by Phil Parvin
‘Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents […] But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, – no, nor from the law or the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’
Edmund Burke, ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’ [1774], in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bone, 1854), p. 446
Three problems with democracy
The idea of democracy, in both its direct and representative forms, has been criticized by numerous thinkers throughout history. We will concentrate on three main criticisms.
THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY
Democracy is a method for making decisions when people disagree. Given the diversity of modern liberal democratic states, it is unrealistic to expect consensus on most political issues. Indeed, populations of democratic states like Britain or the USA rarely, if ever, reach unanimous consensus. People disagree about almost everything: state provision of healthcare, immigration, state funding of the arts, sentencing of criminals, religion and so on. Consequently, the best that democratic states can do is enact the will of the majority of the people. But this means that there will be winners and losers: some people get the leaders and the laws that they want, and others do not. The losers must accede to laws and leaders with which they may profoundly disagree.
‘[T]he democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization, but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols [1989] (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 117.
On one level, this is not too problematic: the fact of inevitable disagreement simply underlines the fact that politics is a messy business. The role of democratic institutions is precisely to take difficult decisions in circumstances of deep disagreement. The real problem, however, is when one group or individual systematically loses out because it is permanently in a minority. The needs of homosexuals, Muslims or ethnic minorities, for example, are systematically marginalized in democratic societies with homophobic, Islamophobic or racist majorities. Such systematic marginalization seems to violate democratic principles: it violates equality in practice, by denying some individuals the ability to influence the political system. It denies freedom too, by repeatedly forcing some individuals to submit to the will of others.
THE TENSION BETWEEN JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY
What happens when a majority wants to do something unjust? In a democracy, one measure of the rightness or wrongness of a policy is whether it is endorsed by the majority. When considering questions such as ‘Should black children receive the same education as white children?’ or ‘Should the state punish homosexuality?’, democratic institutions are required to take account of the will of the majority. If the majority believes that black children should receive a worse education than white children, or that homosexuality merits imprisonment, then the most democratic response to these questions seems to be that the state should legislate accordingly.
This conclusion is obviously problematic and has worried many liberals. As will become clearer in Part Two of the book, liberals have generally held that political and moral decisions must conform to principles of justice which are independent of public opinion. Such principles act as constraints on what can be done in the name of public opinion: for liberals, states cannot violate principles of justice even if the overwhelming majority of the citizen body would like them to.
Contemporary liberals seek not to replace democracy with justice but rather to determine constitutional safeguards to protect justice. On this approach, public opinion dictates decision-making except where stipulated by the justice-protecting liberal constitution. Nevertheless, there is a tension between justice and democracy. The more we emphasize democracy, the more we will have to reconcile ourselves to the possibility of states acting unjustly. The more we constrain decision making with liberal principles of justice, on the other hand, the less democratic the system becomes.
Spotlight: Freedom Day
In 1992 white South Africans voted overwhelmingly to end the system of apartheid, under which black South Africans had been denied the vote. On 27 April 1994 the first election under the new system was held, with Nelson Mandela becoming President. His party, the African National Congress, had been banned at the previous election and Mandela himself had spent 27 years in prison for his anti-apartheid activities. Millions of South Africans queued for hours to cast their votes over a three-day election period, which resulted in just under 20 million votes being counted. 27 April is now celebrated as a public holiday in South Africa, under the name ‘Freedom Day’.
THE ROLE OF EXPERTISE
The third criticism of democracy can be traced back as far as the work of Plato and Aristotle, and is found most obviously in conservative critiques of democracy made by Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. The criticism is that the idea that all people are equally able to govern is false. So democracy, which is based on this supposed falsehood, leads to injustice, instability and bad decision-making. The democratic claim that all individual citizens should possess equal power and that, therefore, the opinions of each and every individual in society should count equally in collective deliberations about political decisions, is intended as a safeguard against tyranny. But why shouldn’t the opinions of certain people carry more weight than others in such deliberations? In virtually any realm of life outside of politics we are happy to entrust decision-making power to those who have expertise. We want brain surgery to be carried out only by people who have been trained in it, and medical research to be conducted by scientists, and children to be taught by qualified and skilled teachers.
When it comes to the business of politics, however, democracy requires the opposite. In democratic societies we think that everyone should have an equal right to influence decisions about state action. Why? It is not as if political matters are straightforward or easy. On the contrary, states require incredibly complicated and difficult decisions on a range of complex topics which have national and international implications. Democracy seems to hold that there is no role for expertise in the realm of politics, but this seems implausible. Who is best placed to decide whether, for example, Britain should sign up to an EU constitution: a team of professional politicians who have the time to develop a considered position on the matter, drawing upon the advice of experts from law, economics, business and so on, or the general public, many of whom will not have any knowledge of the issues at hand, or any appreciation of the complexities involved? Similarly, whose views should carry more weight in deliberations about environmental policy, or education policy, or policing, or the provision of healthcare, or the content of international trade agreements, or defence spending, or counterterrorism: people who, over the course of their lives, have developed specialized knowledge in these areas, or people who have not?
Representative democracy offers a solution. In placing a tier of professional decision makers above citizens, each of whom is accountable to, but not entirely controlled by, the people who elected them, the representative model puts decision-making power in the hands of people who are charged with thinking about these issues on a full-time basis, without abandoning the idea that ultimate power lies in the hands of the citizen body at large. But still, politicians in a representative system are broadly required to act in accordance with the will of their constituents, even if only out of a desire to get re-elected. And at the normative level, the fact still remains that a central pillar of democracy is that political decisions are best taken collective
ly, with each and every individual’s opinions counting the same. Consequently, democracy necessarily embodies the claim that governing, unlike virtually anything else, is something that everyone is equally able to do, not something best conducted by experts.
Two alternative conceptions of democracy: deliberative and radical democracy
A number of contemporary political theorists have developed alternative versions of democracy. Some, including Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, Joshua Cohen and James Bohman, have suggested that we should understand democracy as a process of collective deliberation about policies and laws rather than as a particular set of institutions. Democracy, they argue, describes not an end-state but rather an ongoing process of dialogue among free and equal individuals. Its aim should be to identify and prioritize social and political problems, and to seek collective agreement on how to resolve these problems. While a traditional, representative conception of democracy focuses on establishing institutional and constitutional structures necessary to hold the power of legislators in check (e.g. regular free and fair elections, constitutional checks and balances, bills of rights, etc.), deliberative democrats emphasize the process of deliberation about policy.
Deliberative democracy has become very popular among liberal political philosophers. The reason for this popularity is that it appears to resolve the tension between justice and democracy and the problem of the tyranny of the majority. Deliberative democracy is not simply about translating the will of the majority into action; it is about bringing diverse people together in active dialogue so they can find genuine agreement on controversial matters. Citizens meet as moral and political equals and reason collectively with one another about political questions. The answers and agreements they come up with are not set in stone but can be revisited in the light of new developments.
Despite its popularity among liberals, deliberative democracy has been fiercely criticized by radical democrats like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (Mouffe and Laclau 2001). Radical or ‘agonistic’ democracy retains the notion of active deliberation but rejects the idea that it is possible, or even desirable, for diverse groups and individuals to reach agreement on political and moral questions. Radical democrats reject the optimism that liberals have about the ability of reason to generate consensus. From Mill to Rawls, liberals have emphasized the role of reasoned argument and deliberation as a means of revealing the truth or falsity of claims about the world, which is why they defend free speech: public deliberation on moral, ethical, political and other matters can be the basis for unity between diverse groups. It is not surprising, therefore, that many liberals have sought to reconceive democracy as a deliberative process grounded in liberal principles of freedom, equality and reason: such a model brings democracy within liberal theory, and (they argue) resolves the tensions between justice and democracy, and the problem of the tyranny of the majority, that we described earlier.
The problem with deliberative democracy, however, is that it simply asserts the good of liberal values at the outset. That is, deliberative democrats simply reconceive the democratic process as necessarily characterized by liberal principles such as individualism, freedom and equality. They also hold that free and equal individuals can and should seek agreements among one another about political and ethical matters via reasoned public deliberations which are themselves constrained by the norms of liberal deliberation. That is, deliberative democracy resolves the tension between liberal justice and democracy by simply ruling out forms of deliberation which would produce outcomes inconsistent with liberal justice.
Radical democrats like Mouffe and Laclau are more pessimistic about the capacity of reasoned debate to produce agreement, and are fiercely critical of both liberalism and liberal democracy. Drawing on a more radical, Marxist, literature, Laclau and Mouffe criticize liberalism for its inability to take moral diversity seriously, since it requires divergent groups to put aside their differences and adopt the values of liberalism in order to come up with collective decisions about institutions, policies and political principles. But, they suggest, you are not taking diversity seriously if you require, for the purposes of resolving political questions, everyone to adopt the same values, understand themselves in the same way, and deliberate according to the same norms.
Liberals and deliberative democrats do not see this as a problem because they believe that liberal principles are neutral. But, Laclau and Mouffe argue, liberal values are neither: they embody a substantive moral and political world view which is controversial and which will be incompatible with the world views held by many groups and individuals in diverse states. Consequently, if a democratic system is to take diversity seriously, and is to avoid oppressing non-liberal members of states into adopting a perspective on the world that they find alien or mistaken, then it needs to make room for the very real possibility that disagreement on fundamental matters of politics and morality is inevitable. Reason may not provide the common ground that liberals and many democrats need it to, because different groups and individuals will ‘reason’ in different ways.
Thus radical democracy emphasizes the inevitability of disagreement. Democracies should establish institutional frameworks in which different groups can express their disagreements, but they should not necessarily seek to resolve these disagreements. Agonistic democracy is thus more unstable than deliberative or more traditional conceptions of democracy, and insists that politics is inherently unstable. Deliberative and traditional democrats try to ensure stability by misrepresenting the nature of politics and downplaying the divisions which will inevitably exist in society. Consequently, democracy may be a less stable form of politics than many would like it to be, but that is simply unavoidable in a world characterized by fundamental disagreement over moral, political and ethical matters.
Case study: The problem of political disengagement
Liberal democratic states across the world are suffering from declining levels of political engagement among their citizens (Parvin and McHugh 2005; Putnam and Feldstein 2003; Stoker 2006). In Britain, for example, only just over half of those eligible to vote in general elections choose to do so, and even fewer choose to vote in local or European elections, in which turnout stands at around 35 per cent. Turnout is especially low among the young, with only 44 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds choosing to cast a ballot in the 2010 general election. Furthermore, membership of political parties is currently at its lowest point in the post-war era, party allegiance has eroded, and trade union membership has fallen in recent years.
This general story is replicated in other countries, too, with levels of political engagement and trust in politicians declining in many advanced Western democracies. The fact of increased political disengagement among citizens of liberal democratic states raises serious concerns about the enduring strength and legitimacy of the democratic system. Democratic institutions rely on participation by the citizen body for their legitimacy. Governments need a democratic mandate acquired through an electoral majority among a broad cross section of the population. Political parties need members, and activists, if they are to survive, as do the pressure groups and lobby organizations which represent particular interests in the policy-making process. If citizens turn away from the political process, then they become estranged from the institutions and organizations which are assumed to be working in their name. Representative democracy is more able to cope with the decline in participation than direct democracy, of course, as it does not rely on active participation among the public in the business of decision-making. However, as levels of participation continue to fall, it becomes increasingly difficult to see elected representatives as embodying the will of the people.
The concern, therefore, is that declining participation in liberal democratic states robs the political system of its legitimacy and its ability to make good on democratic ideals. Laws and decisions become external impositions rather than extensions of the will of the people, thus undermining individual freedom. And declining engagement pla
ces disproportionate power in the hands of those who do choose to engage in political activity, thus threatening political equality and the idea of equal representation.
Conclusion
Democracy has widespread appeal. It places power in the hands of the people, enshrines individual freedom and equality, and protects citizens from tyranny by making political institutions, and the people who work in them, accountable to each and every member of society. In an era in which democratic ideals have spread around the world, and are used as a benchmark against which regimes are evaluated, it seems odd to suggest that it is not clear what democracy actually is, or whether it can hope to live up to its high ideals. But as political philosophers we are required to look beyond popular assumptions, and evaluate the coherence and persuasiveness of the evidence before us. The fact that there are so many different definitions of democracy suggests that there is a problem somewhere: different thinkers have understood democracy in so many different ways that, upon close inspection, the idea begins to become ambiguous and unclear. Does democracy require active participation from citizens? Who should be granted the status of a citizen? What is the appropriate relationship between citizens and their representatives? Does democracy describe a particular set of institutional and constitutional structures? Or is it best understood as a process of deliberation among free and equal individuals? Should states ultimately be guided by the will of the people, or justice, or something else? Should democratic decisions be grounded in collective agreement? Or is this utopian and oppressive? What is the relationship between democracy and rights? And is it true that all individuals are equally deserving of power, or have an equal right to influence political decisions?