group that shares your interests takes power, then you will be empowered in the sense that your interests will be promoted. I’m not sure you’re empowered in the sense that you’re getting your way.

This is a weird metaphor, but imagine I couldn’t move my arms because they were tied. But then you were to give me coffee whenever I wanted it. That’s kind of what’s going on in a democracy: I’m still getting the coffee, and that’s awesome, but I’m not actually responsible for the coffee getting into my mouth — you’re the one that’s doing it.

No matter how you look at it, it’s really the group that has the power, not the individual, even if we’re in the group that has the power.

That’s a peculiar understanding of self-empowerment, but I don’t want to go down that theoretical rabbit hole. Part of your argument in the book is this idea that democratic politics undercuts social cooperation because it fuels identity-based conflicts. But I’d argue that social divides are byproducts of real and unavoidable differences in values and power. Could you just as easily argue that democracy provides a constructive means to channel these fundamental differences?

My worry is that people too often vote for basically arbitrary or historical reasons that have little to do with interests or ideologies. Certain identity groups get attached to certain parties and that’s just the way it is.

So I’m Boston Irish — that’s my identity. Because I’m Boston Irish, that predicts my loyalty to the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox. And it’s true — I’m a fan of both teams. It also predicts that I’m going to vote Democrat, even if I don’t know anything about the Democrats, or have no political beliefs.

And you find that, overwhelmingly, people with that identity will be assigned to the Democratic Party, even if they have no idea what the Democratic Party supports, and even if, when you ask them their opinion, it turns out their opinion more closely matches Republicans, or Libertarians, or Socialists, than it does Democrats. But they vote that way anyway.

So I tend to think that for the majority of people, your political affiliation is kind of like your sports team affiliation. And in the US, at least, sports team affiliations are not really that antagonistic. When I see a Yankees fan, I think, “Fuck the Yankees,” but I’m not looking to fight anyone. And I’ve been in Yankee Stadium wearing Red Sox gear and no one tries to beat me up. It’s just kind of a fun way to channel this divisiveness.

But in the political space, especially in the age of social media, we’re all engaged in constant grandstanding and the nastiness and division is ratcheted up all the time. Political division has gotten so dysfunctional and so ugly that it’s crippling to democracy.

Look, I’m sympathetic to much of what you’re saying, but let’s step back and try to get a little perspective. Democracy has always been a mess, and yet the democratic world has, over time, gotten more wealthy, more stable, and more tolerant. So democracy is self-evidently not a disaster. Why should we expect an epistocracy to produce a better outcome?

That’s a very good question. I like to say I’m a fan of democracy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maiden, but I think Iron Maiden has quite a few albums that are terrible — and I think democracy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best system we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.

We might recognize that it’s better than anything else we’ve tried, and yet we can also see that there are all these persistent pathologies that exist, and so we should be asking, “How can we fix them?” We should be constantly experimenting and discovering what works and what doesn’t.

So epistocracy is just an idea, an attempt to do even better than we’re currently doing. There’s a lot at stake. We’ve eliminated a lot of problems. We have equal rights for LGBTQ people now; we treat African Americans better than we used to, though still much worse than we should. Women have more rights. We’ve reduced poverty. These are all good things.

But we’ve also bombed lots of countries and committed atrocities and engaged in all sorts of injustices at home and abroad. We can always do better.

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Arguing For Democracy

Vanderbilt philosophers Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse discuss their handbook for political disagreement

By Paul V. Griffith | May 12, 2023

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In conjunction with Humanities Tennessee’s exhibition tour of Voices and Votes: Democracy in America , Chapter 16 is revisiting coverage of notable books on civil rights and the foundations of a democratic society. This interview originally appeared on February 7, 2014. 

Winston Churchill once claimed that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. According to Vanderbilt philosophy professors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, it doesn’t have to be that way. While granting the current abysmal state of political deliberation among professionals and laypersons alike, they maintain that proper argument is fundamental to both cognitive and democratic health. In Why We Argue (and How We Should) , Aikin and Talisse set ground rules for productive democratic disagreement.

“Democracy is the social and political manifestation of our individual aspiration to manage our cognitive lives according to reasons,” they write. The failings of contemporary democracy, it follows, can be traced to our inability to engage appropriately in political debate. By wallowing in a host of dialectical fallacies—most of which paint the opposition as stupid, out of touch, or worse––contemporary political debate quickly devolves into distraction and distortion, leaving the fruit of democratic compromise to rot on the tree. The solution, say Aikin and Talisse, can be found in reasonable public debate. Only by addressing our opponent’s reasons, as opposed to our opponent herself, and by giving a proper hearing to those reasons can we foster the reciprocity upon which democracy depends.

Chapter 16 : You make the case that democracy and reasoned argument are inseparable. In a democracy, are people who vote according to their heart a liability?

Talisse : It all depends on what precisely is meant by “voting with your heart.” You’re correct that Scott and I argue that democracy is the political manifestation of the basic aspiration to be rational; in short, democracy provides the social and political background necessary for pursuing our rational aims. The most basic aim that we have is to believe what is true and reject what is false. But it turns out that we can pursue that aim only within a social and political environment that enables us to believe on the basis of our best reasons. In order to base our beliefs on good reasons, each of us needs access to reliable sources of information, data, and evidence. Additionally, we need more: we need to deal rationally with disagreement ; we need to manage conflicts among rational creatures. And this means that we need to argue well in order to pursue our most basic aspirations.

In Why We Argue (And How We Should) , Scott and I argue that we need a democratic society in order to be rational as individuals. But, as your question reveals, there’s the rub. In a democratic society, citizens may participate, and even vote, in almost any way they choose. So whereas a democratic society enables us to be rational, it also allows for a lot of bigotry, bias, and blind passion. However, notice that the blindly passionate do not take themselves to be blind. They take their passion to be well warranted by their reasons.

An interesting feature of the kind of question that you raise is that the reason-versus-passion concern typically comes from people who see themselves on reason’s side of the matter. That is, those who talk about people who “vote with their hearts,” are often talking about other people rather than themselves. We all see ourselves as voting with our heads, and not with our hearts, or at least not blindly with our hearts.

Now for a second point. We need democracy in order to be rational, but this is not to say that rationality is cold, calm, detached, and passionless. In fact, in Why We Argue (And How We Should) , Scott and I show that proper argument can be emotional, loud, heated, and even in some ways impolite. That is, proper argument is not opposed to impassioned commitment. So, to answer your question, those who vote according to their heart are no liability as such. The liability lies in voting in ways that are insensitive to reasons and arguments––and one can project a good deal of calm, cool reasonableness while still being irrationally stubborn. The real threat to democracy comes from those who have a disregard for the reasons and arguments offered by their political opponents, those who are cocksure and dogmatic, those who believe that their political opponents are ipso facto stupid, ignorant, benighted, or treasonous.

Chapter 16 : If true democracy thrives in the dialectic between opposing views, how do you account for the fact that political compromise so frequently leads to a middle ground where nobody gets what they want?

Aikin : Compromises wherein nobody gets what they want are certainly a bad deal, and that might have to do with the fact that the middle isn’t always where things should end up. First, not all dialectical exchanges have to proceed on the thought that we’re looking to meet in the middle. It’s distinctly possible for one side to be just plain wrong and have to evacuate their entire position. The point of the dialectical setup is to identify places where the disagreeing sides have agreement and what’s defensible about the two sides. This, of course, isn’t just a matter of assessing your opponent, but it’s also a matter of taking that same critical view to your own side––knowing and being honest about what’s well supported and what’s not.

I think also that there’s a strange phenomenon of buyer’s remorse with compromises. You always, in hindsight, compare the compromise outcome with what you’d hoped for coming in to the discussion––namely, getting everything you wanted. For sure, you’re going to think that compromises, from the perspective of that comparison, are not good outcomes. But that’s not the right comparison set––you’ve also got to consider the other alternatives, too. Compare it with the other side getting everything they want, and you nothing. Or compare it with no compromise at all and nothing getting done. It’s clear that compromises aren’t the first choice, but they, given the alternatives, are the best.

Chapter 16 : You clearly believe that polarization leads to false views. I’m wondering, though, is it possible for a group with extreme views to be argumentatively responsible?

Talisse : There is a distinction to be made here. There are two senses of “polarization.” Sometimes, we use “polarization” to denote a situation in which the distance between opposing sides is so great that there is no common ground between them, and thus no basis for compromise, or even dialogue. Polarization in that sense is surely a problem in a democracy, as it leads to governmental deadlock and paralysis. But there’s another sense of the term, and this is the sense that Scott and I are most interested in. There is a well-studied and documented phenomenon called “group polarization.” Polarization in this sense does not describe the intellectual distance between one person’s belief and her opponent’s; rather, it describes the way in which an individual’s belief changes or shifts when that individual surrounds himself only with like-minded others.

The thought is simple: let’s say that Ann is generally pro-choice, but sees the need for some strict legal regulations concerning access for women under eighteen. If Ann spends a few days talking about her views on abortion only with others who are pro-choice, her position predictably will begin to shift, imperceptibly to Ann, to one that recognizes less of a need for those legal restrictions. So too with the entire group of advocated various pro-choice views: as they talk only amongst themselves, the median view of the group will shift in the direction of a more extreme pro-choice viewpoint; it “polarizes” in the sense of moving towards the most extreme version of the kind of view the group began with. The phenomenon is found across the political spectrum, and it seems that differences in education, wealth, gender, and geography do not affect the tendency. Now, the crucial feature of group polarization phenomenon is that the belief-shift is not occasioned by reasons and argument; rather, the polarization is fueled simply by group dynamics. And that’s the worrisome feature.

You are of course correct that those who hold views that might be regarded as “extreme” can be argumentatively virtuous; indeed, extreme views can even be correct ! Again, the polarization worry concerns the grounds upon which individuals hold their beliefs. The lesson is that those who insulate themselves from having to consider opposing views are losing control over their own minds. Scott and I sometimes get the following kind of response: “Argument and reasoning is all fine and good when you don’t know the truth. But once you have the truth, there’s simply no point in talking to those with whom you disagree––you know the truth, and those who disagree are simply wrong . So why bother even talking to them?” The group polarization phenomenon shows that this thought is deeply and tragically mistaken. Insulating oneself from opposition is a surefire way to lose the truth.

Chapter 16 : Democratic revolutions––In France and America, for example, and more recently in Romania and Nepal––seem to be necessarily extremist in nature, requiring a wholesale rejection of the other’s values that’s anything but a dialectic approach. In your view is revolution actually antithetical to a rational democracy?

Talisse : There is a lot to be said here, but the short answer is yes. Revolution is justifiable only where there’s no democracy, or a democracy in name only. And revolution is justified only when it aims not only at ousting a tyrannical power but also at establishing democratic rule. The stated reasons supporting the great democratic revolutions in history are aimed at demonstrating the absence of democracy and the need to establish one.

Now, of course, a lot of “democracy” talk among revolutionaries is just talk, mere PR, and it’s notoriously difficult, especially in the short-run, to determine whether any particular revolution is in fact justified. And it is similarly difficult to distinguish between a democratic society that is seriously failing at democracy and a despotic society that claims to be a democracy. Again, revolution against despots is justifiable. Yet the question of what citizens may do to effect far-reaching social change in the direction of democracy when their democratic society is badly failing at democracy is complex and very difficult––but it’s also why we still read people like Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X on these issues.

But if we take the simple case of a democratic uprising against a brutal dictator, you’re right to say that the revolution is premised upon an outright rejection of the standing regime’s values. Scott and I embrace that. Our view is that in a democracy , we must engage in argument with our political opponents. This is to presume that our opponents are our fellow democratic citizens, citizens with whom we may disagree deeply but who nonetheless share a common underlying commitment to a basic democratic and constitutional order. The worry that Scott and I see––and this is part of our motivation in writing Why We Argue (And How We Should) ––is that our current political climate encourages citizens to hold those with whom they politically disagree in contempt.

The thought seems to be that reasoned and responsible political disagreement is impossible, as there could be only one reasoned and responsible political viewpoint. The tale is told simply by looking at the titles of books of popular political commentary: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder ; The Republican Noise Machine ; If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be Republicans ; The Republican War on Science ; and so on. The common message in popular political discourse is that those who disagree with your views are therefore stupid, blind, or worse. That is a dangerous and profoundly anti-democratic message. And yet it’s the unifying lifeblood of the billion-dollar industry of popular political commentary.

Chapter 16 : What would you say to that segment of society who are done with politics? Life is short, I hear them say, and they don’t want to spend it playing someone else’s rigged game.

Aikin : My first response is that I very often share the malaise. Attending to politics, and especially to the rhetorical overload, spin, and general hatefulness of so much of it, is exhausting and saddening. Robert and I regularly despair at the state of our current political discourse, and it’s a very tempting thought that we can just quit paying attention and let it all go to hell.

Notice first, that this temptation is based on exactly the kind of thoughts we’ve argued for––good politics is about the fair exchange of reasons, with the objective of promoting the common good. And so when we despair over the fact that the game is rigged and are tempted to give up, that’s evidence that the view that Robert and I have been arguing for (that politics should be properly run argument) is right––just that we’re not doing it well. So our shared frustration with politics as it is practiced bespeaks the deep rational norms of politics. Every cynic has an idealist’s heart.

Second, notice something about the temptation to turn one’s back on politics, to ignore it and let it all go its own way. Only a very privileged few can realistically take that attitude. For many people, how the discussions go will drastically change their lives for better or worse. If it’s possible for someone to say: I don’t care about politics because it’s all a rigged game; I don’t pay attention anymore , that person has a privilege of being immune to the consequences of the discussions. How can you get that kind of privilege? The short answer: by having the game rigged in your favor more often than not. As a consequence, checking out of political discussion because it’s proceeding in an ugly fashion is really a form of complicity with the rigging and injustice of the system.

So, yes, by all means, people should experience the distastefulness of ugly political exchange and feel the temptation to check out. That bespeaks a healthy mind. But the matter is that of overcoming that temptation to check out and staying plugged in, keeping the discussion going, and being vigilant about justice. It’s a tough job, but democracy is work.

Chapter 16 : You admit that your views are often met with charges of ivory-tower naiveté, but you also clearly believe that even in a rational democracy people have to get their hands dirty. How would you go about the process of educating the American populace in the ways of proper argumentation?

Talisse : It is true that we are often charged with that kind of naiveté distinctive of academics. But the charge puzzles us. Our account of the place of reasoning in our cognitive lives draws nearly exclusively from what people in fact already do . Scott and I say that arguing well matters, and we say that because people act as if they think that it matters .

Nearly all political news these days is presented in a discussion/debate forum. Why is that? Scott and I say it’s because people generally think that it’s important to see the reasoning behind the political positions that people hold, and important to see how proponents of different views can respond to criticisms. Our Presidential campaigns are driven by debates. Why? Scott and I say it’s because people think that reasoning matters. Our news media is constantly describing itself in terms that extol the cognitive virtues of reason: the no spin zone ; fairness ; balance ; straight-talk ; trust ; clearness ; independence ; and so on.

Why all this appeal to familiar cognitive virtues associated with rationality? Again, because reasons, evidence, debate, and argument aren’t simply the concerns of academics; arguing well is an aim of cognitive beings as such. So, importantly, in Why We Argue (And How We Should) , Scott and I do not seek to impose some highbrow and anemic model of argumentation upon the everyday conversations of the ordinary folk. We’re not lecturing people on argument in that way. Instead, we are showing our readers the conception of argument that they already endorse and then trying to reveal the ways in which we can fall short of that standard of good argument.

In fact, much of Why We Argue (And How We Should) is devoted to identifying a series of argumentative mimics , bits of counterfeit reasoning that are difficult to distinguish from the real thing. But this, again, is not a matter of imposing an academic’s standard on ordinary efforts of reasoning. So, Scott and I begin with non-academic practices and attitudes about argument, draw out from these a conception of proper argument, and then attempt to examine the hazards we all encounter in trying to live up to them. That doesn’t seem to us like an ivory-tower enterprise.

Aikin : Let me follow up about our commitments beyond the book. We both teach logic classes and do a good deal of outreach beyond the academy representing the argumentative skills we value. Almost every person Robert and I have talked to about the book makes the same joke: Logic and politics? Good luck! But, immediately after making the joke, they welcome our attempt at fixing the problem. The thing is that, again, we are philosophy professors, and we’ve got the academic model of addressing problems, which is: write a book, and then talk about the book. The reality is that there’s a good bit of frustration with the quality and tenor of our national conversation, not only in politics but also about religion and morals, and Robert and I think that there’s a hunger for a better model. The book’s the beginning, and hopefully what follows is a better model for discussion.

Education is key, we think. To argue well, you’ve got to not only have some skills, but you’ve got to know a lot of facts. You’ve got to be scientifically literate, knowledgeable about the history of the debates, familiar with the kind of arguments your opponents give, and aware of drawbacks to your view. You’ve got to know things about our government; you’ve got to be culturally literate.

That’s a lot of overhead, and one thing we think that contributes to the failure of good discourse is the fracturing of culture. There’s little shared knowledge. In fact, it’s a feedback loop––the more fractured a culture, the more dissonant the political discourse, which leads to further cultural retrenchments. One of the reasons why conservatives and liberals don’t think that they can talk to the other side is that they never actually try. And that’s because they have very little they think they can talk about besides what divides them. And so the various sides have little more than caricatures of each other. The upshot is that the more you know about the history of issues you care about, the better you’ll be able to argue about political issues––you’ll know the governmental institutions and their roles, you’ll know about how the sides changed their minds, made compromises, you’ll know your own views better.

Tagged: Nonfiction , Q&A , Voices and Votes

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Against Democracy

• Jason Brennan

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A bracingly provocative challenge to one of our most cherished ideas and institutions

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Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it’s time to experiment and find out. A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines. Featuring a new preface that situates the book within the current political climate and discusses other alternatives beyond epistocracy, Against Democracy is a challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable.

Awards and Recognition

• One of Zócalo’s 10 Favorite Books of 2016

"Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman's pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character."—Caleb Crain, New Yorker

"A brash, well-argued diatribe against the democratic system. There is much to mull over in this brazen stab at the American electoral process. . . . [I]n the current toxic partisan climate, Brennan's polemic is as worth weighing as any other."— Kirkus Reviews

" Against Democracy challenges a basic precept that most people take for granted: the morality of democracy. . . . Brennan presents a variety of strategies by which the quality of the electorate could be improved, while still keeping it large, and demographically representative. . . . [A] powerful challenge to the conventional wisdom about democracy. . . . [W]orth serious consideration."—Ilya Somin, Washington Post

"Important."—Ilya Somin, Washington Post Volokh Conspiracy

"Compelling. . . . This is theory that skips, rather than plods."— Los Angeles Times

"The book makes compelling reading for what is typically a dry area of discourse. This is theory that skips, rather than plods."—Molly Sauter, Los Angeles Times

"Among the best works in political philosophy in recent memory."—Zachary Woodman, Students for Liberty

"Challenging and insightful."—Alexander William Salter, Public Choice

"Lucidly written in provocative, sometimes brash tones, it is especially useful for the undergraduate classroom."— Choice

" Against Democracy seems scarily prescient today. Writing well before the twin shocks of the Brexit and the U.S. elections, the Georgetown political scientist makes a powerful case that popular democracy can be dangerous—and, provocatively, that irrational and incompetent voters should be excluded from democratic decision-making. The case for elitism in governance never read so well."— Zocalo Public Square

"Meticulous [and] crisply written."—Tom Clark, Prospect

"Mercilessly well-argued."—Niko Kolodny, Boston Review

"While controversial, Brennan raises important questions that anyone with an interest in politics, philosophy, and economics will have to answer for years to come. This book is a must read."—Thomas Savidge, Journal of Value Inquiry

"Jason Brennan is a marvel: a brilliant philosopher who scrupulously studies the facts before he moralizes. In Against Democracy , his elegant method leads to the contrarian conclusion that democratic participation prompts human beings to forget common sense and common decency. Voting does not ennoble us; it tests the virtue of the best, and brings out the worst in the rest."—Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter

" Against Democracy makes a useful set of challenges to both conventional wisdom and dominant trends in political philosophy and political theory, particularly democratic theory. Engagingly written, it is a lively and entertaining read."—Alexander Guerrero, University of Pennsylvania

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Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory. It does not offer in the first instance a scientific study of those societies that are called democratic. It aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must call on the results of political science, sociology and economics in order to give this kind of concrete guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on four distinct issues in recent work. First, it outlines some different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally desirable at all. Second, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to expect from citizens in large democratic societies.  This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories as we will see. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. It also discusses blueprints of democratic institutions for dealing with issues that arise from a conception of citizenship. Third, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation. These last two parts display the interdisciplinary nature of normative democratic theory. Fourth, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and it discusses different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1 instrumentalism, 2.2 non-instrumental values, 3.1 some solutions offered for the problem of democratic citizenship, 3.2 the self-interest assumption, 3.3 the role of citizenship as choosers of aims, 4. legislative representation, 5.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 5.2 democratic consent theories of authority, 5.3 limits to the authority of democracy, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

To fix ideas, the term “democracy,” as I will use it in this article, refers very generally to a method of group decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the collective decision making.   Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which I mean decisions that are made for groups and that are binding on all the members of the group. Second, this definition means to cover a lot of different kinds of groups that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight to it. It is quite compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to an assembly where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct participation of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how.   For instance, Joseph Schumpeter argues (1956, chap. XXI), with some force, that only a highly formal kind of democracy in which citizens vote in an electoral process for the purpose of selecting competing elites is highly desirable while a conception of democracy that draws on a more ambitious conception of equality is dangerous. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762, Book II, chap. 1) is apt to argue that the formal variety of democracy is akin to slavery while only robustly egalitarian democracies have political legitimacy. Others have argued that democracy is not desirable at all. To evaluate their arguments we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of humanity and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

We can evaluate democracy along at least two different dimensions: consequentially, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision making; or intrinsically, by reference to qualities that are inherent in the method, for example, whether there is something inherently fair about making democratic decisions on matters on which people disagree.

2.1.1 Instrumental Arguments in Favor of Democracy

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: relatively good laws and policies and improvements in the characters of the participants. John Stuart Mill argued that a democratic method of making legislation is better than non-democratic methods in three ways: strategically, epistemically and via the improvement of the characters of democratic citizens (Mill, 1861, Chapter 3). Strategically, democracy has an advantage because it forces decision-makers to take into account the interests, rights and opinions of most people in society. Since democracy gives some political power to each, more people are taken into account than under aristocracy or monarchy. The most forceful contemporary statement of this instrumental argument is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues, for example, that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press” (Sen 1999, 152). The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemologically, democracy is thought to be the best decision-making method on the grounds that it is generally more reliable in helping participants discover the right decisions. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and critical assessment of laws and policies. Democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. Furthermore, the broad based discussion typical of democracy enhances the critical assessment of the different moral ideas that guide decision-makers.

Many have endorsed democracy on the basis of the proposition that democracy has beneficial effects on character. Many have noted with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on them more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. In addition, democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference whether they do or not. Finally, some have argued that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they come genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861, p. 74, Elster 2002, p. 152).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects.

More detailed knowledge of the effects of political institutions can be used to discriminate in favor of particular kinds of democratic institutions or modifications of them. For instance in the United States, James Madison argued in favor of a fairly strong federal government on the grounds that local governments are more likely to be oppressive to minorities (Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1788, n. 10). Of course the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth or validity of the associated substantive views about justice and the common good as well as the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

2.1.2 Instrumental Arguments against Democracy

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato ( Republic , Book VI) argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to properly governed societies. In a democracy, he argues, those who are expert at winning elections and nothing else will eventually dominate democratic politics. Democracy tends to emphasize this expertise at the expense of the expertise that is necessary to properly governed societies. The reason for this is that most people do not have the kinds of talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people's sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office.

Hobbes (1651, chap. XIX) argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects. But his skepticism is not based in a conception that most people are not intellectually fit for politics. On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens. For Hobbes, then, democracy has deleterious effects on subjects and politicians and consequently on the quality of the outcomes of collective decision making.

Many public choice theorists in contemporary economic thought expand on these Hobbesian criticisms. They argue that citizens are not informed about politics and that they are often apathetic, which makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone else. Some of them argue for giving over near complete control over society to the market, on the grounds that more extensive democracy tends to produce serious economic inefficiencies. More modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions.

2.1.3 Grounds for Instrumentalism

Instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a certain kind of moral theory.   For example classical utilitarianism simply has no room in its fundamental value theory for the ideas of intrinsic fairness, liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.   And there are many moral theories of this sort.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing consequentialist to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 2002, pp. 96-97).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. No general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1980, p. 116). Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality, so it cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000, ch. 4 [originally published in 1987]). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 2000, ch. 10 [originally published in 1999]).

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value. The most common of these come broadly under the rubrics of liberty and equality.

2.2.1 Liberty

Some argue that the basic principles of democracy are founded in the idea that each individual has a right to liberty. Democracy, it is said, extends the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life to the domain of collective decision making. First, each person's life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Second, only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould (1988, pp.45-85) conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government. Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. This right is established at least partly independently of the worth of the outcomes of democratic decision making. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

Here we can see the makings of an argument against instrumentalism. To the extent that an instrumentalist wishes to diminish a person's power to contribute to the democratic process for the sake of enhancing the quality of decisions, he is committed to thinking that there is no moral loss in the fact that our power has been diminished. But if the liberty argument is correct our right to control our lives is violated by this.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision.

The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement. And so it is hard to see how any political decision making method can respect everyone's liberty.

2.2.2 Democracy as Public Justification

One distant relative of the self-government approach is the account of democracy as a process of public justification defended by, among others, Joshua Cohen (2002, p. 21). The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals. Citizens justify laws and policies to each other on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested to this kind of worry. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

Another set of worries concerning this approach arises when we ask what reason there is for trying to ensure that political decisions are grounded in principles that everyone can reasonably accept. What is the basis of this need for consensus? To be sure, the consensus that is aimed at is reasonable consensus among reasonable persons. Reasonable consensus does not imply actual consensus. The unreasonable persons in society need not agree with the terms of association arrived at by reasonable persons in order for those terms to be legitimate.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. The notion of the reasonable is meant to be fairly weak on this account. One can reasonably reject a doctrine to the extent that it is incompatible with one's own doctrine as long as one's doctrine does not imply imposition on others and it is a doctrine that has survived sustained critical reflection. So this principle is a kind of principle of reciprocity. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons not propose laws and policies on the basis of controversial principles for the regulation of society. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls, 1996, Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

What moral reasons can there be for restraining oneself from offering what one takes to be the best justified proposals for the terms of the society one lives in? One might consider a number of arguments for this principle of reasonableness. One argument is an epistemological one. It is that there is no justification independent of what people or at least reasonable people believe. Hence, if one cannot provide a justification for principles that others can accept given their reasonable beliefs then those principles are not justified for those persons. Another argument is a moral argument. One fails to respect the reason of the other members of society if one imposes terms of association on them that they cannot accept given their reasonable views. This failure of respect for the reason of the other members of society defeats the value of the principles one is proposing for the society. A third argument is a specifically democratic argument. One does not genuinely treat others as equals if one insists on imposing principles on them that they cannot reasonably accept, even if this imposition takes place against the background of egalitarian decision making processes.

Each of these three arguments can be questioned. On the democratic argument, it simply isn’t clear why it is necessary to democratic equality to justify ones views on terms that others can accept. If each person has robust rights to participate in debate and decision making and each person's views are given a reasonable hearing, it is not clear why equality requires more. My rejection of another person's beliefs does not in any way imply that I think that person is inferior to me in capacity or in moral worth or in the rights to have a say in society. The epistemological argument seems to presuppose a far too restrictive conception of justification to be plausible. Many beliefs are justified for me even if they are not compatible with the political beliefs I currently hold as long as those beliefs can be vindicated by the use of procedures and methods of thinking that I use to evaluate beliefs. The conception of respect for reason in the moral argument seems not obviously to favor the principle of reasonableness. It may require that I do as much as I can to make sure that the society I live in conform to what I take to be rationally defensible norms. Of course, I may also believe that such a society must be democratically organized in which case I will attempt to advance these principles through the democratic process.

Moreover, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept.

2.2.3 Equality

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. On one version, defended by Peter Singer (1973, pp. 30-41), when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives. But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up, the argument goes. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person's point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973, Waldron 1999, chap. 5).

One difficulty is that this view relies on agreement much as the liberty views described above. What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

Another egalitarian defense of democracy asserts that it publicly embodies the equal advancement of the interests of the citizens of a society when there is disagreement about how best to organize their shared life. The idea is that a society ought to be structured to advance equally the interests of the members of the society. And the equality of members ought to be advanced in a way that each can see that they are being treated as equals. So it requires equal advancement of interests in accordance with a public measure of those interests. Hence, justice requires the publicly equal advancement of the interests of the members of society or public equality.

The idea of public equality requires some explanation. If we start with the principle of equal advancement of interests, we will want to know what it implies. Does it imply equality of well being or equality of opportunity for well being or equality of resources?  There are other possibilities but the problem with these accounts is that they cannot be realized in a way that every conscientious and informed person can know them to be in place.  So even if one of these principles is implemented many will think that they are not being treated equally. There are likely to be too many disagreements about what each person's well being consists in and how to compare it to the well being of others. The question for a political society is, is there a kind of equality that genuinely advances equally the interests of the members of the society but that does so in a way that all conscientious and informed people can agree treats them as equals?  And the answer to this question must be informed by background facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement. Public equality is the realization of equality of advancement of interests that all can see to be such a realization. And the basic argument for democracy is that it realizes equality of advancement of interests when we take the background facts above into account. 

Now the idea is that public equality is a great value. The importance of publicity itself is grounded in equality. Given the facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement, each will have reason to think that if they are ruled in accordance with some specific notion of equality advanced by some particular group that their interests are likely to be set back in some way. Only a conception of equality that can be shared by the members of society can give good reason to think that this will not happen. Within the context set by public equality, people can argue for more specific implementations of equality among citizens in law and policy all the while knowing that there will be substantial and conscientious disagreement on them. As long as the framework within which they make and vote for opposing views is set by public equality, they can know that at base, the society treats them as equals in a way that they can recognize.

The publicly equal advancement of interests requires that individuals’ judgments be taken into account equally when there is disagreement. Here is the argument for the transition from equal concern for interests to equal concern for judgment. Respect for each citizen's judgment is grounded in the principle of public equality combined with a number of basic facts and fundamental interests that attend social life in typical societies. The basic facts are that individuals are very diverse in terms of their interests. People's interests are diverse because of their different natural talents, because they are raised in different sectors of society and because they are raised in societies where there is a diversity of cultural backgrounds. Partly as a consequence of the fact that people are raised in different sectors of society and in distinct cultural milieus they are likely to have deep cognitive biases when they attempt to understand other people's interests and how they are compared to their own interests. Those biases will tend to assimilate other people's interests to their own in some circumstances or downplay them when there is a wide divergence of interests. Hence people have deep cognitive biases towards their own interests. The facts of diversity and of cognitive bias ensure that individuals are highly fallible in their understanding of their own and others’ interests and that there will be considerable disagreement among them. And they are likely to be highly fallible in their efforts to compare the importance of other people's interests to their own. So they are highly fallible in their efforts to realize equal advancement of interests in society. And of course there will be a lot of substantial disagreement about how best to advance each person's interests equally.

Against the background of these facts each person has interests that stand out as especially important in a pluralistic society. They have interests in correcting for the cognitive biases of others when it comes to the creation or revision of common economic, legal and political institutions. And each person has interests in living in a world that makes some sense to them, that accords, within limits, to their sense of how that social world out to be structured. The facts described above, and the principle of equality, suggest that each person ought to have an equal say in determining the common legal, economic and political institutions they live under. In the light of these interests each citizen would have good reason to think that his or her interests were not being given the same weight as others if he or she had less decision making power than the others. And so each person who is deprived of a right to an equal say would have reason to believe that she is being treated publicly as an inferior. Furthermore, since each person has an interest in being recognized as an equal member of the community, and having less than an equal say suggests that they are being treated as inferiors, only equality in decision making power is compatible with the public equal advancement of interests. The principle of equal advancement of interests also implies limits to what can be up for democratic control and so the infinite regress noted above is avoided.

So against the background facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement each person has fundamental interests in having an equal say in the processes of collective decision making. And so in order for people to be treated publicly as equals they must have an equal say in collective decision making (Christiano, 2004).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities i.e. groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with equality and even with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the criticisms leveled against the ideal of equality in decision making processes. Is it a coherent ideal, in particular in the modern state? This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

3. The Problem of Democratic Citizenship

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large society. There are three distinct problems here. First, Plato ( Republic , Book VI) argued that some people are more intelligent and more moral than others and that those persons ought to rule. Second, others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?

Third, since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that a vote will affect the outcome of an election are nearly indistinguishable from zero. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued (1957, chap. 13) that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote. On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one's votes to advance one's aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

3.1.1 Elite Theory of Democracy

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy on these grounds. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena. The alternative, they believe, is a highly motivated population of persons who know nothing and who are more likely than not to pursue irrational and emotionally appealing aims.

Joseph Schumpeter's assertion that the “democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote” (1956, p. 269), still stands as a concise statement of the elitist view. In this view, the emphasis is placed on responsible political leadership. Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate in the process of competition by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule.

On Schumpeter's view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out. So democracy, even on this stripped down version, plays some role in protecting society from the worst politicians.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. Against the liberty and equality arguments, the elite theory simply rejects the possibility that citizens can participate as equals. The society must be ruled by elites and the role of citizens is merely to ensure smooth and peaceful circulation of elites. Against the public justification view, ordinary citizens cannot be expected to participate in public deliberation and the views of elites ought not to be fundamentally transformed by general public deliberation. To be sure, it is conceivable for all that has been said that there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society. Indeed, some deliberative democrats do emphasize deliberation in legislative assemblies though in general deliberative democrats favor a more broadly egalitarian approach to deliberation, which is vulnerable to the kinds of worries raised by Schumpeter and Downs.

3.1.2 Interest Group Pluralism

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl's early statement of the view is very powerful. “In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sale tax” (Dahl 1959, p. 69). In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. And it attempts to do this in a way that gives citizens a key role in decision making. The account ensures that individuals can participate roughly as equals to the extent that it narrowly confines the issues each individual is concerned with. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it eschews deliberation about the common good or about justice. And it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences to be advanced by each group is not subject to further debate in the society as a whole. To be sure, there might be some deliberation within interest groups but it will not be society wide.

3.1.3 Neo-Liberalism

A third approach inspired by the problem of citizenship may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1965). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. As a consequence, interest groups will not form very easily. Only those interest groups that are guided by powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government. Hence, only some interest groups will succeed in influencing government and they will do so largely for the benefit of the powerful economic elites that fund and guide them. Furthermore, they argue that such interest groups will tend to produce highly inefficient government because they will attempt to advance their interests in politics while spreading the costs to others. The consequence of this is that policies will be created that tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals argue that any way of organizing a large and powerful democratic state is likely to produce serious inefficiencies. They infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent. The assumptions that lead neo-liberals to be skeptical about the large modern state imply equally disturbing problems for the large private concentrations of wealth in a neo-liberal society.

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. While these ideas have generated interesting results and have become ever more sophisticated, there has been a growing chorus of opponents. Against the self-interest axiom, defenders of deliberative democracy and others claim that citizens are capable of being motivated by a concern for the common good and justice. And they claim, with Mill and Rousseau, that such concerns are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics. They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests. Accordingly, many propose that democratic institutions be designed to support the inclination to engage in moral and open-minded discussion with others (see the essays in Mansbridge 1990).

Once we approach the idea of citizenship from a moral point of view and we recognize the importance of a division of labor, the question arises, what is the appropriate role for a citizen in a democracy? If we think that citizens are too often uninformed we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? Some, such as Dahl in the above quote, have proposed that citizens know about their particular sectors of society and not others. We have seen that this view has a number of difficulties. Christiano proposes, along with others, that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996, chap. 5). This kind of view needs to answer to the problem of how to ensure that politicians, administrators and experts actually do attempt to realize the aims set by citizens. And it must show how institutions can be designed so as to establish the division of labor while preserving equality among citizens. But if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver's seat in society.

It is hard to see how citizens can satisfy any even moderate standards for beliefs about out how best to achieve their political aims. Knowledge of means requires an immense amount of social science and knowledge of particular facts. For citizens to have this kind of knowledge generally would require that we abandon the division of labor in society. On the other hand, citizens do have first hand and daily experience with thinking about the values and aims they pursue. This gives them a chance to satisfy standards of belief regarding what the best aims are.

Still the view is not defensible without a compelling institutional answer to the question of how to ensure that others are genuinely pursuing the means to achieve the aims specified by citizens. On the proposed view, legislative representatives and bureaucrats as well as judges must subordinate their activities to the task of figuring out how to pursue the aims of citizens. There is a huge principal/agent problem here.

Furthermore, we must ask, how must institutions be designed in order to reconcile the demand for equality among citizens with the need for a division of labor? We will discuss one dimension of this issue in the question of legislative representation.

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of legislative institution are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying ethical justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is present most prominently in the United States and the United Kingdom. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues (1989, chap. 7) that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider. This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society. Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment. In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Another criticism of single member district representation is that it encourages parties to pursue dubious electoral campaign strategies. The need to appeal to a large, diverse and somewhat amorphous sector of the population can very often be best met by using ambiguous, vague and often quite irrelevant appeals to the citizens. Thus instead of encouraging reasonable compromise the scheme tends to support tendencies towards ignorance, superficiality and fatuousness in political campaigns and in the citizenry. It encourages political leaders to take care of the real issues of politics in back rooms while they appeal to citizens by means of smoke and mirrors. Of course, those who agree in the main with the elitist type theories will see nothing wrong in this, indeed they may well champion this effect. Proportional representation requires that parties be relatively clear and up front about their proposals, so those who believe that democracy is ethically grounded in the appeal to equality tend to favor proportional representation (see Christiano 1996, chap. 6).

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young (1990, chap. 6), have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation. They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to frieze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

5. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any obligation of citizens to obey the democratic decision. In particular, the question arises as to whether a citizen has an obligation to obey the democratic decision when he or she disagrees with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

With respect to democracy we can imagine three main approaches to the question as to whether democratic decisions have authority. First, we can appeal to perfectly general conceptions of legitimate authority. Some have thought that the question of authority is independent entirely of whether a state is democratic. Consent theories of political authority and instrumentalist conceptions of political authority state general criteria of political authority that can be met by non democratic as well as democratic states. Second, some have thought that there is a conceptual link between democracy and authority such that if a decision is made democratically then it must therefore have authority. Third, some have thought that there are general principles of political authority that are uniquely realized by a democratic state under certain well defined conditions.

Readers who are interested in more general conceptions of political authority may consult the entry for political authority for a discussion of the issues. And the second kind of view has been largely abandoned by democratic theorists. I do wish to discuss the third kind of conception of the political authority of democracy.

In general, instrumentalist conceptions of authority make no special mention of democracy. The instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. But there may be many other instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Goodin, 2003, chap. 5; Estlund, 2002, 77-80). According to this theorem, on issues where there are two alternatives and there is a correct answer as to which one is correct, if voters have on average a better than even chance of getting the right answer, the majority is more likely to have the right answer than anyone in the minority. And the likelihood that the majority is right increases as the size of the voting population increases. In very large populations, the chance that the majority is right approaches certainty. The theorem is an instance of the law of large numbers. If each voter has an independently better than 0.5 chance of getting the right answer then the probability that more than 0.5 of the voters get the right answer approaches 1 as the number of voters becomes very large.

Such a result makes sense of Rousseau's famous passage: “Each citizen, in giving his suffrage, states his mind on that question [concerning what the general will is]; and the general will is found by counting the votes. When, therefore, the motion which I opposed carries, it only proves to me that I was mistaken and that what I believed to be the general will was not so” (Rousseau 1762, 95-96). On this account, we have a conception of the authority of democracy. The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right.

There are a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda. First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. And the theorem only works on independent trials. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways so that some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. And modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. One can always have good reason to think that the majority is not properly placed to make a reasonable decision on a certain issue when one is in the minority. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases thus undermining the sense that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

One further worry about the Condorcet Theorem's application seems to be that it would prove too much anyway for it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. Indeed, even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003, chap. 7).

Some consent theorists have thought that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority at least under certain conditions. John Locke argues (1690, sec. 96) that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, he necessarily consents to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized. Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there are no other ones. He argues that once a society is formed it must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person's interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

To be sure, Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals in consenting to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and when taxes may be levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690, sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority. How democratic this conception is depends on how we understand property in Locke's discussion. If it includes the rights of citizens generally, then we have an argument for democratic decision making. But if the idea of property only includes holders of private property then we have an argument for, at best, a highly attenuated form of democratic decision making.

Another consent-based argument for the claim that democracy is necessary for legitimate authority asserts that when people participate in the democratic process, by their act of participation they consent to the outcome, even if it goes against them. Their participation thereby lends legitimacy to the outcome and perhaps even to the democratic assembly that is elected by citizens. On this account, the acts of voting, for example, are also acts of consent to the outcome of the voting. So participants are thereby obligated to comply with the decision made by the majority.

The problem with all these variations on consent theory is that they face a worrisome dilemma. On the one hand, they seem to involve highly suspect interpretations of behaviors that may or may not imply the kinds of consent that these theorists have in mind. Hume's worries about consent theorists’ interpreting residence in a territory as consent to its government have close analogs in this kind of context (Hume, 1748, p. 263). Why suppose that a person's vote is understood by that person to be consent to the outcome of the vote. Why not suppose that the person is merely trying to have an impact on the outcome? Or why suppose that a person's membership in society—the “consent” signaled by remaining in the society—really commits him to agreeing that decisions must be made by majority rule?

On the other hand, if we eschew the interpretative route the only way to think of the person's vote as constituting consent is if we think that the person ought to consent to the outcome or ought to know that he is consenting to the outcome. The fact that they ought to consent to the outcome because they have participated is sufficient, on some views, to produce an obligation. And the thesis that they ought to know that they consent is usually grounded in the idea that it they ought to be consenting when they vote. But this kind of view seems to get far away from the basic idea of consent theorists, which is that whether persons consent or not should be up to them and should not be determined by the correct moral view. Consent theory is grounded in the need a way to think of government has legitimacy when people disagree about whether it is just or right.

5.2.1 Liberty and Authority

The liberty approaches to the justification of democracy provide alternative approaches to the idea of the authority of democracy. The idea here is that democracy has authority to the extent that people freely bring about the democratic decision. The reason for this is that democracy merely extends their activity of self-determination to the political realm. To the extent that self-determination is an preeminent value and democracy extends it to the political realm, allegiance to democratic decisions is necessary to self-determination and therefore is required by virtue of the pre eminent importance of self-determination.

But here is a worry about this kind of approach. It seems either to presuppose that decisions will have unanimous support or it requires a number of substantive conditions on self-determination, which conditions do a lot of the work of generating obligations to democracy. For instance, if a decision must be made by majority rule, one strategy for reconciling this with self-determination is to say that a self-determining person must accept the legitimacy of majority rule when there is disagreement. This may be because the self-determining person must accept the fundamental importance of equality and majority rule is essential to equality under circumstances of disagreement. So if one argues that one cannot be self-determining unless one accepts equality then one might be able to argue that the self-determining person must accept the results of majority rule. But this argument seems to make the authority of democracy depend primarily on the importance of equality. And one must wonder about the importance of the idea of self-determination to the account.

5.2.2 Equality and Authority

Another approach to the question of the authority of democracy asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one's fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2004, 284-287). And this approach establishes the authority of democracy by claiming that the inequality involved in failing to obey the democratic assembly is the most important form of inequality. It is more important to treat persons as equals in political decision making on this account than it is to treat them as equals in the economic sphere. The idea is that citizens will disagree on how to treat each other as equals in the areas of substantive law and policy. It is the purpose of democracy to make decisions when these disagreements arise. Democracy realizes a kind of equality among persons that all can share allegiance to even when they disagree about many matters relating to substantive law and policy. Since democracy realizes equality in a highly public manner and publicity is a great and egalitarian value, the equality realized by democracy trumps other kinds of equality.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality provides some reason to think that democratic equality must have some pre-eminence over other kinds of equality. The idea is that public equality is the most important form of equality and that democracy, as well as some other principles such as liberal rights, are unique realizations of public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). So the principle of public equality requires that one treat others publicly as equals and democracy is necessary to doing this. Since public equality has precedence over other forms of equality, citizens have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Of course, there will be limits on what citizens must accept from a democratic assembly. And these limits, on the egalitarian account, must be understood as deriving from the fundamental value of equality. So, one might think that public equality also requires protection of liberal rights and perhaps even the provision of an economic minimum.

If democracy does have authority, what are the limits to that authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. First, it is worthwhile to distinguish between different kinds of moral limit to authority. We might distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit to democratic authority is a limit that arises from the requirements of democratic process or a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. An external limit on the authority of democracy is a limit that arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements of democracy. Furthermore, some limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh in the balance against the principles that support democratic decision making. Some considerations may simply outweigh in importance the considerations that support democratic authority. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience.

On the other hand some limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

5.3.1 Internal Limits to Democratic Authority

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980, chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke (1690, chap. XI) gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent. She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. To the extent that consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this suggests that there are limits to what a democratic assembly may do that derive from the very principles that ground the authority. And these limits simply undermine the right of the assembly to rule in these cases since they are not things to which citizens can consent. This account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority. Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy's embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

5.3.2 Persistent Minorities

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality. In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

5.3.3 External Limits to Democratic Authority

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external rebutting kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one's fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external rebutting limits to democracy.

• Arneson, R., 2002, “Democracy at the National Level,” in Philosophy and Democracy , ed. T. Christiano, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Beitz, C., 1989, Political Equality: An Essay on Democratic Theory , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Buchanan, J. and Tullock, G., 1965, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
• Christiano, T., 2004, “The Authority of Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy , Vol. 12, n. 3 (August): pp. 266-290.
• Christiano, T., 1996, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Cohen, J., 2002, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Philosophy and Democracy , ed. T. Christiano, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dahl, R., 1959, A Preface to Democratic Theory , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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• Dworkin, R., 2000, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• Elster, J., 2002, “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Philosophy and Democracy , ed. T. Christiano, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Estlund, David, 2002, “Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority,” in Philosophy and Democracy , ed. T. Christiano, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Gould, C., 1988, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economics and Society , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hayek, F., 1960, The Constitution of Liberty , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Hobbes, T., 1651, Leviathan , ed. C. B. MacPherson, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968.
• Hume, D., 1748, “Of the Original Contract,” in Hume's Ethical Writings , ed. Alasdair MacIntyre, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965.
• Mill, J. S., 1861, Considerations on Representative Government , Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.
• Locke, J., 1690, Second Treatise on Civil Government , ed. C. B. MacPherson, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980
• Madison, J., Hamilton, A. and Jay, J., 1788, The Federalist Papers , ed. Isaac Kramnick, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987.
• Mansbridge, J. (ed.), 1990, Beyond Self-Interest , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Plato, The Republic , revised/trans. by Desmond Lee, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1974, 2 nd edition.
• Rawls, J., 1996, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press, revised edition.
• Riker, W., 1980, Liberalism Versus Populism , San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
• Rousseau, J.-J., 1762, The Social Contract , trans. Charles Frankel, New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1947.
• Schumpeter, J., 1956, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , New York: Harper and Row.
• Sen, A., 1999, Development as Freedom , New York: Knopf.
• Singer, P., 1973, Democracy and Disobedience , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Waldron, J., 1999, Law and Disagreement , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Young, I. M., 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

authority | citizenship | constitutionalism | egalitarianism | equality | Hobbes, Thomas | -->justice --> | justification, political: public | -->legitimacy --> | -->liberty --> | Locke, John | Mill, John Stuart | Plato | -->pluralism --> | political obligation | publicity | Rawls, John | representation, political | rights | -->Rousseau, Jean Jacques --> | -->rule of law and procedural fairness -->

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5 The Argument for Democracy

• Published: December 2021
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This chapter defends an epistemic argument for democracy, namely the argument that the rule of the many is better at aggregating knowledge and, in the version presented here, at producing better decisions than the rule of the few. This argument builds on the formal properties of two key democratic decision-making mechanisms of democracy, namely inclusive deliberation on equal grounds and majority rule with universal suffrage. Properly used in sequence and under the right conditions, these two mechanisms ensure that no information and viewpoint is ignored and maximize the cognitive diversity brought to bear on collective political problems and predictions. Building on existing formal results by Lu Hong and Scott Page, the chapter introduces the “Number Trumps Ability” theorem, which formalizes the intuition that many minds are smarter than just a few. Under the right conditions systems governed by democratic decision-procedures can be expected to deliver greater epistemic performance than less inclusive and egalitarian systems.

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Guest Essay

The One Idea That Could Save American Democracy

By Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix

Ms. Taylor and Ms. Hunt-Hendrix are political organizers and the authors of the book “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

These days, we often hear that democracy is on the ballot. And there’s a truth to that: Winning elections is critical, especially as liberal and progressive forces try to fend off radical right-wing movements. But the democratic crisis that our society faces will not be solved by voting alone. We need to do more than defeat Donald Trump and his allies — we need to make cultivating solidarity a national priority.

For years, solidarity’s strongest associations have been with the left and the labor movement — a term invoked at protests and on picket lines. But its roots are much deeper, and its potential implications far more profound, than we typically assume. Though we rarely speak about it as such, solidarity is a concept as fundamental to democracy as its better-known cousins: equality, freedom and justice. Solidarity is simultaneously a bond that holds society together and a force that propels it forward. After all, when people feel connected, they are more willing to work together, to share resources and to have one another’s backs. Solidarity weaves us into a larger and more resilient “we” through the precious and powerful sense that even though we are different, our lives and our fates are connected.

We have both spent years working as organizers and activists . If our experience has taught us anything, it is that a sense of connection and mutualism is rarely spontaneous. It must be nurtured and sustained. Without robust and effective organizations and institutions to cultivate and maintain solidarity, it weakens and democracy falters. We become more atomized and isolated, suspicious and susceptible to misinformation, more disengaged and cynical, and easily pitted against one another.

Democracy’s opponents know this. That’s why they invest huge amounts of energy and resources to sabotage transformative, democratic solidarity and to nurture exclusionary and reactionary forms of group identity. Enraged at a decade of social movements and the long-overdue revival of organized labor, right-wing strategists and their corporate backers have redoubled their efforts to divide and conquer the American public, inflaming group resentments in order to restore traditional social hierarchies and ensure that plutocrats maintain their hold on wealth and power. In white papers, stump speeches and podcasts, conservative ideologues have laid out their vision for capturing the state and using it as a tool to remake our country in their image.

If we do not prioritize solidarity, this dangerous and anti-democratic project will succeed. Far more than just a slogan or hashtag, solidarity can orient us toward a future worth fighting for, providing the basis of a credible and galvanizing plan for democratic renewal. Instead of the 20th-century ideal of a welfare state, we should try to imagine a solidarity state.

We urgently need a countervision of what government can and should be, and how public resources and infrastructure can be deployed to foster social connection and repair the social fabric so that democracy can have a chance not just to limp along, but to flourish. Solidarity, here, is both a goal worth reaching toward and the method of building the power to achieve it. It is both means and ends, the forging of social bonds so that we can become strong enough to shift policy together.

Historically, the question of solidarity has been raised during volatile junctures like the one we are living through. Contemporary conceptions of solidarity first took form after the democratic revolutions of the 18th century and over the course of the Industrial Revolution. As kings were deposed and the church’s role as a moral authority waned, philosophers and citizens wondered how society could cohere without a monarch or god. What could bind people in a secular, pluralistic age?

The 19th-century thinkers who began seriously contemplating and writing about the idea of solidarity often used the image of the human body, where different parts work in tandem. Most famously, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim put solidarity at the center of his inquiry, arguing that as society increased in complexity, social bonds between people would strengthen, each person playing a specialized role while connected to a larger whole. Solidarity and social cohesion, he argued, would be the natural result of increasing social and economic interdependence. But as Durkheim himself would eventually recognize, the industrial economy that he initially imagined would generate solidarity would actually serve to weaken its fragile ties, fostering what he called anomie, the corrosive hopelessness that accompanied growing inequality.

In the United States, solidarity never achieved the same intellectual cachet as in Europe. Since this nation’s founding, the concept has generally been neglected, and the practice actively suppressed and even criminalized. Attempts to forge cross-racial solidarity have met with violent suppression time and again, and labor organizing, effectively outlawed until the New Deal era, still occupies hostile legal ground. Decades of market-friendly policies, promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, have undermined solidarity in ways both subtle and overt, from encouraging us to see ourselves as individual consumers rather than citizens to fostering individualism and competition over collectivity and cooperation.

As our profit-driven economy has made us more insecure and atomized — and more susceptible to authoritarian appeals — the far right has seized its opportunity. A furious backlash now rises to cut down the shoots of solidarity that sprung up as a result of recent movements pushing for economic, racial, environmental and gender justice. In response, programs that encourage diversity and inclusion are being targeted by billionaire investors, while small acts of solidarity — like helping someone get an abortion or bailing protesters out of jail — have been criminalized.

Awaiting the return of Mr. Trump, the Heritage Foundation has mapped out a plan to remake government and society, using the full power of the state to roll back what it calls “the Great Awokening” and restore a Judeo-Christian, capitalist “culture of life” and “blessedness.” “Woke” has been turned into a pejorative so that the word can be wielded to tarnish and break the solidarity that people have only just begun to experience.

Our vision of a solidarity state offers a pointed rejoinder to this project. Social democrats and socialists have been right to emphasize the need for redistribution and robust public investment in goods and services. We must restructure our economy so that it works for the many and not the few. But unlike conservatives — think, for example, of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain who in 1981 said, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul” — liberals and leftists have tended to downplay the role of policy in shaping public sensibilities. This is a mistake.

Laws and social programs not only shape material outcomes; they also shape us, informing public perceptions and preferences, and generating what scholars call policy feedback loops. There is no neutral state to aspire to. Policies can either foster solidarity and help repair the divides that separate us or deepen the fissures.

Today, the American welfare state too often does the latter. As sociologists including Suzanne Mettler and Matthew Desmond have detailed, lower-income people tend to be stigmatized for needing assistance, while more-affluent citizens reap a range of benefits that are comparatively invisible, mainly through tax credits and tax breaks. Both arrangements — the highly visible and stigmatized aid to the poor and the more invisible and socially acceptable aid to the affluent — serve to foster resentment and obscure how we are all dependent on the state in various ways.

Instead of treating citizens as passive and isolated recipients of services delivered from on high, a solidarity state would experiment with creative ways of fostering connection and participation at every opportunity for more Americans. What if we had basic guarantees that were universal rather than means-tested programs that distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, stigmatizing some and setting groups apart? What if, following the model of a widely admired program in Canada, the government aided groups of private citizens who want to sponsor and subsidize migrants and refugees? What if public schools, post offices, transit systems, parks, public utilities and jobs programs were explicitly designed to facilitate social connection and solidarity in addition to providing essential support and services?

We’ll get there only if we take up the challenge of building solidarity from wherever we happen to sit. Both means and end, solidarity can be a source of power, built through the day-to-day work of organizing, and our shared purpose. Solidarity is the essential and too often missing ingredient of today’s most important political project: not just saving democracy but creating an egalitarian, multiracial society that can guarantee each of us a dignified life.

Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix are political organizers and the authors of the book “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

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Governor DeSantis Signs Legislation to End the Squatters Scam in Florida

ORLANDO, Fla.— Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 621, which protects property rights, provides homeowners remedies against squatting, and increases penalties on squatters.

“We are putting an end to the squatters scam in Florida,”  said Governor Ron DeSantis . “While other states are siding with the squatters, we are protecting property owners and punishing criminals looking to game the system.”

“Florida is once again leading the nation, this time in securing our state against squatters,”  said  Attorney General Ashley Moody . “Biden has allowed millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the border. After video evidence of their plan to take over homes emerged, we’re ensuring Floridians are protected from this egregious and brazen scheme. I’m grateful to Governor DeSantis for signing this important legislation into law, and to Representative Kevin Steele for carrying this bill through Session.”

Under HB 621, a property owner can request law enforcement to immediately remove a squatter from their property if the following conditions are met:

• The individual has unlawfully entered and remains on the property;
• The individual has been directed to leave the property by the owner but has not done so; and
• The individual is not a current or former tenant in a legal dispute.

In Florida, it will be quick and simple to reclaim your home from squatters, avoiding costly delays, litigation, and missed rents.

HB 621 also creates harsh penalties for those engaged in squatting and for those who encourage squatting and teach others the scam. The bill makes it:

• A first-degree misdemeanor for making a false statement in writing to obtain real property or for knowingly and willfully presenting a falsified document conveying property rights;
• A second-degree felony for any person who unlawfully occupies or trespasses in a residential dwelling and who intentionally causes $1,000 or more in damages; and
• A first-degree felony for knowingly advertising the sale or rent of a residential property without legal authority or ownership.

For more on HB 621, click  here .

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Write any five arguments in favour of democracy?

Answer: democracy is a political structure in which people directly exercise power, or elect members from among themselves to represent the people, such as a parliament. it is also called the majority rule and here can’t inherit the power. people are choosing their representatives. representatives participate in an election and the voters elect their members. arguments in favour of democracy five arguments in favour of democracy are, 1) more accountability from democratic government a non-democratic government need not necessarily try to solve and respond to the needs of the people, the response of a non-democratic government depends on the wishes of the rulers. in a democracy the government has to respond to the needs of the people, they are accountable to the people of the country. 2) improved decision-making qualities decisions taken in a democracy are based on discussions and consultations held with various stakeholders. on the flip side, it may take more time, but the big advantage is that when multiple people are involved in decision making, the possibilities of making impulsive, rash decisions, irresponsible and wrong decisions will be avoided. 3) democracy provides a method to deal with differences and conflicts. there will be differences of opinions and conflicts in any society. this is prevalent in a country like india which has immense social diversity. in india, people have varied and diverse preferences since people belong to different regions, religions, castes, speak different languages and have diverse cultural practices. hence differences of opinion are bound to rise. in democracy no one is a permanent loser and no one is a permanent winner, hence in a diverse country like india whenever conflicts arise, democracy is the only option that provides a peaceful solution. 4) democracy enhances the dignity of citizens the principle of political equality is the foundation of democracy. in a democracy educated and uneducated will be given the same status. in a democracy, the poor and rich will be accorded the same status. in a democracy, there is no scope for dictatorship. 5) democracy is better than other forms of government because it allows us to correct its own mistakes. there is no guarantee that governments will not make mistakes. there is no guarantee that mistakes will not happen in a democracy. on the positive side, mistakes done cannot be hidden for long in a democracy, democracy gives space for civilized public discussions and debates on the mistakes. democracy gives room for rectifying errors or mistakes. in a democracy, if there is a mistake, the government has to change its wrong decisions or people have the right to change the government through elections. the above process does not exist in non-democratic governments..

Q)Give any five agrument against and in favour of democracy?