The essays composing this excellent collection pivot on the issue of equality, and in particular the equal power democratic citizens give to themselves to make and influence the making of decisions they agree to obey. Political equality (from which the principle of majority rule follows) stands in close relation to citizens’ authorizing power (voting on laws and electing representatives), while an equal right to association and speech presides over citizens’ deliberative judgment and their representative claims. Michael Saward unfurls the panoply of meanings associated with equality and moreover stresses the difference between equality ‘in principle’ and ‘in practice’. Voting rights ‘symbolize an equal citizenship status regardless of social or economic status’ but this formal equality ‘translates into substantive equality only to a limited and variable degree across countries and other contexts, and may be especially problematic in voluntary voting regimes.’ To resume an ancient distinction, isonomia (equal in power by law) and isegoria (equal freedom to talk in the assembly and in public) entail different manifestations of equality, as the former makes a declaration by principle that involves each and all indistinctly, while the latter pertains to the practical experience of discourse and participation; isegoria exalts individual differences in performative proficiency and influence efficacy, so that actual participation registers the unpremeditated interference of several factors, such as the gifted disposition of the speaker, her cultural background, her social and economic conditions, etc. Equal by the law, citizens are truly different in practice, and one might say that the strength of democracy rests precisely on this: associated individuals decide by an artificial convention that they are equal in the power to make decisions in order to block the translation of their differences into reasons for inequality in power or domination. Political equality respects the fact that citizens are different and is thus an essential condition of their liberty.
In representative democracy, which is the contextual domain of these papers, political equality undergoes additional complications because, while voting rights are arithmetically equal, non-elective participation that the right to speech and association sanction is not, and many factors intervene that unbalance power as, for instance, in the case of private money when employed in electoral campaigns and to control media coverage of political issues. The existing socioeconomic barriers to citizenship clash with democracy’s principle of equal political liberty even if we cannot ‘prove’ beyond any reasonable doubt that they affect political decisions in this or that way, because it is the consent of the majority, and not debate, that makes the law. Yet the extra-institutional or debating domain is exceptionally important as the place in which citizens refine and change their judgment on the actualization of the promised rights. Thus, Michael Saward elegantly writes, the fleeting and fragmentary equalities become evident in non-elective representation outside the voting booth. Extra-institutional politics are democratically significant as they enhance understanding of the democratic promise and the limits of different modes of representation. Non-elective representative claims stimulate features in political life closely associated with democratically legitimate representation, some of which resonate distinctively with the aspiration of political equality, even if arithmetical equality is not at all the main principle in non-elective representation. Other principles are active in this case, such as advocacy of conditions against discrimination and domination or calls for authenticity. In support of Saward’s position, we have to recall that many democratic victories were achieved, thanks to acts of non-elective representation. The movements against slavery or for women’s suffrage emerged as representative claims by people who spoke in the name of other people without being formally authorized by them. Yet, it was precisely equality ‘in principle’ that gave their ‘practice’ justification and power; in other words, the dualism of ‘principle’ and ‘practice’ is less strong than it might appear at first glance, as the ‘practice’ is empowered by reference to the ‘principle’.
Does this mean that non-electoral representation is a minor form of participation? Yes and no. Yes, if we focus on the authoritative moment of law-making, because democracy is first of all a form of government, that is to say it entails the vertical power of the law, which is not an informal agreement but a norm that commands obedience. It is in relation to what we may call ‘the power of the will’ that political equality must be defined and honored in its simple and abstract form of a principle. Based on this understanding, Eva Erman criticizes the interpretation of deliberative democracy that stresses discursive participation and deliberative influence through an exchange of justification, while neglecting or even explicitly denying the system of power that this government also entails. It is certainly the case that deliberation within a deliberative system need not be oriented toward reaching a binding decision to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Not all politics we perform translates into institutional decisions, yet all of it is related in one way or another to institutional politics, as our judgment is after all on policies and decisions. It is generally agreed, Erman writes, ‘that democracy is essentially a way of making binding collective decisions in such a way that it connects those decisions to the judgments and interests of those whose conduct is supposed to be regulated by them.’ Thus, deliberation is democratic because diarchic – not only a system of discourse and, thus, not generically inclusive of all indistinctively – but inclusive of a portion of humanity or the citizens of a specific democratic state (Erman brings to the fore the issue of exclusion and expresses doubts on the legitimacy of a global democratic state). Breaking the diarchic form of democracy, some deliberative theorists have proposed ‘minidemoi’ and ‘minipublics’ as alternatives to electoral rights and electoral representation; they have narrowed democracy to communicative freedom and the deliberative gathering of citizens selected by random sample or some other device. All these proposals downplay the role of elections and any other formal process of authorization. However, Erman observes, it is not elections per se that are of interest when considering the desiderata of a good account, but what elections are meant to secure, namely political equality. Elections and majority rule have so far been the main ways to secure political equality in the composition and legitimation of decision-making bodies under modern conditions.
Of course, it would be foolish to narrow democracy to voting, as democracy is also the name of a form, method, and style of political life by which citizens develop the awareness of their concrete problems, refine their visions, and adjust their opinions on decisions to be made or unmade. This diarchic nature of politics allows us to understand the value and the richness of a procedural definition of democracy, wherein by procedures, Lisa Hill says very convincingly, we should mean a complex system of regulated public actions performed by legally free and equal citizens. In debating and associating freely, citizens construct a representation of their society, interpret their position within it, and judge the relationships of one another in view of producing or opposing decisions. Liberty is for this reason the justification and substance of the democratic process, not some specific outcomes, not even when some experts judge them ‘correct’, ‘fair’, or ‘just’. Procedures are, of course, driven by the goal of reproducing the democratic condition (equal liberty) and in this sense they cannot produce ‘unjust’ results, such as slavery for instance or domination. But this is precisely the reason why the quest of epistemic perfection is either redundant (as the good result is inscribed in the process itself) or is a patent violation of equality, if made in the name of a Platonist kind of a good that few competent can better understand and implement. Some contemporary political theorists seem to exalt the value of the outcome over and above procedures, or, to put it another way, they evaluate the goodness of the democratic procedures based on a consequentialist approach, thus subordinating the principle of equal liberty to some desired outcome. Like the deliberativists mentioned above, epistemics devalue voting and majority rule. This is the risk of epistocracy: as we know all too well, voting does not give us any certainty that all or the majority of us will vote ‘well’ or ‘correctly’ or in view of a ‘good cause’. But then, one must ask: Who is to decide what is a right or correct or good cause? If it is not the citizens with their voting power and the majority, then the sovereignty of democracy is subverted and the power of technocracy installed. Democracy is honored only if we understand that its substance is its process, which is not a small thing at all as it consists in reproducing the principle upon which it rests: equality of each and all in authorizing decisions. This entails that setting down the rules of the game is the beginning rather than the end of the democratic story, a very hard beginning since it requires we accept being temporarily governed by a majority of people we might disagree with, a condition that is very far from minimal.
The issue is that, willing to be consistently procedural, democracy is compelled to innovate itself, to experiment with new procedures and institutions or adapt old ones in order to answer the challenges that its dynamic society generates. Anthoula Malkopoulou asks: How can we circumvent the problem of antidemocratic political conduct that exists in contemporary consolidated democracies without subverting the democratic system? She looks for solutions that are consistent with the equal political liberty principle, and thus rejects both ‘militant democracy’ measures (ex ante exclusion of some political groups from political competition) and neutralist procedural measures (ex post or judicial review sanctions of criminal deeds or unconstitutional decisions). Against these approaches, she advances the proposal of extending the responsibility of protecting democracy to the demos by granting citizens ‘a special right to intervene in political struggles and to ostracize, i.e. to remove from power, elected officials.’ She resumes from ancient democracy the logic of ostracism and searches for its possible adaptations in representative democracy. When representative government first emerged, Condorcet posed the same question: How to make citizens’ judgment always in charge of the activity of the representatives, both by controlling their law proposals and by judging their deeds? In his contribution to the Plan of Constitution he resolved to proceduralize the sovereignty of surveillance and gave citizens the ‘legal means’ to repeal laws and recall the representatives in the assembly who voted on them. He also included it in the Declaration of Rights as the right ‘to resist oppression’ (Art. 31). Condorcet stipulated that there is oppression when ‘the law violates natural rights, civil and political, it should guarantee;’ when ‘the law is violated by public functionaries in the act of implementing it;’ when ‘arbitrary acts’ or acts that are ‘contrary to the expression of the laws, violate the rights of the citizens’ (Art. 32), and where the generation that wrote the constitution prevents future generations from revising, reforming, or changing it (Art. 33). The right of repealing ordinary and constitutional laws was the ‘legal means’ that instituted the negative power of the citizens (Title VIII of the Constitution). Of the two forms of repeal, it is ordinary laws that establish the democratic element of control over the representatives because, contrary to the deputies in the constitutional assembly, the laws are expected to be in a relation of political communication with the society and subject to the opinion of the citizens who judge them in view of that relation. Thus, representation as a democratic process justifies citizens’ power of surveillance and negative action.
Along similar lines, that is to say, advancing proposals that can redress conditions of inequality that citizens suffer because of their social and economic unequal conditions, Dirk Jörke opts for John McCormick’s Tribunate, which entails ‘granting less-privileged citizens suspensive veto power in the context of an optional referendum.’ In the name of experimental democracy, Jörke claims that this veto power should not be ‘absolute’ or authoritative, but ‘merely’ able to postpone the decision in question, in which case the Parliament would have to decide anew, yet under consideration of the objections articulated in the veto. Importantly, only citizens belonging to lower social classes should have this right. Their social inequality is descriptively registered and translated into a special right, although this veto power should be limited to highly controversial legislative acts which aim to reshape the social structure of the society – for example, cuts in social welfare benefits, as happens in many European countries. While I have deep sympathy with procedural experimentalism, I think that all experimentalism must comply with the basic principles determining democratic procedures. Means and ends must not be dissociated in order for proceduralism not to fall into the same vice of the epistemics. Jörke is aware of these procedural limitations and specifies that because – contra to classical referenda and to electoral procedures – this veto ‘should not be open to all citizens, but only to the socially disadvantaged’ its goal should only be to suspend legislation and cause representatives to think twice. This role of temporal law suspension, which in bicameral parliamentary systems is played by the second chamber, is here performed by a portion of citizens. Yet, a problem arises because either this veto should be effective, and in this case must be given equally to all citizens, or it is simply a form of public opinion that denounces a course of action by the government, which is of course legitimate as an expression of freedom of association. In the latter case too, however, some objections emerge because although nothing would be changed formally, the idea of giving the ‘stopping power’ to some citizens according to their income poses serious problems: in order to assign this power to the right people (those with a specific income?) an institution is required that sets the ceiling of income and distributes citizens accordingly. This may obviously provoke discretion in power as that ceiling is itself wholly like any other form of discrimination that ‘names’ citizens as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have it; as an object of legitimate contestation; moreover, it can hardly play the role of a criterion for distributing a political right.
Among the experimentations proposed by the papers in order to redress inequality in power, that of lottery is perhaps the most challenging and also questionable if adapted to law making. The ancients used lottery to select the members of juries but did not use it to select anyone responsible for making laws (direct presence in the assembly was the criterion, in this case). Lottery was applied in the domain of judgment, not the will. In recent years, Peter Stone argues, democrats have begun to reconsider the merits of this age-old practice for the random selection of political officials. Random selection and election are different understandings of democratic equality and each might be appropriate under different circumstances. Certainly, lottery seems inapplicable when political decisions have to be made that involve law making. We may recall that in the Italian humanistic republics, particularly Florence, lottery was chosen as a substitute for elections because the richest citizens did not trust each other and wanted to make sure that a wholly impartial system of selection was adopted; they were not prepared to obey laws passed by an assembly of elected representatives. This proves once more that elections presume legal equality much more than lottery does. Moreover, lottery nullifies responsibility and for this reason in ancient democracies and republics public officials were made to swear before taking office and then checked on their deeds when they stepped down of office. The adoption of an oath and of an examination was an explicit acknowledgment that an external system of accountability was needed, one that lottery did not have.
Many procedural innovations here discussed presume a critical view of representative democracy as a second-best kind of democracy that rests on inequality as elections notoriously stress rather than conceal individual inequalities and moreover expel the people from the institutions in which political decisions are made. Winfried Thaa contests this classical view and shows convincingly that the countries in which representative democracy has been adopted have become gradually more – and in any case not less friendly to equality, politically as well as socially. Trying to understand this change in Western societies, Thaa argues that not only universal franchise, but, paradoxically, also the distinction between society and the stage of political representation has had strong egalitarian effects, first of all because it has promoted movements of contestation to voice and fight against inequality. Representative democracy is primed to work better and to be better disposed toward implementing more social equality whenever political parties are strong and capable of playing their role, which is that of unifying representative claims and moreover controlling the representatives sitting in parliament. The former function allows for a circulation of opinions between society and its institutions and the second allows for a political mandate that substitutes for the lack of legal mandate. The decline of political parties as means of participation and control in contemporary democratic societies, certainly in European countries, is partly a function of the decline of legitimacy of representative institutions.
Yet, this is not the only factor of distress. Economic crisis and the new media technology encumber representative institutions in their own ways, with the paradox that the former inhibits human agency, while the latter expands it for millions in many domains of life. Accordingly, representative institutions are under stress for two reasons: first, because their deliberative nature makes them act slowly (deliberation and participation take time) and without guarantee of competent outcomes (as epistemic democrats also argue), and second, because the new media technologies amplify their dysfunction while reinforcing citizens’ beliefs that politics no longer needs intermediaries (hence the decline of party affiliation and also the drop in electoral participation). Calls for expertise in power and anti-party sentiments profit from the same factor that empowers the critics of parliamentary democracy – the Internet. Thus, the new media seem equally capable of facilitating political verticalization – i.e. epistocracy or the rule of the most knowledgeable, and plebiscitarian leaders – and a horizontal expansion of the public. These contradictory scenarios share distrust in traditional representative institutions (and the parliamentary system in particular), and both rely on the potential of the Internet and an unprecedented erosion of socioeconomic inequality. This is the topic of a novel avenue of research in front of us on the aspects of the present crisis of legitimacy of parliamentary democracy.
Columbia University