VALUE REPRESENTATION—THE DOMINANCE OF ENDS OVER MEANS IN DEMOCRATIC POLITICS: REPLY TO MURAKAMI

Abstract

American democracy is not unconstrained or autonomous, but instead achieves what could be termed value representation. Rather than affording representation on policy issues, elections transmit priorities among competing normative ends, while elite politics address the more complex matching of ends and means within the value boundaries established by voters. This results in neither policy representation nor state autonomy, but instead in a specific and limited form of democratic representation.

Notes

1. “[T]here is a difference between the articulated, differentiated, well-developed political arguments put forward by informed and conscious Marxists or Fascists or liberal democrats on the one hand, and the loosely structured, unreflective statements of the common men of Eastport … . I distinguish between the ‘forensic’ ideologies of the conscious ideologist and the ‘latent’ ideologies of the common man” (Lane 1962, 16). Values can be understood most simply as core normative predispositions, what Donald Kinder (1983, 406) describes as “general and enduring standards.” Examples include individualism, communitarianism, secularism, or religiosity. An ideology, on the other hand, entails a specific constellation of values and other beliefs that organize a coherent political program. In the United States this most often falls along the liberal–conservative continuum, although it includes other ideologies such as libertarianism or populism. Important facets of the distinction between values and ideologies include their stability, level of generality, level of consciousness, and prevalence within the general population. An excellent full explication of the distinctions can be found in Rohan 2000.

2. As Pitkin (1967), 237) defines it, “representation means the making present of something that is nonetheless absent.” The debated question is what that thing must be, whether the demographic characteristics, policy preferences, or political values of constituents. An elected politician might be representative in these or other ways, but “from the ‘standing for’ interpretation, he may represent by embodying the values of a society” (ibid., 117).

3. The approach to citizen competence grounded in cognitive psychology argues that the public can make up for its deficits through various forms of heuristics, or “judgmental shortcuts, efficient ways to organize and simplify political choices, efficient in the double sense of requiring relatively little information to execute, yet yielding dependable answers even to complex problems of choice” (Sniderman et al. 1991, 19; see also Popkin 1991 and Lupia 1994 among others).

4. Friedman (2007, 216) stipulates that “as a practical matter, therefore, measures intended to achieve a certain end will be treated as if they were ends in themselves.” Our difference lies in the interpretation of this psychology: Friedman suggests that the transmutation of policy disputes into principled divisions is due to the public's inability to process the complex arguments on either side of means disputes, and therefore does not get at the heart of what is going on, while I see it as more revealing than illusory.

5. “The only regulations and ways of acting that can claim legitimacy are those to which all who are possibly affected could assent as participants in rational discourse. In light of this ‘discourse principle’ citizens test which rights they should mutually accord one another” (Habermas 1996, 458).

6. Seyla Benhabib (1996, 67) identifies three public goods that “complex modern democratic societies since the Second World War face the task of securing,” the first of which is legitimacy (the others are economic welfare and collective identity). The only viable method of gaining this political good, she contends, is deliberation. Habermas (1996, 458), too, defines deliberation as the “democratic procedure that lends legitimating force to lawmaking under conditions of social and ideological pluralism.” One way of explaining the connection between deliberation and legitimacy, as well as the origins of deliberative theory, is the post-war European concern about the historical legitimacy of basic institutions that had allowed and then had been dominated by fascism and Nazism. Fascist and Nazi governments were delegitimized in the eyes of their people (as were the communist governments of the Soviet Bloc in later decades), so a new, extra-historical source of legitimacy seemed to be required. American politics, on the other hand, is grounded in a reverence for the past, in the form of the Founding. Contrary to Habermas's assertion that we “no longer legitimate maxims, practices, and rules of action simply by calling attention to the contexts in which they were handed down” (ibid., 97), this is precisely what Americans do (and what American constitutional law does). Legitimacy in the sense of public certainty about the form and justification of political institutions is not an American problem; that Habermas is a member of the postwar German generation that faced that problem is not a coincidence.

7. To be clear, most citizens do not employ terms such as isolationism or interventionism to describe their values. They do hold value preferences along these dimensions, but employ more common-language phrases to describe the same concepts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morgan Marietta

Morgan Marietta has published articles on the political consequences of belief in the Journal of Politics, Political Communication, the Review of Political Economy and other journals. He thanks David Barker, Samuel DeCanio, Jeffrey Friedman, Michael Goodhart, Chao Guo, Addie Hampton, Ed Kellough, and Bert Rockman for comments on earlier drafts.