criticism of democracy essay

The Case Against Democracy

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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Intellectuals have said democracy is failing for a century. They were wrong.

Walter Lippmann’s famous critique of democracy revisited.

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by Sean Illing

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion , published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I’ve ever read. Shortly after it was published, John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and the most important American philosopher of the era, called Lippmann’s book “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived.”

Lippmann poses a straightforward question: can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? His answer is no, and the whole point of the book is to expose the gap between what we say democracy is and what we know about how human beings actually behave.

Most democratic theorists in the 20th century believed that more information would produce a more informed citizenry, and a more informed citizenry would make good on the core promise of democracy. They were wrong. More information doesn’t necessarily lead to more enlightened civic participation — it is just as likely to lead to more noise, more partisanship, and more ignorance (click here and here and here for research backing this up). Indeed, more informed voters practice more partisan self-deception.

The second half of the book attempts to solve all the problems the first part unearths. Here Lippmann fails spectacularly, and he fails because his solution to the problems of democracy is to abandon everything that makes democracy worthwhile. He couldn’t figure out how to intelligently guide public opinion, so he sought to transcend it altogether by creating a “bureau of experts” that would decide public policy on behalf of the public. But that isn’t a democracy at all; it’s a technocracy at best, an oligarchy at worst.

Today, Lippmann’s pessimism is fashionable. After Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a whole genre of nonfiction literature has emerged, seeking to explain how democracies die , or why Western liberalism is in retreat . Pundits and analysts have argued that democracy is “decaying” worldwide, and that America is morphing into an authoritarian state.

Which is why it’s important to note that as powerful as Lippmann’s diagnosis of democracy’s flaws is, it seems to have missed something essential about the elasticity of democratic systems. After all, here we are, almost a century later, and America has become more powerful, more tolerant, more wealthy, and even more democratic. Perhaps that divergence contains lessons for our present moment of panic, too.

The myth of democracy

Lippmann begins his critique by exploding the romanticized vision of democracy espoused by the American Founders.

They imagined that citizens, no matter how sprawling the state became, would still function much as they did in the small, self-contained communities that existed in the 18th century. Which is to say, they would be asked to make decisions about issues with which they had direct experience. They were thinking of white, male, property-owning farmers who understood their local environment, knew their neighbors, and didn’t live in a highly industrialized society.

As Lippmann put it, “The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.” The racism and sexism notwithstanding, that environment looks nothing like ours, and the range of issues voters are expected to know something about today vastly exceeds the demands at the time of the founding.

The question for Lippmann, then, wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently. And he made the point using himself as an example:

My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.

You might read this and think, “Citizens don’t have to have an intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community. Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their interests.” On this view, citizens don’t need to be “omnicompetent,” to borrow Lippmann’s term, they just have to know enough to pick the team that represents their interests. But to do that, voters have to know what their interests are, and which party actually represents them.

There’s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn’t assume a minimum level of competence from a majority of voters. Lippmann doubted this level of mastery was possible because citizens are too removed from the world to form concrete judgments. Consequently, they’re forced to live in “pseudo-environments,” in which they reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.

Lippmann was an integral part of the Committee on Public Information, the agency tasked with creating propaganda to gin up support for World War I. That experience taught him how manipulable the public was, how easily people surrender to compelling narratives. We’re told about the world before we see it, we imagine things before we experience them, and we become hostages to these preconceptions.

These narratives are a defense against uncertainty. They present us with an ordered picture of the world, to which our tastes and stereotypes and values are anchored. Which is why it’s so hard to separate people from their dogmas. “Any disturbance of the stereotypes,” Lippmann says, “seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe ... It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe.”

Lippmann’s point is that voter preferences are based “not on direct and certain knowledge but on pictures” given to us. The question is then, where do we get our pictures? The most obvious answer is the media. If the media can provide accurate pictures of the world, citizens ought to have the information they need to perform their democratic duties. Lippmann says this works in theory but not in practice. The world, he argues, is big and it moves fast and the speed of communication in the age of mass media forces journalists to speak through slogans and simplified interpretations. (And this doesn’t even touch the problem of partisanship in a commercialized media landscape.)

Somewhere early in the book, Lippmann cites a famous passage from Plato’s Republic that describes human beings as cave-dwellers who spend their lives watching shadows on a wall and take that to be their true reality. Our present condition is scarcely different, Lippmann implies. We’re locked in a cave of media misrepresentations and we take our caricatured pictures of the world to be an accurate reflection of what’s actually happening.

“News and truth are not the same thing”

If Lippmann is right, more and better information won’t save us, because the problem isn’t access to facts; it’s flaws in human cognition. But even if he’s wrong about this, and I think he might be, we’re still screwed because of certain constraints imposed on the press.

Lippmann says the press is like a roaming spotlight, bouncing from topic to topic, story to story, illuminating things but never fully explaining them. “The function of news,” he writes, “is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

This is a strange way of making a simple point: in the world of news, there is often no objective test for what’s true. If we’re reporting sports statistics or poll numbers or stock futures, then objectivity is easy. But when it comes to analyzing economic conditions or the value of labor unions or the merits of universal health care or the limits of state power, there is no such test. What we’re doing isn’t uncovering truth so much as constructing narratives, and those narratives reflect our biases, our experience, our ignorance, our hopes, our confusion. We see reality through a glass darkly.

But even if we set aside this question of whether the press can reliably tell the truth, there remains an intractable demand-side problem: readers, for the most part, aren’t paying for news, so publications need advertisers; to get advertisers, you must attract readers; and to attract readers, you must pander to the audience’s biases. Here’s how Lippmann sums it up:

This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the outcome ... The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position.

Lippmann’s point was true enough in 1922 — today it is indisputable. The media is more fragmented, more competitive, more profit-driven. Consequently, news consumption is like shopping: you find the source of information that most reflects your point of view, and you signal your preference with your loyalty.

Here again Lippmann is undermining an assumption baked into most democratic theories: we expect the press to “carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty” by supplying citizens with the truth even though it’s not at all clear most people are interested in truth. Is it not obvious, Lippmann asks, that people prefer the entertaining and the trivial over the dull and the important, or the flattering and the convenient over the honest and the difficult?

It’s hard to look at our current moment and conclude that Lippmann’s pessimism was misplaced. Truth is as variable as it’s ever been, and public trust in the press is at an all-time low . That stereotypical thinking Lippmann worried about is amplified by a media environment far more commercialized and partisan than he ever imagined. Indeed, public opinion is now so hopelessly cocooned that the president is under investigation for colluding with our primary geopolitical foe and more than half the country doesn’t give a damn .

Lippmann anticipated many of these problems, and yet you can’t engage his critique without asking what comes next. Sadly, the alternative vision of democracy isn’t actually a vision of democracy at all.

The best he can do is call for a “specialized class” of social scientific experts who operate beyond the voters and the politicians. In theory, there would be a crop of experts for each area of government, and these experts would competently examine the facts and then advise government officials. Lippmann believed such a system would divorce the “assembling of knowledge” from “the control of policy.” And, even more crucially, it would ensure that the experts remained independently funded and thus free from corrupt motives.

Dewey probably said it best: “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.” If Lippmann had his way, the public would be liberated from its oppressive fictions, but at the price of everything just about democracy.

Dewey’s rejoinder

After Public Opinion was released, Lippmann and Dewey entered into a long, informal debate about how to fix democracy. Dewey was forced to concede Lippmann’s basic point about the folly of public opinion. “As matters now stand,” he wrote, “every issue is hopelessly entangled in a snarl of emotions, stereotypes and irrelevant memories and associations.” Still, he rejected Lippmann’s call for a technocratic elite.

For Dewey, everything reduced to a simple question: who is most in need of enlightenment, citizens or administrators? What Lippmann wanted, whether he realized it or not, was to permanently turn citizens into spectators. He assumed that public opinion was about the mass of individuals possessing a correct representation of the world, and since they could never do this, they had to be locked out of the decision-making process.

But Dewey insisted that political knowledge, in a democracy, could only come about through conversation among and between citizens. The only reality that matters is the reality that citizens collectively construct. If you accept, as Lippmann does, that the public is atomized and permanently cut off from the conversation about public affairs, then you’ve undercut the very possibility of democracy. Again, Dewey put it well:

There is no limit to the intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community. That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.

I think Dewey is right here, but Lippmann’s point about people effectively living in separate worlds still holds. Since Robert Putnam’s famous 2000 book Bowling Alone , scholars have lamented the loss of civic bonds in America. At the same time, local newspapers are dying out and political discourse is becoming increasingly nationalized, which means most issues are abstract and dominated by tribal allegiance and caricatured right-left narratives.

Lippmann feared that the citizenry would abandon the public square and give themselves over to propaganda. That’s exactly what happened, and yet American democracy has done remarkably well over the last century.

How do we make sense of that?

Things are bad, but they’ve always been bad, which means they’re not as bad as we think

It’s tempting, from our perch in 2018, to conclude that democracy is broken beyond repair. The world seems to be careening into more and more disorder, and American politics in particular is hopelessly ensnarled in partisan dysfunction.

But perhaps the Lippmann-Dewey debate offers another perspective: democracy has always been clumsy, has never really lived up to its ideals, and yet we’re all still alive. Given how prophetic Lippmann’s critique was, you’d expect American democracy to have collapsed under the weight of its own incoherence by now. But here we are, in 2018, still humming along, still the most influential country in the world, still the richest and the most dynamic economy on the planet.

For all its problems (and there are many), democracy has managed to thrive. And the democratic world, over time, has gotten more stable, more wealthy, and more tolerant. Maybe the point is that democracy doesn’t have to work the way it was conceived in order to be successful. Maybe the myth of democracy is just that — a myth.

If there’s a lesson in all this for today, it’s that we should be careful not to define democracy by its worst attribute. Lippmann was so obsessed with the problem of public opinion that he failed to notice that the problem wasn’t new, that democracy wasn’t malfunctioning. The practice of democracy has always been messy and chaotic, and mass ignorance wasn’t the exception but the rule.

Voters will often make egregious choices, and sometimes those choices produce horrifying outcomes. Still, the system, as a whole, has proven incredibly resilient, and a far better alternative to non-democratic systems, which lead invariably to corruption and oppression. If democracy works, it’s not because the people are reliably wise; it’s because the system offers a layer of accountability that, more often than not, supports a stable and just society. Democracies are also prone to disorder and corruption, but these are ineluctable features of any political system comprised of selfish and flawed human beings.

The current wave of pessimism is a reminder that there’s a recurring tendency on the part of intellectuals to abandon democracy when it veers off course. It’s a reactionary move that typically overstates the nature of the threat. Lippmann was shaken by the insanity of World War I, and so he thought something — anything — had to be done to keep the democratic world from descending into another war. The shock of Brexit and a Trump presidency has sent many observers (myself included) into a panic. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I interviewed Jason Brennan , a Georgetown political theorist, who argued for a Lippmann-esque epistocracy to replace traditional democracy.

But I could just as easily argue that Brennan, like Lippmann, has it precisely backwards. Instead of abandoning democracy, maybe what we need is more and better democracy. Maybe, as Dewey taught, we need to educate and empower more citizens. Maybe the crisis we’re facing now, in the age of Trump, is just the latest manifestation of a problem that has always plagued democratic societies, and always will. Maybe we should pause, take a deep breath, and step back from the precipice.

Democracy has survived far worse than Trump and Brexit.

This article was originally published on August 9, 2018.

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Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy

• © 2023
• Eerik Lagerspetz 0 ,
• Oili Pulkkinen 1

Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

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University of Turku, Turku, Finland

• Explores how the concept of democracy is being impacted by technological developments
• Proposes that democracy requires trust as well as distrust to function properly
• Brings together historians, philosophers, political theorists and sociologists to discuss the criticisms of democracy

Part of the book series: Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century (CDC)

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Is it possible, in the complex modern world, to have a government ‘by the people’? Does, for example, digital technology help us to bring the reality closer to the ideal? Or does it actually make the ideal unattainable?

The volume brings together conceptual historians, philosophers, political theorists and sociologists to discuss the criticisms and crises of democracy with fresh approaches to the idea of democracy, democratic theory, democratic institutions, trust and distrust, populism, and advancement of technologies in Western societies.

• democratic theory
• democratic institutions
• trust and distrust
• crisis of democracy
• artificial intelligence
• authoritarianism
• deliberative democracy
• illiberal democracy
• political institutions

Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Eerik Lagerspetz, Oili Pulkkinen

Trust, Distrust and Democracy

The trust in science revisited: social-epistemic challenges in democratic and digital societies.

• Michael Baurmann

Suspicious Minds: Towards a Typology of Political Distrust

• Paul-Erik Korvela, Isak Vento

Distrust and Democracy

• Sari Roman-Lagerspetz

Authoritarianism and Democracy

Whose populism what democracy on the conceptual and normative connections of populism and democracy.

• Onni Hirvonen

Carl Schmitt and the Political Theology of Populism

Between democracy and authoritarianism: the illiberal challenge.

• Jonatan Ropponen

The Grey Areas of Democracy: Indifference and the Erosion of Democratic Principles from Within

• Jussi Metsälä, Heino Nyyssönen

Constitutional Thought, Democracy and Crisis Government

Eerik Lagerspetz

Democracy—The Will of the People?

From the democracy of opinions to the democracy of procedures.

• Kari Palonen

Agenda Problem in Referendum Democracy

On the concept and practice of democracy in late-modern mass conditions: an oakeshottian update.

• Suvi Soininen

Back Matter

Editors and affiliations.

Oili Pulkkinen

About the editors

Eerik Lagerspetz  is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland.

Oili Pulkkinen  is a historian, who is currently researching artificial intelligence, democracy, political subjectivity and time.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy

Editors : Eerik Lagerspetz, Oili Pulkkinen

Series Title : Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41397-1

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Political Science and International Studies , Political Science and International Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-41396-4 Published: 01 November 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-41399-5 Published: 02 November 2024

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-41397-1 Published: 31 October 2023

Series ISSN : 2946-3416

Series E-ISSN : 2946-3424

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XI, 296

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

Topics : Political Theory , Political Sociology , Political Philosophy , Political History

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Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory 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 and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

This entry focuses on issues in contemporary democratic theory. Although it mentions authors in the history of philosophy where relevant, it does not attempt to give a history of democratic theory. Readers interested in more in-depth discussions of historical figures important to the development of democratic theory are advised to look at the entries listed in the “Historical Figures” section towards the end of this entry.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.1.4 economic justifications of democracy, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

• 4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.2.6 sortition, 4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, 8. historical figures, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures 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. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is 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 a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda 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. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues 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.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

• each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
• voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
• votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. 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. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. 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. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Marsilius [DP]; Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree 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 their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue 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 can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, 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 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

There are a number of economic justifications of democratic institutions. They proceed from the idea that preferences are given and that institutions are justified in terms of how citizens, given their preferences, would rationally want their society to be organized. The two accounts we mention here are in a broadly contractarian tradition, which seeks to determine what persons would agree to as a framework for collective decision making. Probably the most famous of these efforts and the one that has led to the highly fruitful research program of public choice theory is that of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their classic work The Calculus of Consent (1963). They argue that something like constitutional democracy could arise from a state of nature in which persons, with their basic natural and property rights protected, would agree to a collective decision procedure. The basic preference structure is self-interest in which persons attempt to maximize the stream of benefits to themselves. Individuals desire a collective decision-making apparatus in order to take care of problems that arise in the state of nature from uncontrolled external costs and public bads, which are costs that arise for everyone because no individual has incentive to limit them. External costs are costs that persons impose others without their consent. Hence, the purpose of the collective decision making is to take care of problems that arise when markets are inefficient because of externalities and public bads. The design of the decision procedure is meant to minimize two kinds of costs: external costs and decision costs. Decision costs are costs that arise from the difficulty of making collective decisions. Such decision making takes time and resources. Here is the basic calculation each person considers when choosing a collective decision procedure. On the one hand, they consider the external costs imposed on them if the decision procedure is not a unanimity procedure. Each person reflects that as the decision procedure approximates unanimity the chance of external costs imposed on them goes to zero. Taking the external costs of the procedure alone into account each prefers unanimity. On the other hand, each person considers the decision costs of a collective procedure. Here, as the decision procedure approaches unanimity the decision costs grow extremely large because of all the haggling such a procedure would generate. The procedure each person would choose under the circumstances would attempt to minimize the combination of these two costs. It would be a procedure that is close to majority rule, though there is no reason to suppose that majority rule itself would be chosen.

One objection is that the assumptions behind the argument are too strong. Buchanan and Tullock argue that this process would lead to unanimous agreement on a collective decision procedure under certain assumptions such as individuals cannot be divided into groups with strongly opposed interests and when individuals are sufficiently uncertain of their fates in the long term that their interests become more or less the same. They are in effect behind a veil of ignorance with regard to the future. These assumptions have been contested as descriptions of any plausible circumstances in which societies find themselves.

Another broadly economic approach can be found in Douglas Rae (1969). Rae argues that individuals with preferences over social states would generally prefer majority rule over the long run because majority rule maximizes the chances of the satisfaction of their preferences. The Rae-Taylor theorem states that if each individual has an equal prior probability of preferring each of the two alternatives, majority rule maximizes each individual’s expected utility (see the Section 2.4 of the entry on social choice theory ). Again the background assumption is that people don’t know how often they fall in the majority or minority and don’t have any special preference for the status quo. Under these circumstances, one gets what one wants more often from a collective decision procedure when it is majoritarian (see also Coleman [1989]).

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato 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 the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual 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. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). 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.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This 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. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and 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.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian 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 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

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. The core objection is that 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 1982: 116). Ronald 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; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

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.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85; see also Marsilius [DP]). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. 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.

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 (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). 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.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. 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.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies 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 Cohen’s conception 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. 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.

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. 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 avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. 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 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, 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. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

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. Peter Singer argues that 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 (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. 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).

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.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

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 public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. 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.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree 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 coercively 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?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many 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 epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? 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. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. 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: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that 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.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent 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 taxes 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.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by 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). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic 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. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. 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. Internal 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.

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 gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, 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.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). 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.

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 (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). 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.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external 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. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

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 limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

• Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
• 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?
• 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 an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). 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.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. 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.

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 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 (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

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 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. To be sure, 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.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

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 sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 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. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). 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. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will 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 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.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

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. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). 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 (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, 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? One promising view is 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: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And 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 and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

It has been argued that some of the core problems of electoral representative democracy can be solved by embracing the appointment of political officials by random selection, or sortition . Athenian democracy involved direct democracy for the making of laws and sortition for the choice of officials. Sortition is arguably consistent with the definition of democracy offered in section 1 because, in virtue of the fact that citizens have an equal chance of being selected, sortition is characterized by equality at a crucial stage of the decision-making process. Alex Guerrero (2014) argues that sortition can avoid the related problems of political ignorance, lack of representative accountability, and capture of the political process by elites. The problems are solved because the appointment of public officials does not depend on the input of ordinary citizens who are likely to be ignorant about political matters, nor does it leave space for the wealthy and powerful to influence official decision-making through funding electoral campaigns. One objection is that sortition ignores citizens’ interests in being part of the process of collective self-governance and rather than merely having an equal chance to be part of this process (Lafont 2019). Another objection is that the process of sortition does not allow for choosing representatives and political parties that have put together a conception of how all the interests in society are to fit together in a just and reasonable whole.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral 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 prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. 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 that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). 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 (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). 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.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). 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 freeze 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.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

• Plato’s ethics and politics in The Republic
• Aristotle’s political theory
• Thomas Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy
• John Locke’s political philosophy
• Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Immanuel Kant’s social and political philosophy
• John Stuart Mill’s moral and political philosophy
• Hannah Arendt
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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.

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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.

What is Euthyphro’s dilemma? Plato’s Ideas About Religious Morality

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.

Frequently Read Together

Plato’s Theaetetus: How Do We Know What We Know?

The Ship of Fools: Plato’s Allegory on Leadership and Political Expertise

Who Was Aristotle?

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4 Plato against Democracy: A Defense

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This essay examines the Republic ’s most important argument against democracy, and claims that it remains, even amidst the dominance of democratic theory, a powerful critique not only of Athenian democracy but also of representative democracy. Plato’s basic idea is that a regime is inherently defective if it gives people a right to participate in political office whether or not they have demonstrated any qualifications for doing so. I examine several ways in which modern and contemporary democratic theorists respond to Plato’s critique, and argue that they are problematic. Perhaps Plato was right, then: democracy is not the best possible political system.

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Plato and Aristotle: Criticisms of Democracy Research Paper

Plato’s criticism of democracy, how should experts in government be selected, the principle of social justice, aristotle’s criticism of democracy, concept of private property, how valid are the arguments of plato and aristotle.

Plato criticises the free choices or freedoms in democracy and the free choice of occupation. An important theory that comes from Socrates states that control of policy in government should be given in the hands of the ‘guardians’. The guardians are those who have reason or a dominating faculty which allows them to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.

Morality can be guarded and ensured if those given the chance to have power over it are those whose actions are ruled by reason. The others who are not dominated by reason should not be allowed to take control of policy. (Sofroniou 2007, p. 75)

People in government should have moral knowledge and not just moral opinion. According to Plato, this is a requirement in order for a government to be moral. An ordinary citizen can have opinion about good things in life but may not have good moral judgement.

He does not know if such things are good if he does not know how to distinguish the ‘essence of goodness’ and its corresponding attributes or manifestations. If a citizen does not possess this power or quality, he will not be able to know the goodness of a thing.

To speak of it in our present time, there are only a few people who are given the power of ‘sound judgement about what is right and what is wrong’ and should have the power to make policy.

Plato opposed the doctrine that everyone should be allowed to express his or her own opinion, to state his beliefs or to influence policies because those who are not trained to function in government do not have enough reason and do not exactly know what is right and what is wrong. A moral government should be controlled by those with moral knowledge and not with mere moral opinion.

In order to expound on this clearly, Plato makes another distinction, that between Forms and their apparent manifestations. Plato would like to distinguish the ‘essence’ of beauty and the manifestations of beauty. For Plato these are two different things – essence and manifestations of beauty. (Sofroniou 2007, p. 75)

Modern philosophers have interpreted this distinction with their examples of ‘particular’s and ‘universals’. For example, an orange has its individual qualities, the particulars, but oranges have general qualities of colour, taste, smell, and so on. An orange may have a particular sweet taste – it may be sweeter than another orange but the universal quality is that all oranges have sweet taste.

Plato suggests that a thing is beautiful if it has the Form of beauty. We will know that a thing is beautiful if we know the Form of beauty, or the thing has the presence of that Form , and not on our mere belief that the thing is beautiful. Knowledge depends upon what we know of the universals.

Having knowledge of the Form is important before one can have the wisdom to act and according to Plato this is a prerequisite before he can act on his own life or anything about the state. This is true with goodness and the Form of goodness. The Form of goodness enables us to understand the goodness of a thing. This is compared to the sun which makes our eyes see and makes things visible to everyone.(Sofroniou 2007, p. 76)

The Form of the Good, according to Socrates, may not be the same with universal characteristic. But Socrates believes the objective difference between good and bad acts and humans know how to recognise this difference and distinction. Socrates suggests that only the philosophers can do it.

A philosopher is one who has the ‘passion to see the truth’. He knows how to discern the essence of the thing and does not confuse things. For this reason, Socrates concludes that philosophers should be kings – political power and philosophy should meet so that people can rest from troubles and there will be peace in the land. (Sofroniou 2007, p. 77)

Plato suggests that a government should be composed of experts. He does not conform to the democratic system that people should select the kind of leaders to make the policy of government because those who are elected in office will only do what satisfies public demand and do not even know the essence of things and the many manifestations of things.

Experts in government should be selected according to their knowledge of the essence of things.

According to Plato, someone who has the capability to have knowledge of the Good needs training or his mind should be trained for this purpose. And another important thing is that someone who has this kind of knowledge and training should live apart from temptations so that he is able to perform his solemn duty.(Sofroniou 2007, p. 78)

Plato criticises the free choice of occupation and the free choice of being politician. In the play, Socrates proposed in social justice that one should perform one social service according to his best nature or capacity – one should perform according to what he knows best. He must not perform the job of a cobbler if he is a carpenter, or perform the job of a carpenter if he is a cobbler, or perform both.

If this happens, he does a great disservice to the city and it would cause a problem. (Santas 2010, p. 171) Multitasking results in a great problem for the city, Socrates suggests. A money maker should not become a soldier, or a soldier cannot become a counsellor and guardian, or one man cannot perform all those functions; otherwise, he gives a ‘ruin of the city’ (Santas 2010, p. 171).

The principle of social justice, as suggested in the Republic , is that one should perform for what he is best suited and should not be permitted to do anything that he cannot do best; anyone should also not be permitted to change occupation from something for which she can do best to something she cannot do best, and this applies to all. Why can this harm the city?

According to Socrates, this goes all the way to the principle of division of labour which makes things easier, rather than each one do all the things he/she can do – be it production of food, shelter and clothing. People are born with different talents and capabilities needed in different occupations.

An individual can do best on one particular thing while another one can do best on other things. He cannot do many things because doing best on one occupation requires time, education, training, and so on. (Santas 2010, p. 172)

Socrates’ reasoning is still applicable in our time. Division of labour is applied in production. In communities, we get the right people for the right job.

Firms have human resource management to get the best person for the job. And it is not possible to have two jobs for one person even if that person is multi-talented – his performance will be affected. It is still best if people are chosen and perform their job according to their knowledge and training.

Aristotle’s criticisms of democracy are varied and still practiced up to today. They can be applied in many governments today. They are present in many of human activities.

Aristotle says that there is a tendency for democracy to be excessive. More democracy is the usual cry of democrats. A democrat starts with a cry for justice and equality; then he identifies this with the masses and the sovereignty and will of the people. He ends up with absolute freedom (Coats 1994, p. 54). Absolute freedom and absolute ownership of property go together.

Extreme democracy, according to Aristotle, allows the political domination of a small group of citizenry over all the members of a polity (Ober 2001, p. 328). Aristotle says that democracy can change and like any other human activity, it is subject to change.

Democracy can turn into oligarchy or oligarchy into democracy, but there are other forms of democracy and also other forms of oligarchy. From oligarchy, tyranny can take place and tyranny terminates progress. (Simpson 1998, p. 419)

Aristotle in his writings taught that there is a system of check in democracy, something which is found in the American system. This kind of check is present in the powerful and the elite. Bureaucrats are criticised by the people, and when the people are organised, they oppose every proposed measure which is good for the people. (Wilson, Cheek, Power, & Cheek 2001, p. 242)

Aristotle sometimes agreed with Plato that democracy is not an ‘ideal political constitution’ but it distorts and corrupts something else. Aristotle attacks what democracy creates: the people’s ambivalence to what they call social justice; political chaos; seeming lack of morality by the so-called elite; the holding on to power by a select few; etc. (Corcoran 1983, p. 17)

Aristotle considers polity is a form of government or state – it is constitutional and applies to what we now know as democracy. Aristocracy has a constitution which diverts from democracy or it may have a mix of oligarchic and democratic ideals. But Aristotle recognizes democracy as the best that we can ever have as a form of government – it is ‘a government of, by, and for the people’ (Jayapalan 2002, p. 139).

It is false to state that democracy is a government by the poor because rich countries of the world have the democratic form of government – with all the weaknesses and barriers that democracy can offer to the poor. But it is still the best, or perhaps better than dictatorship. Aristotle does not recognize or mention other forms of government like Parliamentary, Representative, or Totalitarian form. (Jayapalan 2002, p. 139)

Aristotle’s criticism on private property is often the subject of commentaries of philosophers. It is interesting and worth the time because it is one of the original concepts of socialism: wealth should not be used for private gain but for the common good. Property enables an organised community to be well constituted and in a well-organised polity common means should be given to all people. (Frank 2005, p. 55)

Aristotle prefers the word ‘holding’ instead of ownership but he rejects common ownership by Plato. He is not opposed to private property but anyone with property should also have the power over it. He opposes forced redistribution of property because it may lead to civil strife. (Frank 2005, p. 55)

But if people have private property, there should be one for common use, with laws applied to it, properties like land and crops, political offices, and so on. This gives a public dimension to the concept of property. Scholars regard property as an instrument; theorists hold that it is an instrument to accumulation of wealth. Property can lead to wealth and virtue.

But Aristotle says that too much property can harm the owner or possessor of property. The summary of Aristotle’s understanding of property is that property is both private and public. Excessive property will not do any good to its owner. (Frank 2005, p. 56)

The world’s main source of Greek political thought, the old and modern tenets of democracy are the writings of Plato and Aristotle. No way can they be considered not valid. Plato is Aristotle’s predecessor and most of their writings agree although there are times that they deviate from their original ideas.

Plato and Aristotle have anti-democratic biases which sometimes render obstacle to a political-science student’s serious study of ancient political thought. But they are more than valid and are even applicable to today’s democratic practices.

Plato’s criticism on the many kinds of regimes depends on the degree from which they have departed from ideal democracy. Aristotle’s criticism on democracy and oligarchy are very valid in the sense that they sometimes both meet on their extremes. For example, when democrats cry for justice, they go to the extent of seeking the people’s support but when they are given the freedom, they abuse power.

Oligarchs are old-time democrats who have lost their being democrats because of their long stay in the system. They are used to democracy that they have taken it for granted. They have transformed into oligarchs. (Yunis 1996, p. 26)

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle warns of excessive property for excessive wealth brings harm to the possessor. Aristotle’s words echo in the lobbies and corridors of wealth and power in congress and in the skyscrapers of businesses in New York and Wall Street where money sells like hotcake, or ‘money doesn’t sleep’. It is here where according to Plato freedom becomes absolute because the democrat continues to cry for justice.

Plato and Aristotle both opposed absolute freedom. Plato said that if all people are allowed to express themselves, there will be chaos. This is the freedom of expression that is a primary freedom of the world today. Take this out and there will be chaos and war.

But this is one of the primary causes of war – the freedom to express one’s self. While both Plato and Aristotle are proponents of democracy, they want a controlled democracy. It may be called an ‘autocratic democracy’.

But this could be an ideal state. There are states practicing this form of autocratic democracy. Some call it a police state. And they are successful in some sense.

Coats, W 1994, A theory of Republican character and related essays , Susquehanna University Press, U.S.A.

Corcoran, P 1983, “The limits of democratic theory”, in G Duncan (ed.), Democratic theory and practice , Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge and New York, pp. 13-24.

Frank, J 2005, A democracy of distinction: Aristotle and the work of politics , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Jayapalan, N 2002, Comprehensive study of Aristotle , Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi.

Ober, J 2001, Political dissent in democratic Athens: intellectual critics of popular rule , Princeton University Press, Oxford and New Jersey.

Santas, G 2010, Understanding Plato’s Republic , John Wiley & Sons Inc., West Sussex.

Simpson, P 1998, A philosophical commentary on the politics of Aristotle , University of North Carolina Press, North Carolina.

Sofroniou, A 2007, Moral philosophy, from Hippocrates to the 21 st aeon , Lulu.com, UK.

Wilson, F, Cheek, H, Power, M, & Cheek, K 2001, Political philosophy and cultural renewal: collected essays , Transaction Publishers, New Jersey.

Yunis, H 1996, Taming democracy: models of political rhetoric in classical Athens , Cornell University, New York.

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