Democratic Autonomy and the Shortcomings of Citizens

European Journal of Political Research, 1993

Schumpeter argued that the norms of what he called the 'classical' theory were unrealisable within modern societies and offered what he believed to be a more realistic alternative. However, his critics accuse him of confusing 'is' with 'ought'. This paper seeks to save him from this criticism. It shows that Schumpeter's attack on the classical model rested on a correct appraisal of the constraints on individual autonomous action within modern societies. Unlike the 'competitive theory' of Downs and others, Schurnpeter's own alternative cannot be treated as a naive apologia for contemporary parliametary party democracy. He was well aware that such systems easily degenerate into oligopolies. Indeed he welcomed this development, viewing the party elections as means for moulding rather than responding to the people's will. Nevertheless, a series of procedural norms underlay his theory which are elucidated with reference to Wittgenstein's account of language.

Democracy and the need for autonomy, 2019

Democracy is a system to keep different groups and interests in balance. External changes like climate change, wars, mass immigration and changes in trade policies can influence the balance. That is why it is important to see democracy as a process. However, we have to be alert, a process is never completed. When changing the rules of the process we have to be alert that the citizens of democratic countries still have the perception that they are heard and have control over their own destiny. In this paper some elements are described that can influence this perception of being in control.

Reprinted with the permission of the author and Columbia University Press. good that is acceptable to all citizens. According to some, the results of social choice theory led to a critique of populism. 6 These two developments, one sociological and the other economic, were the two main sources for liberal democratic theory up to 1970. The central motifs of these lines of research also had an impact on constitutional theory. In this context, the pluralist model of democracy proposed by Robert Dahl and others provided an inºuential framework for interpreting Madisonian democracy. Dahl was interested in the social conditions under which egalitarian democratic ideals could be approximately realized in complex industrialized societies. In line with James Madison's Federalist Paper no. 10, he identiªed competition among group interests as a crucial condition for democracy. Although Dahl's decentralized, "polyarchal" version of pluralism shed much of Schumpeter's elitism, it retained the emphasis on competition, interests, and voting. 7 This climate was a rather inhospitable one for conceptions of public deliberation about a common good. Although other theorists, such as John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, were prominent in postwar political theory, the competitive-pluralist trend only began to reverse itself in the late 1960s. This reversal can be traced, at least in part, to broad dissatisfaction with the debacles and anonymity of liberal government (e.g., the war in Vietnam and the increasing perception that decision making in government was bureaucratic and beyond the control of citizens). More speciªcally, leftist political activism, with its emphasis on participatory democracy, sparked renewed interest in the possibilities for consensual forms of self-government. 8 The theoretical critique of liberal democracy and revival of participatory politics gradually developed through the 1970s. 9 It was only in the 1980s, however, that a concept of deliberative democracy began to take deªnite shape. The term "deliberative democracy" seems to have been ªrst coined by Joseph Bessette, who argued against elitist (or "aristocratic") interpretations of the Constitution. 10 Bessette's challenge joined the chorus of voices calling for a participatory view of democratic politics. These theorists questioned the key assumptions underlying the earlier economic and pluralist models: that politics should be understood mainly in terms of a conºict of competing interests-and thus in terms more of bargaining than xii Introduction respond only to power? The key to his solution lies in the internal relation between the exercise of political power and the rule of law: in constitutional regimes, government ofªcials are at least constrained by the arguments and reasons that have held up in the public sphere. Insofar as a broadly dispersed, "subjectless communication" among citizens is allowed to develop in autonomous public spheres and enter into receptive representative bodies with formal decision-making power, the notion of popular sovereignty-a democratically self-organizing society-is not beyond the pale of feasibility. Models such as Habermas's differ from updated republicanism and rights-based liberalism by elaborating an idealized deliberative procedure as its point of departure. In the next two essays, Joshua Cohen and John Rawls try to work out the philosophical details of a conception of political justiªcation based on deliberation and public reason. The third essay in part 1, Joshua Cohen's "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy," provides a good example of how such an ideal proceduralism could be elaborated. Like Habermas, Cohen deªnes political legitimacy in relation to an ideal consensus: "outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals." 14 Similar to Elster in his discussion of the constraints of the forum, Cohen maintains that the orientation toward reasoned agreement should constrain citizens to focus their proposals on the common good. But Cohen takes a step beyond Elster by specifying procedural standards, such as freedom and lack of coercion and the formal and substantive equality of participants, designed to preserve autonomy and guard against objectionable deliberative outcomes. Cohen then goes on to argue that his ideal procedure provides a suitable model for democratic institutions, one that should be broadly acceptable, stable, just, and institutionally feasible, given the proper mediating structures (such as voting and party competition). As Cohen has argued elsewhere, an ideal procedural model provides the basis for an "epistemic" interpretation of democratic outcomes. 15 This interpretation presupposes that deliberation involves xv Introduction Reason, Politics, and Justiªcation: The Process, Conditions, and Goal of Deliberation The essays in part 2 continue the work of specifying the details of the ideal of deliberative democracy. They primarily address controversies that have emerged after the initial statements of Elster, xvii Introduction Deliberative Democracy as a Substantive Ideal: Equality, Pluralism, and Liberty The remaining essays by Knight and Johnson, Bohman, Richardson, Young, and Cohen concern more substantive issues about the process and conditions necessary for deliberative democracy: political equality, cultural difference, the formation of joint intentions, and the role of the substantive liberal and egalitarian values that inform deliberative procedures. Taken together, they show not only the variety of positions within deliberative theory, but also the robustness of the deliberative ideal in dealing with the problems facing contemporary democracy. Rather than focusing on the outcome of deliberation, Bohman and Knight and Johnson take up the most fundamental condition of deliberation for either epistemic or nonepistemic versions: political equality. Both essays develop substantive conceptions that attempt to go beyond merely building equality into procedures, ideal or otherwise. Certainly, procedural equality, understood as the equality of opportunity to participate in political decision making, is crucial for democratic legitimacy. But deliberative democracy also requires elaborating the substantive aspects of political equality appropriate to its particular ideal. Whereas for Knight and Johnson this is "equal opportunity of access to political inºuence," for Bohman it is "equally effective social freedom." In order to develop procedural aspects of equality, Knight and Johnson turn to analogies to the axioms of social choice theory; Bohman, by contrast, develops this aspect of political equality in terms of Habermas's ideal speech situation where all have equal opportunity to speak. But the main innovation in both essays is to develop the more substantive account in which the work of Amartya Sen on "capability equality" is the primary inspiration. 25 Knight and Johnson argue that this approach has considerable advantages over the Rawlsian approach and answer objections put forward by Cohen that the resource-based account is more practically useful. However, they see problems with Sen's xxiii Introduction of group-based identities in the decision-making process, deliberative democracy will be blind to sources of inequality and asymmetries of power. Adding to her previous work on "group differentiated citizenship," Young argues here that making groups (rather than individuals) the subjects of deliberation has distinct epistemic advantages. These advantages follow from her nonessentialist understanding of social groups as occupying different, relational positions, each with its own particular social perspective. Critical public discussion ought to be about the expression and exchange of different social perspectives, so that each can be transformed into a more reºective and objective social judgment. Deliberation is thus the mutual openness and accountability of different groups to each other's perspectives, each of which is committed to thinking from the standpoint of everyone else. Young makes communication across differences essential to the creation of a wider and potentially shared perspective that is infused with the comprehensive social knowledge derived from the situated knowledge of every particular social group. Difference is thus "a resource" (and not just a burden) for democratic communication among and across various groups, the outcome of which is the more comprehensive and effective form of social knowledge. Given the intense scrutiny to which Joshua Cohen's work has been submitted in this volume, it is only ªtting that it end with an essay by him. Here Cohen gives a revised general statement of the deliberative conception, showing how "the fact of reasonable pluralism" xxv Introduction provides a way to give concrete shape to the conception of citizens as free and equal. Deliberative democracy, he argues, is not merely based on a procedural conception of justiªcation. Rather, it establishes a substantive conception of politics, containing a very speciªc interpretation of egalitarian and liberal values of rights and liberties. Under reasonable pluralism, citizens are free to the extent that they do not have to share some particular religious or moral doctrine; they are equal to the extent that "each is recognized as having the capacities required for participating in discussion aimed at authorizing the exercise of power." Using Rawls's terminology, the idealized procedure is still a model characterization of free reasoning among equals, the features of which can be built into institutions. The added norm of reasonableness is the crucial addition to the model that he develops in "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy." This assumption is strongly challenged by Knight and Johnson, Gaus, Young, and Christiano as an inadequate normative basis for settling problems of difference. Its main use for Cohen is to...

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2022

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists.

Works on the quality of democracy propose standards for evaluating politics beyond those encompassed by a minimal definition of democracy. Yet, what is the quality of democracy? This article first reconstructs and assesses current conceptualizations of the quality of democracy. Thereafter, it reconceptualizes the quality of democracy by equating it with democracy pure and simple, positing that democracy is a synthesis of political freedom and political equality, and spelling out the implications of this substantive assumption. The proposal is to broaden the concept of democracy to address two additional spheres: government decision-making – political institutions are democratic inasmuch as a majority of citizens can change the status quo – and the social environment of politics – the social context cannot turn the principles of political freedom and equality into mere formalities. Alternative specifications of democratic standards are considered and reasons for discarding them are provided

forthcoming in N. J. Pedersen, P. Graham, M. Fricker, D. Henderson, and J. Wyatt (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Social Epistemology, Routledge.

A current debate concerns whether we can explain democratic legitimacy purely with reference to the intrinsic value of the public affirmation of equality, or whether we must invoke epistemic standards to do so. The freedom side of democracy is ignored or rejected in this debate. But in order to understand the intrinsic value of democracy, we cannot ignore the relationship between freedom and democracy. Moreover, the freedom argument can better respond to the epistemic challenge to intrinsic accounts than can the equality argument. However, the freedom argument for democracy must be refined to avoid important objections to the idea that democracy can make citizens self-governing. The proposed freedom argument is based on the relational norm of not having another person as a master.

2019

International Philosophical Quarterly, 2013

According to Thomas Christiano, autonomy-centered arguments for democratic rights are not successful. These arguments fail to show that there is anything wrong with citizens who want to trade-off their political rights in exchange for more autonomy regarding their private affairs. The trade-off problem suggests that democratic participation is not necessary for leading a free life. My reply employs recent work in the republican tradition. The republican conception of freedom as non-domination supports the incommensurability of the public and the private aspects of autonomy. Christiano overlooks that trading-off the normative conditions of one’s public autonomy results in agents who are mere subjects to the dominating will of those citizens who retain their democratic rights. Since democratic decisions apply to all citizens, the privatized members end up being dominated, especially with respect to the collective determination of the very border separating the private from the public realm.