A Relativized Definition of ‘Democracy’
The term ‘democracy’ is clearly heavily contested; so much so that the task of imposing a single meaning or definition has seemed hopeless to many. We find it used in a wide variety of ways – for instance, we talk of democracy at a variety of levels, from workplaces and local government to national government and even global democracy, not to mention in more extended uses, such as democratic peace or democratic equality. Moreover, since the term has come to bear positive connotations, a number of very different regimes claim to be ‘democratic’ – for example, Britain is generally regarded as a democracy despite having a monarch, the USA represents a presidential democracy, and even North Korea claims to be a Democratic People’s
Republic. This is not a new phenomenon. Seeking to appeal to the term’s Greek etymology does little to reduce our confusion since, even if the term’s meaning has not shifted over the last two and a half millennia, we find that ‘ demokratia
’ was equally contested in ancient Greek times.
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Such is the variation with which the term has been used that it could even been claimed that democracy is an essentially contested concept, because there is no way to settle which of various so-called democracies is most true to the democratic ideal, since each capture different aspects of it.
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Perhaps, more modestly, these different uses of the term share no universal common core or essence, but are united rather by overlapping ties of ‘family resemblance,’ and thus it is fruitless to seek necessary or sufficient conditions for something being democratic.
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These considerations provide reason to doubt that we can establish a clear and useful definition of democracy, but they do not prove a priori that such a task is impossible. Wittgenstein, after all, counselled us to look and see whether we can find universal features of the phenomena in question, rather than simply assuming that there were none. Before concluding that ‘democracy’ is simply essentially contested, and nothing informative can be said about it, we ought to investigate whether it has any determinate content. This is a task that naturally falls to political theorists and philosophers, who have been engaged in the task of conceptual clarification and definition since Socrates first asked his fellow Athenians about the nature of the virtues. In what follows, I argue that democracy does indeed have some determinate content, which provides some restriction on our use of the term and some guidance as to how we should think about it. Its content is, however, rather minimal, which partly explains why it can be used so variably. Before proceeding, however, I should say that I am not primarily concerned to stipulate how we use the word. There can be a variety of reasons to use words in different, even non-literal (e.g. metaphorical) ways, but at the end of the day a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. My concern is not to regulate the use of the word ‘democracy’ but to interpret the underling concept or idea to which that word is generally attached.
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1 Description vs. Evaluation
Before going any further, a necessary preliminary is to settle whether ‘democracy’ is to be used in what we may call an evaluative or descriptive sense. The contestation over the term arises largely because of the positive evaluative connotations that the word now carries in popular discourse (though in the past it was due to negative connotations). Regimes claim to be democratic because it is commonly assumed that democratic endorsement bestows legitimacy on the rulers. Nonetheless, it is objected that an evaluative definition is not useful because it confuses substantive questions
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about the value of democracy with definitional ones about its meaning and reduces the term to meaning nothing more than that the regime in question is a good one.
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If we understand democracy as an evaluative term, then whether or not a given state – be it the USA or North Korea – is democratic becomes a matter of substantive controversy. This may indeed reflect the contested way in which the term is actually used in ordinary language, but is not useful for political scientists.
It is often suggested that we need to adopt an evaluatively neutral – or purely descriptive – account of democracy. This is the practice often employed by international bodies such as Freedom House, who rate countries according to indicators such as regular elections, multi-party competition, a free press, and so on.
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If we take such an approach, then we can uncontroversially identify which countries count as democracies and then ask substantive questions, such as whether or not democracies better respect human rights or promote social justice. Certainly this approach is more useful for social scientists, who need to be able to identify regimes for study without simply getting bogged down in controversy about evaluative questions. Nonetheless, if we take this approach, then what counts as a democracy becomes a stipulative and uninteresting matter, because all the important work remains to be done later. Knowing that so-defined democracies are, for example, less likely to go to war with other so-defined democracies may itself be interesting and, provided some causal mechanism is established, it may give us reason to want our political regimes to fit this definition of democracy. Nonetheless, if the definition remains strictly neutral then we cannot assume that it is better to be democratic as so defined than undemocratic. A non-democratic regime may better realize whatever values we endorse, such as social justice or freedom, than one that qualifies as democracy. That the former happens not to fit our stipulated definition of democracy does not count against it whatsoever.
There are obvious reasons why positivistic social scientists may want a value-free definition of democracy, but it does not fit our ordinary usage of democracy, according to which the fact that a regime is democratic is something good about it, even if it performs worse with respect to other values such as justice. This does not, however, mean that we are condemned to treating ‘democracy’ as no more than a vague term of commendation, attached to any regimes that we happen to favour. The contrast between a neutral, factual description and an evaluative definition is needlessly stark. We need not assume that the term is either simply evaluative, without descriptive content, or merely a neutral description.
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There is an alternative; namely that the term combines both descriptive and evaluative elements. We might appeal here to an analogy with what Bernard Williams describes as ‘thick evaluative terms,’ such as bravery or honesty.
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When we call someone honest, we are not simply commending her character in a vague way, as when we say she is good or virtuous.
Nor, however, are we merely describing her conduct in a neutral way, as when we say that what she just said was true. Rather, we are commending her as good in a particular way. This therefore gives us some indication of how it was that she acted, while leaving open questions about whether her behaviour was all things considered the correct thing to do.
The possibility can be well illustrated by appeal to the Aristotelian notion that virtues are a mean between two vices.
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One might think that courage or bravery is naturally contrasted only to cowardice, on which view it is always brave to face danger; but if we take this purely descriptive view of bravery then it is always an open question whether bravery is called for in a given situation. Sometimes it will be a good thing to be brave and sometimes it would have been better not to be brave.
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Aristotle, however, suggests what amounts to an evaluative definition of the virtues.
On this alternative picture, the commendatory virtue term – bravery – is only appropriately applied to someone who feels the right thing, to the right extent, in the right circumstances. Bravery is not, then, one end of a continuum opposed only to cowardice, but rather somewhere between two opposing vices; cowardice on the one hand and recklessness on the other. Someone who chooses to stand and fight against overwhelming odds should not then be called brave but foolish, as the descriptive account would have it, but rather simply reckless. Bravery, understood in the evaluative sense, does not call for such reckless lack of self-concern. Thus, to call an action brave is always to commend it as appropriate to the circumstances, but it still has some descriptive content, for bravery can be distinguished from other virtues such as honesty or charity as being that which involves facing danger. One who responds appropriately to danger is brave, whatever other virtues and vices they possess.
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We may take a similar approach to democracy, regarding it as one value amongst others. Sometimes, we may be willing to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of other values, such as getting decisions that are substantively more just. Nonetheless, other things being equal, we prefer more democracy to less. It should be noted that this does not commit us to saying that any regime that we judge to be democratic is therefore justified.
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We have only said that it is in one way good. Someone committed to the value of equality may recognize that the distribution (4,4) is in one way good, because equal, yet still prefer a Pareto superior inequality, such as (7,5).
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Similarly, it is possible to recognize democracy as being of value without thereby foreclosing further questions about whether a democratic regime is, all things considered, better than a non-democratic one or whether democracy can be justified.
Democracy may be a value without being all that we value. Thus an evaluative definition of democracy does not foreclose all questions of evaluation; it merely implies that our overall assessment of two regimes may require us to balance the importance of democracy against that of other values, such as social justice. It may be that a just distribution of wealth can be better achieved by a society governed by a narrow elite, while extending the franchise will predictably result in less substantively just policies being enacted. In this case, we face a trade off and we may, in the end, decide that justice is more important than democracy.
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We should not, however, deny the real loss involved when we choose some other value over democracy.
Another consequence of this evaluative approach is that whether or not a given regime is democratic is more easily recognized to be a matter of degree. It is not that some regimes perfectly realize the value of democracy while others completely fail to do so; rather some better approximate it than others, for instance a broadly-based oligarchy (as Athens arguably was) comes closer to the ideal than a monarchy. For the reasons just given, this does not mean that a more democratic regime is always to be preferred to a less democratic one, if it involves a loss of some other value. A direct democracy, in which the people vote on laws themselves through popular referendums, may be more democratic than a country in which people merely vote for representatives every four or five years or where the popular will is checked by a judiciary, but we may favour the latter arrangements if they better serve substantive justice. Note also that it is not strictly necessary to adopt an evaluative definition in order to appreciate that the extent to which any given regime is democratic is a matter of degree. Obviously, different regimes may more or less closely fit a neutral description, since calling a person tall is not evaluative, yet we can recognize that it better fits some people than others. Nonetheless, if the motivation behind a neutral, descriptive definition is that it is less contestable and therefore more useful for social
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scientists, then for the same reason a binary classification will likely be sought. If scientists want to study whether or not democracies are likely to have higher welfare spending, for example, then they will presumably want to classify any given regime as democratic or not, and it would be less useful to have them ranked according to degrees of democracy. An evaluative definition and a scalar account of democracy seem to fit harmoniously together, though this is of course not a decisive point in favour of either approach, since one may reject either of them. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be the more attractive way to conceive of democracy, even if less useful for empirical study.
2 Descriptive Content
I have argued that democracy is, at least in part, an evaluative idea. To call a regime democratic is to say that it is in one way good (though exactly what is good about democracy must be left for another occasion). It is not simply saying that the regime in question is a good one though; it is in one way less than this, because it does not imply an all things considered judgement, but in another way more because it is more specific than a vague commendation. Whether or not democracy is of value, it seems also to have descriptive content. Plato, in the Republic , offers us a vision of a society ruled by enlightened and virtuous philosopher-kings or Guardians in the interests of all citizens. Even if we were to agree with him that such a regime would be desirable, however, it would surely be misleading to call it a democracy. Rather,
Plato’s claim is that aristocracy is better than democracy, because the art of statesmanship is possessed only by the few.
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So what is the descriptive meaning of democracy?
The term ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek demokratia , which immediately suggests that it has something to do with giving power ( kratos ) to the people ( demos) .
In fact, many still associate democracy with the three conditions famously presented in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address – “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” 15 Note, however, that he was not intending to define democracy, but rather to state the conditions of good government. Moreover, only the second of these appears distinctively democratic. Government of the people is ambiguous, but means either simply rule by the people (as in the ‘rule of Henry VIII’ or ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) or rule over the people, in which case it applies to all forms of government. Government for the people, meanwhile, refers to its ends rather than means. While Macpherson argues that Communist states legitimately use the term ‘democracy’ in this sense, this seems deeply revisionary, since even Plato’s
Guardians may be described as rule for the people. There may be much to be said for benevolent dictatorship if it really does lead to better decision-making, and what I have said allows us to argue (like Plato) that it is preferable to democracy, but it is not democratic in our ordinary understanding of the term. The essence of democracy appears to lie in rule by the people or popular sovereignty and this, I think, is its minimal content. This, of course, raises the vexed question of who the people in question are – a matter that shall be partly addressed in the following section. Before turning to that, however, I want to clarify just how minimal this idea is, by examining two things that democracy does not require.
Firstly, it is often supposed that democracy requires – along with citizen sovereignty – political equality between these people.
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The ideal of political equality is invoked to resist hierarchical societies in which, for example, a landed aristocracy enjoy great political power and maybe even social status. Against this, champions of
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democracy asserted that each man – and later each woman too – had an equal life to lead and thus called for ‘one person, one vote.’ This is sufficient to realise democracy, but not, it seems, necessary. We may note, for example, that political power is arguably unequal in many societies currently considered to be democracies, for instance due to variations in district size, turnout patterns, or ‘marginal’ seats – not to mention the fact the elected representatives possess much greater power than the citizens they represent, so at best the equality invoked could only be one of opportunity rather than outcome.
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Great inequalities may be undemocratic because they in effect completely exclude those with a smaller share of the vote. If one person possessed so many votes that she could outvote all others, then despite the fact that they formally have votes they would not in fact have any power. This regime would be accurately described as a monarchy, rather than a democracy. The problem, however, is not that power is unequally dispersed, but that it is concentrated entirely in one person’s hands.
If democracy simply requires the broad dispersal of power, then it may be realized even if some have slightly larger shares of that power than others. Suppose, for example, that all women have two votes and men one. This may or may not be justified, but it does not seem inconsistent with the bare idea of democracy, since men would still possess a share of political power. Any objection to such an arrangement would presumably lie in the fear that men’s interests, where they differed from women’s, would be unjustly under-represented. There would be ways around this, however. Suppose instead of women having two votes, everyone has one vote, apart from 10% of the population, selected at random, who have two each. There may be no reason to institute such a scheme, but it would not seem undemocratic. It may be argued that this is because it does not actually conflict with equality of opportunity, since anyone could be selected, but this still shows that equal votes are not necessary.
We might, therefore, accept a proposal like that of John Stuart Mill, according to which more votes go to the educated, provided that everyone has the opportunity to acquire the necessary qualifications.
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Moreover, it has recently been argued that there may be a case for weighting people’s votes according to the interests that they have at stake in a given decision.
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This is not to advocate or endorse such proposals for political inequality. In fact, it may be that the only justifiable form of democracy is an egalitarian one. Nonetheless, I have argued that democracy is only one value among many and so democracy is not always justified. Thus it may be that an inegalitarian distribution of power could qualify as democratic even if it was not all things considered justifiable.
Secondly, it is often assumed that democracy requires majority rule. This is commonly inferred from political equality. Moreover, it does not depend upon the assumption – just rejected – that all individuals should have equal votes, only on the more minimal claim that each vote ought to count equally, even if some have more votes than others. If all votes count equally, then it is inferred that more votes ought to count for more. This reasoning may be impeccable, but it does not follow that the majority ought to be fully determinative of what should be done. It may be that equality is better respected by some form of proportionality, according to which the majority get more – but not all – of what they want and the minority are given some satisfaction.
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In any case, whatever the merits of majority rule as a decision procedure, it is wrong to suppose that it is uniquely privileged by democracy. This should be evident once we recognize that majority rule is simply a procedure by which a group – any group, whether it be a democracy or a three-person oligarchy ruling over a country of millions – reach decisions. Non-democratic groups can
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employ majority rule and, as I just suggested, democratic groups can employ alternative decision procedures, such as compromises.
Confusion arises because of an ambiguity in ‘the rule of the many (or majority).’
This may refer either to how decisions are to be reached within a specified group or to who should be in the ruling group in the first place. The claim that democracy requires majority rule as a decision procedure rests either on the assumption that majority rule is the only acceptable decision procedure for any situation, and thus a fortiori for democracy, which seems untenable, or on an illicit slide from the second question to the first. Historically, democracy arose in opposition to the concentration of power in the hands of a monarch or oligarchy. Its purpose was to spread power more widely through the community, so that the many each had a share. Thus, democracy can be identified as the rule of the many understood as an extensive franchise. However, no conclusions about the appropriate decision procedure to employ follow straightforwardly from this. The requirement of democracy is that the franchise be extended widely, not that any particular method of decision making is employed by this wider group.
21 Thus, democracy does not require majority rule be used to make decisions; its essence lies rather in the broad inclusiveness of who has a say in decision making.
Whether or not we should insist on either political equality or majority rule is a matter for substantive debate. It may be that these are the only defensible possibilities, but I have argued that democracy does not analytically require either. A regime could be democratic despite being inegalitarian or non-majoritarian, provided simply that the right to vote is extended widely through the populace. This, I think, captures the minimal meaning of democracy in all its variants. This, however, merely raises the further question of who it is that should have the vote. Most regimes in practice restrict the vote in a number of ways, for instance on the basis of citizenship or age and, in many cases, deny the vote to convicted criminals and the severely cognitively impaired.
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Does it follow that it would be more democratic to dispense with all of these restrictions so as to make the scope of the franchise maximally inclusive? In the following section I will argue that this question cannot be given a simple answer, yes or no, but is in fact misformed. I will argue that we cannot, strictly, call any decision or political arrangement democratic or not tout court but only judge it in relation to some prior community. Thus, to take a fairly controversial example, we may say that apartheid South Africa was democratic with respect to its white citizens, but not democratic with respect to its whole population, and the more general question – what is democratic simpliciter ? – cannot be answered.
3 The Boundary Problem
If we identify the essence of democracy with a broadly inclusive franchise, this raises the question who it is that ought to have a say in any given decision. To simply say that a political system is more democratic the more people have a say or vote in it is implausible. This would suggest that the only true democracy is a global one, in which everyone has a vote. That would, in turn, mean that democracy (to any reasonable degree) was impossible in smaller units, such as nation states – not to mention local government, workplaces, and schools. Ordinarily, when we talk about workplace democracy, we mean that decisions are taken not only by shareholders or upper management, but include the employees as well. Similarly, when we talk about a nation state being democratic, then we mean that all citizens are included, without arbitrary discriminations (e.g. on grounds of property, race or sex). Neither of these
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ideas imply, however, that people outside the group in question ought to be enfranchised. We do not ordinarily think that a workplace – or even a nation state – would be more democratic if it were to enfranchise those on the other side of the world. We usually assume that the people are entitled to govern their own affairs collectively, without interference from outsiders and thus, if anything, it would actually be less democratic if outsiders were to have a say, thereby diluting the popular sovereignty of the group in question. But how are we to identify the relevant decision-making group for any decision?
It has been argued that the constitution of the demos, being a necessary prerequisite for any democratic decision-making process, must itself be arbitrary from the democratic point of view.
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One possible conclusion is that it must be up to any given community to decide for itself who ought to be included in its decision-making processes.
24 This, however, would seem to suggest that a variety of exclusions from the franchise could in fact be reconciled with democracy, provided that they were said to follow from the self-identification of the community in question. The exclusion of blacks in apartheid South Africa or pre-civil rights USA, for example, might be said to reflect the fact that the community in question chose to define itself in some way that excluded blacks and there is no basis on which we can criticize this, since it simply reflects their freedom of association or right to define their franchise as they choose.
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It has recently been argued that democratic principles do indeed offer some guidance to who ought to be enfranchised in a given decision, namely all of those in some way affected by it.
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This proposal would arguably explain many of our ordinary judgements about the extent of the franchise. Decisions taken in a firm have obvious potential to affect its workers and thus they ought to have a say in company strategy. Those who share the same nation state will almost inevitably be affected by each other’s activities, and by the collectively enacted laws that regulate their society, so again all should have a say. We do not customarily think that decision-making power needs to be extended more widely to other groups, since for the most part outsiders are not affected by what we decide, or at least not to the same extent.
Nonetheless, where the decisions we make do have clear and significant affects on outsiders – as when one state’s decisions on energy policy threaten to cause pollution affecting neighbouring states – the implication of the all affected principle is that democracy requires the franchise on that decision to be extended beyond national boundaries in order to include those outsiders who are also affected.
It might seem that the all affected principle provides helpful guidance as to who ought to be enfranchised in any given decision. We may be tempted to conclude that a decision was taken democratically to the extent that all those whose interests were affected were included in making it – that is, the more affected interests were included, the more democratic it was. There are, however, numerous difficulties with this. Firstly, we need some proper standard of what it is to be affected. It is not obvious that nosy busybodies ought to get a say in the decisions of others simply because they have some preference over the matter. It seems that we need an objective notion of interests. Secondly, even if we know in principle what it is for someone to be affected, it is impossible to know in advance of a decision whose interests will be affected, because this depends both on the outcome of that decision and on possibly complex causal chains that may lead to unforeseen impacts. Goodin’s solution to these problems is to take a permissive or inclusive line: to say that all of those who may possibly have their interests affected ought to be enfranchised.
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This leads to a third difficulty, what we should say about those who are not affected. We might think that decisions ought to be made by all and only those who are affected by
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them, so it is less democratic if unaffected outsiders get to meddle in what does not concern them. Goodin denies this, though it is unclear whether his rejection of this idea is intended at the level of principle or merely policy.
28 He suggests that it is more problematic to exclude those who ought to have a say than to include those who need not have a say, so we should err on the side of over-inclusiveness. As he then notes, the easiest way to ensure that all affected interests are included is simply to include everyone. It does not follow, however, that the only true democracy requires a global franchise. If there was an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest, who were completely unaffected by our decisions, then we could be fully democratic without including them. Nonetheless, on Goodin’s proposal, it would be no less democratic to include them too – all that matters is that all affected interests are encompassed. A fourth difficulty is that, even among those who are affected by a decision, people may be affected to quite different extents. For some a decision might be of life or death importance, while for others it may be relatively trivial. If it is being affected that entitles one to a say in decision-making then it may be that we should abandon the idea of ‘one person, one vote’ – which I earlier argued was not in any case essential to democracy – and weight people’s votes according to the extent to which they are affected.
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I cannot dwell on all of these problems with the all affected principle. No doubt some can be addressed by more sophisticated formulations of the principle or accounts of what it is to be affected. Some, for example, choose to focus on being subject to coercion or bound by the laws in question.
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Perhaps – like J. S. Mill’s famous harm principle – the plausibility of the all affected principle rests on it being sufficiently vague that it can be re-interpreted to mean almost whatever one wants, as circumstances dictate. This makes any general refutation tricky, but I have criticized the principle elsewhere, on the grounds that it seems to misunderstand the nature of democracy.
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It may be that all affected interests ought to be considered by those responsible for making decisions, but it does not follow that all whose interests are affected ought to themselves have a vote. If we consider workplace democracy, for example, then decisions taken by a firm affect not only shareholders and employees but also customers and the firm’s suppliers – and some of these groups may be more affected than the firm’s own workers – but we do not think that members of these groups ought to be able to dictate the firm’s decisions. In fact, the case should be even clearer once it is realized that not all affected interests can be enfranchised. What we decide today, on matters such as energy policy, may have profound effects on present young children and future generations, but these groups cannot be given votes to protect their interests. Democracy is a matter of collective agency, and thus only agents can participate in it, even if it may affect those who are merely moral patients.
To say that those agents responsible for making decisions ought to consider the interests of all affected is one thing – and quite plausible – but it does not, so I have argued, help us to decide which agents ought to be responsible for making the decisions in question.
Perhaps some alternative principle, or more refined version of the all affected principle, can offer better guidance. However, in the absence of any such proposal, I am tempted to share Whelan’s sceptical conclusion, that the constitution of the demos is itself arbitrary from the democratic point of view. A given group of individuals may choose to associate, for purposes of business, or to form a state, or for many other reasons. Once they do so, they are entitled to regulate their collective affairs collectively – which means that they are the relevant decision makers. There may be limits on what they can permissibly do to outsiders – it may be that they have no right
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to exclude would-be immigrants from the territory that they happen to occupy or that they would be unjustified in taking decisions that unilaterally impose certain harms on outsiders – but these wrongs, if they occur, could presumably be dealt with by some form of compensation for the outsiders in question, rather than by extending the franchise. If the constitution of the demos is, however, simply arbitrary from a democratic point of view, then this seems to undermine the definition of democracy that I have proposed. I have argued that the essential feature of democracy is the extension of the franchise but, if we do not know to whom it ought to be extended, then it seems that we will not able to judge whether a given regime includes all the people it should. The all affected principle was attractive because it told us who needed to be included for a decision to count as democratic. Its rejection appears to leave us without any guidance whatsoever.
4 A Relativized Notion of Democracy
I think that the problem raised at the end of the previous section depends on the assumption that we can describe a political decision or regime as democratic or not tout court . In the present section, I shall argue that this is not the case. Our judgements of whether or not a regime or decision is democratic are always, at least implicitly, relative to some prior notion of who it is that may or ought to be included.
Moreover, contrary to what is claimed by advocates of the all affected principle, there is not necessarily any privileged reference group that we must appeal to in making ascriptions of democracy. The truth may simply be that a particular decision or regime is democratic with respect to group X (who are included) but not with respect to group Y (who are not included). If the constitution of the demos is itself arbitrary, there may be no more to be said than this – it may be meaningless to ask whether the decision or regime was democratic simpliciter or absolutely.
I have argued that democracy requires a broadly inclusive franchise. It is possible, however, that a decision may be broadly inclusive with respect to the members of one group but not another. Suppose, for example, Britain decides to build a new coal-fired power station, which threatens to cause pollution in Scandinavia. If only those resident in Britain are enfranchised, then the decision is indeed democratic with respect to British residents, but it is undemocratic with regard to Scandinavia residents (none of whom are enfranchised) and possibly with regard to all of those who are affected (this will be a matter of degree, depending upon the relative numbers included and excluded). In other words, whether a decision was taken democratically depends on who the relevant reference group is. It is always, at least implicitly, a relative question.
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Since this may seem counter-intuitive, it will be helpful to introduce an analogy. We ordinarily conceive and speak of motion in absolute terms.
If I am sat still beside a road, and I see you drive past in your car, then it would be natural for me to assert that you were moving and I was not. In fact, however, since the Earth is constantly both spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun, both of us would be moving from some other vantage point, such as the Sun. Einstein’s theory of relativity teaches us that there is no such thing as absolute motion. When we make assertions that something is moving, we always do so relative to some given (though usually implicit) vantage point. It would be natural for me to say that you are moving without further qualification, since I would ordinarily be understood to mean that you were moving relative to me (and the person I was sitting next to). Nonetheless, it is equally true that, relative to your perspective, I am the one that moves, while you remain quite stationary relative to someone sat next to you in your car. There is no
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reason to privilege one vantage point over the other. Nor does it make any sense to ask who is really moving, from some absolute or non-relative perspective, because there simply is no such perspective.
I have suggested that we should accept a similar account of democracy. That is, it may be correct to call a regime democratic with respect to some particular group that is broadly included, but undemocratic with respect to another than is excluded. For this analogy to be convincing, however, it needs to be shown that – as in the case of motion – there is no privileged perspective from which the judgement ought to be made. Two objections might be made against this claim. The first objection would be that our judgements are not usually relative because we do not ordinarily feel the need to qualify them – our assertions normally take an absolute form ‘X is (not) democratic.’ This, however, does not tell against my claim, because it is no different from the case of motion. I have not said that our judgements must be explicitly relative. Ordinarily there is no need to specify the relevant reference group, because it will be obvious from the context. When we call an absolute monarchy undemocratic, for example, we usually do so because the citizens of the country in question are given no say and this can be easily understood from the context, just as when I say that ‘you are moving’ (without qualification) I am understood to mean ‘relative to my position, you are moving.’ Even for a regime that we typically accept as democratic, it is possible to judge it undemocratic with reference to excluded groups – for example, the USA, and in particular its border controls, are undemocratic with respect to
Mexicans who wish to enter the country.
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Thus, it seems difficult to deny that judgements of democracy must be at least implicitly relative to some given reference group.
The second objection concedes that our judgements are indeed relative, but insists that the reference group is not arbitrary, but that each time we make a judgement there is a proper reference group with which it ought to be made. If we accept the all affected principle, for example, then this (once fully spelled out) would tell us the group with reference to whom a particular judgement ought to be made and counted true or false. It would follow that US border controls are undemocratic simpliciter if
Mexicans ought to be included but are not. I cannot refute this possibility without examining each possible demos-specifying principle, which would obviously be beyond the scope of this paper. I have suggested, however, why I think that no version of the all affected principle is particularly promising. We do not ordinarily think that a firm’s customers ought to have a say in its production decisions (except in so far as their purchasing influences it); we think here that the proper decision-making group comprises of either shareholders or workers or both. Moreover, this example highlights the fact that there may be reasonable disagreement as to who the relevant decision-making group should be in any particular decision. This is true also at the national level; for instance, should a referendum on devolution or secession include all those in the current polity or merely those in the would-be breakaway province?
Appeal to something as vague as the all affected principle does not seem to help us here. I think it is better to acknowledge that the decision will, inevitably, be democratic from one point of view yet undemocratic from the other.
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This is all there is to say; there is no reason to assume that there is some absolute vantage point from which we can judge the decision democratic without qualification.
5 Conclusion
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The definition of democracy has been a subject of much controversy. I hope that the present essay has both shed some light on why this is and gone some way to helping to reduce confusion and contestation. I have argued that we can value democracy without simply confusing descriptive and evaluative questions and that, understood as a ‘thick evaluative term,’ democracy still has definite descriptive content. I then went on to argue that this content was, however, rather minimal.
Neither political equality nor majority rule are analytic requirements of democracy – its essence is simply rule by the people, which may take a variety of forms. This minimal understanding of democracy should help to reduce controversy over what counts as a democracy, though of course it still leaves open debate as to what makes for a better or worse democracy. Plural voting, as advocated by J. S. Mill for example, is not undemocratic, though it may or not be justified. Moreover, I went on to argue that the judgement whether a regime or decision is democratic must always be
(implicitly) relative to a given reference group. This explains a lot of contestations – when two parties disagree about the democratic credentials of a given regime, it may be because they have different reference groups in mind. If we recognize that these judgements are relative, and there is no democratically privileged standpoint or absolute truth, then this may help to defuse disagreement. This is not to say that there are no good reasons why certain groups should be included or excluded, but only that we must go outside of the theory of democracy and appeal to considerations such as justice or freedom of association. The constitution of the demos is arbitrary from the democratic point of view, and our judgements as to what is democratic will depend on which of many possible demoi we appeal to.
1 J. Ober (2008) ‘The Original Meaning of “Democracy”: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule’
Constellations 15:1 3-9.
2 W. B. Gallie (1955-6) ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society ,
Vol.56, pp.167-198.
3 L. Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell), §66.
4 Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 45-86, especially pp. 73-6.
5 Ludvig Beckman, The Frontiers of Democracy: The Right to Vote and its Limits (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 33-5.
6 Freedom House
7 This was seen by Hobbes, who criticized the tendency to contrast kingship and tyranny or aristocracy and oligarchy, on the grounds that these distinctions merely reflect subjective preferences, yet preserved the underlying distinction between rule of the one, few or many. Democracy can therefore be distinguished from monarchy or the rule of the few, even though the contrast between democracy and ochlocracy (mob rule) will inevitably be contested. See T. Hobbes, Leviathan , ch. 19.
8 B. Williams Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 1985: 129-30; 140-2.
9 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics II 1106a14-9b28.
10 This picture is actually complicated somewhat by the fact that Aristotle believes in the unity of the virtues. Whoever possesses bravery to the maximal extent must also possess all the other virtues, since their requirements fit harmoniously together like a jigsaw (there can be no conflict between justice and mercy, for instance, because where justice genuinely requires punishment mercy properly understood does not forbid it). Nonetheless, I am not concerned with Aristotelian exegesis and we need not accept this view.
11 Contra-Beckman, pp. 33-5.
12 Parfit (1997) ‘Equality and Priority’ Ratio 10: 202–211 denies that equality can be even in one way better if not better for anyone.
13 For simplicity, I assume that democracy and justice can be easily separated. It may be that democracy is itself a requirement of justice, as argued for instance by Thomas Christiano, but then the conflict re-emerges as one between procedural and substantive requirements of justice.
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14 Plato, Republic , 445d, describes his just constitution as kingship or aristocracy, depending on whether there is one guardian or several. Note that this ‘rule for the people’ qualifies as a legitimate concept of democracy according to Macpherson (1966) The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press) pp.12-22. This revisionary definition is criticized by Lively (1975) Democracy
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp.33-5 and Sartori (1987) The Theory of Democracy Revisited
(Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House) p.35. I side with Plato; rule for the people may be good in one way, but it does not capture what I consider good about democracy. The fact that I attach evaluative import to democracy does not require rejecting its descriptive content and calling any regime judged good democratic in some wider sense.
15 Lincoln.
16 Dahl
17 For discussions of political equality, see C. Beitz (1989) Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic
Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); R. Dworkin 2000. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), ch. 4; W. Sadurski. 2008.
Legitimacy, Political Equality, and Majority Rule. Ratio Juris 21:39–65; and D. Estlund 2007.
Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) ch. 15.
I comment on these arguments in [self-citation].
18 J S Mill
19 David Heyd and Uzi Segal, ‘Democratically Elected Aristocracies’, Social Choice Welfare 27
(2006): 103-27 and Harry Brighouse and Marc Fleurbaey, ‘Democracy and Proportionality’, The
Journal of Political Philosophy [forthcoming]
20 Jack Lively, Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), ??. I have explored similar proposals in
[self-citation].
21 I shall take the broadly inclusive franchise to be the defining feature of democracy. I do not, however, specify exactly how broad it must be. Most regimes make some exclusions (young children, criminals, the mentally incompetent). Since I have argued that democracy is a matter of degree, we can see these as less democratic while still classing the regimes as on the whole democracies. It should also be noted that all that is required is the real opportunity to participate, not widespread actual participation.
22 Beckman, pp. 120-3 and 146-7.
23 F. G. Whelan ‘Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem’ in J. R. Pennock and J. W.
Chapman (eds.) (1983) NOMOS XXV: Liberal Democracy . C.f. my [self-citation]
24 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 5 th edn. (London: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd, 1976), pp. 243-5.
25 This, of course, neglects the fact that most of the blacks involved did not have any freedom of association. In the USA most were descended from slaves, forcibly taken from their homelands.
26 Gustaf Arrhenius, ‘The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory’, in Democracy Unbound: Basic
Explorations I , edited by Folke Tersman (Stockholm: Filosofiska Institutionen, Stockholms
Universitet, 2005): 14-29; R. E. Goodin (2007) ‘Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and its
Alternatives’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 35:1 40-68; and David Miller, ‘Democracy’s Domain’,
Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 201-28.
27 Goodin, pp. 53-5.
28 Goodin, pp. 56-9.
29 Brighouse and Fleurbaey
30 Arash Abizadeh, ‘Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your
Own Borders’, Political Theory 36 (2008): 37-65 (though note that he adopts being subject to coercion as a sufficient, rather than a necessary, condition for enfranchisement, on the grounds that this is weaker than being affected yet still sufficient for his argument) and Beckman, pp. 47-50. This approach is explicitly rejected by Goodin, pp. 49-50.
31 [self-citation].
32 In what follows, I draw on Gilbert Harman’s ethical relativism. See, for example, …
33 Abizadeh
34 Here I assume that over-inclusiveness is less democratic. Goodin’s position seems to commit him to always favouring the more inclusive group, which at least shows that his principle is not without content, but is not obviously the right answer.
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