Democratic Theory
Democratic theory asks what, if anything, justifies collective self-rule, what democracy requires, and how the authority of democratic decisions can be reconciled with individual disagreement.
Definition
Democracy is a method of collective decision-making in which members of the group enjoy formal equality in determining outcomes; democratic theory studies the values that ground this arrangement and the standards by which democratic institutions are judged.
Scope
Covers normative justifications of democracy (intrinsic and instrumental), conceptions of democratic legitimacy, deliberative and aggregative models, the powers and limits of majority rule, and questions of representation and participation. Excludes empirical studies of voting behaviour and electoral systems except where they bear on normative argument.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- Why, if at all, ought collective decisions be made democratically?
- Is democracy valued for its fairness, its tendency to produce good decisions, or both?
- Does democratic procedure confer legitimacy and authority on its outcomes?
- What may majorities not do, and how should minority interests be protected?
- Should democracy be deliberative or merely aggregative of preferences?
Key concepts
- political equality
- democratic legitimacy
- deliberation and public reason
- majority rule
- the tyranny of the majority
- representation
- epistocracy
Key theories
- Procedural and pluralist democracy
- Dahl defends democracy through an ideal of political equality and effective participation, arguing that real-world 'polyarchy' approximates this ideal and that no group of guardians is competent to rule in the people's stead.
- Deliberative democracy
- Habermas grounds democratic legitimacy in a discourse principle whereby laws are valid only if they could meet the assent of all affected in rational discourse; Gutmann and Thompson develop reciprocity-based public reasoning as the core of democratic justification.
- Epistemic democracy
- Estlund argues that democratic authority is grounded in a combination of fair procedure and a tendency to make correct decisions better than chance, while rejecting rule by the knowledgeable ('epistocracy') as unable to gain general qualified acceptance.
History
Reflection on rule by the people runs from Athenian practice and its critics (Plato, Aristotle) through Rousseau's general will and Mill's representative government. Twentieth-century theory turned to defending democracy under conditions of pluralism (Dahl), and from the 1980s the deliberative turn (Habermas, Cohen, Gutmann and Thompson) reframed legitimacy around public reasoning, alongside epistemic accounts such as Estlund's.
Debates
- Aggregative vs. deliberative democracy
- Whether democracy is best understood as the fair aggregation of given preferences or as a process of public deliberation that transforms and justifies them, as Habermas and deliberativists urge.
- Procedural vs. epistemic legitimacy
- Whether democratic outcomes are legitimate purely because the procedure is fair, or partly because democracy tends to track correct decisions, as Estlund argues against purely procedural views.
Key figures
- Robert Dahl
- Jürgen Habermas
- Amy Gutmann
- David Estlund
- Joshua Cohen
Related topics
Seminal works
- dahl1989
- habermas1996
- estlund2008
Frequently asked questions
- Why should decisions be made democratically rather than by experts?
- Intrinsic justifications appeal to the fairness of treating citizens as political equals, while instrumental justifications point to democracy's tendency to produce better or more legitimate decisions; theorists like Estlund argue that expert rule cannot gain the general acceptance needed for authority.
- What is deliberative democracy?
- It is the view that the legitimacy of collective decisions depends not just on voting but on a prior process of reasoned, public deliberation in which citizens offer one another reasons they can mutually accept.