Can Democracy Cope?

The success story of democracy over the twentieth century has given way to doubts in the twenty‐first, as democracies struggle to cope with difficult wars, mounting debts, climate change and the rise of China. This essay uses intellectual history to explain the link between long‐term democratic success and short‐term democratic failure. It distinguishes three distinct views of what can go wrong with democracy, and identifies the third (which I call ‘the confidence trap’, an idea that originates with Tocqueville) as the key to understanding our present predicament. Democratic success creates blind spots and a reluctance to tackle long‐term problems. I use this idea to explain and put in context Fukuyama's claims about the end of history, and to examine the link between democratic failure and market failure.     

Inquiry as Critique: on the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory

This article provides a critical reconstruction of John Dewey's theory of social and political inquiry. Clearing away some misconceptions about this theory allows us to grasp its practical and political focus, and to see its similarities to other strands of anti-positivist social thought, including hermeneutics and critical theory. I go on to examine the relationship between democratic values and the theory of inquiry. Like recent proponents of discursive conceptions of democracy such as Habermas he sees a connection between democracy and the conditions for rational procedures of problem solving. What connects democracy to inquiry for Dewey is primarily ethical and political, rather than epistemological. The article considers what may be usefully taken from Dewey's conception of social inquiry, without accepting his full ethical agenda.     

The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy

Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.     

What comes first,democracy or human rights?

Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.     

Sustaining democracy: folk epistemology and social conflict

When political philosophers ask whether there is a philosophical justification for democracy, they are most frequently concerned with one of two queries. The first has to do with the relative merits of democracy as compared with other regimes. The second query has to do with the moral bindingness of democratic outcomes. But there is a third query we may be engaging when we are looking for a philosophical justification of democracy: what reason can be given to democratic citizens to pursue democratic means of social change when they are confronted with a democratic result that seems to them seriously objectionable or morally intolerable? In this paper I develop an epistemological response to the third query. The thesis is that we have sufficient epistemological reasons to be democrats. The epistemological norms that we take ourselves to be governed by can be satisfied only under certain social conditions, and these social conditions are best secured under democracy.     

Democratic demand and supply: a spatial model approach to satisfaction with democracy

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is a commonly used indicator, and its determinants have been analysed extensively. But what does dissatisfaction with democracy substantially mean? This paper tests if satisfaction is actually a coherent consequence of citizens considering democratic supply and demand. It starts from the simple idea that satisfaction can be explained by the distance between what “should be” and what “is”; between democratic expectations and reality. I capture this idea in a spatial model of democratic support, where size and direction of the gap between citizens’ expectations and evaluations of democracy determine levels of satisfaction. I use data for 26 countries from the European Social Survey. Taking into account both expectation-surplus and evaluations-surplus gaps, I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. The main finding is that liberal criteria of democratic quality are generally agreed upon amongst citizens, and that a perceived lack of their realization is the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction. Democratic input dimensions like direct participation and output criteria like social justice are more disputed, and create dissatisfaction amongst those wanting more of them as well as those wanting less.     

Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy

Although trust is clearly central to human relations of all kinds, it is less clear whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democratic institutions as well as to democratic political participation, and that arguments which make distrust the central element of democracy fail. First, I argue for the centrality of trust to the democratic process. The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws. Second, I refute arguments that place distrust at the centre of democratic institutions. I argue, instead, that citizens must be vigilant with respect to their legislators and fellow citizens; that is, they must be willing to ensure that the institutions are working fairly and that people continue to abide by shared regulations. This vigilance – which is reflected both in a set of institutions as well as an active citizenry – is motivated by an attitude termed 'mistrust'. Mistrust is a cautious attitude that propels citizens to maintain a watchful eye on the political and social happenings within their communities. Moreover, mistrust depends on trust: we trust fellow citizens to monitor for abuses of our own rights and privileges just as we monitor for abuses of their rights and privileges. Finally, I argue that distrust is inimical to democracy. We are, consequently, right to worry about widespread reports of trust's decline. Just as distrust is harmful to human relations of all kinds, and just as trust is central to positive human relations of all kinds, so is distrust inimical to democracy and trust central to its flourishing.     

Making User‐boards a School in Democracy? Studying Swedish Local Governments

In its final report, a Swedish Government Commission has argued that representative democracy should be complemented by a high degree of local participation. The Commission argues that user‐boards and citizen panels, for instance, are tools for vitalising democracy by educating people about democratic principles. This argument rests on two assumptions: (a) about the effects of participation in terms of a learning process at the individual level, and (b) about certain specific organisational circumstances that facilitate the learning processes. However, despite having long been evident in democratic theory, the assumptions lack empirical support. Thus, each of the Commission's assumptions poses an interesting empirical challenge: First, does local participation give rise to an individual democratic learning process? Second, does the link between local participation and representative democracy co‐vary with the individual learning process? This article presents results from a process‐oriented comparative study of two Swedish municipalities that introduced user‐boards in the school sector. The article shows that participation in user‐boards gives rise to various degrees of learning processes about democracy for individuals. It also shows that a relation between local governments and user‐boards, characterised by dialogue and cooperation, increases the possibility that participation in user‐boards will give rise to these learning processes.     

Balancing Procedures and Outcomes Within Democratic Theory: Core Values and Judicial Review

Democratic theorists often distinguish between two views of democratic procedures. 'Outcomes theorists' emphasize the instrumental nature of these procedures and argue that they are only valuable because they tend to produce good outcomes. In contrast, 'proceduralists' emphasize the intrinsic value of democratic procedures, for instance, on the grounds that they are fair. In this paper. I argue that we should reject pure versions of these two theories in favor of an understanding of the democratic ideal that recognizes a commitment to both intrinsically valuable democratic procedures and democratic outcomes. In instances in which there is a conflict between these two commitments, I suggest they must be balanced. This balancing approach offers a justification of judicial review on the grounds that it potentially limits outcomes that undermine democracy. But judicial review is not justifiable in any instance in which a bad democratic outcome results from democratic procedures. When the loss that would result from overturning a democratic procedure is greater than the gain to democracy that would result from ensuring against an undemocratic outcome; judicial review is not justifiable. Loss or gain to democracy is defined by the negative or positive impact of each action on the core democratic values of equality and autonomy, aspects of the democratic ideal. Even when judicial review is justified, the fact that it overturns intrinsically valuable procedures suggests that such review is never ideal from the standpoint of democracy.     

The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics

The claim I want to make in this article is, in short, first, that democratic theory for the most part has seriously neglected the temporal preconditions of liberal democracy and, second, that it therefore fails to adequately grasp some fundamental aspects of the crisis of democratic self-determination in the contemporary global age. In its first part, the article seeks to demonstrate that the history of modernity is an ongoing process of social acceleration and that most of the phenomena we currently grasp under the concept of “globalization” can in fact best be understood as instances or consequences of the latest wave of social acceleration. In the second and main part of this article, the consequences of this acceleratory character of modernity for the plausibility, legitimacy and possibility of political democracy are systematically explored. The main argument is that the speed-up of society at first enabled and supported democratization, but beyond a certain critical threshold, the reverse effect occurs: the speed of social change and the dynamics of socioeconomic development threaten to undermine the proper functioning of democracy. Thus, it is my claim that democracy only works properly within a certain time- or “speed-frame” of social change. From this, I conclude that what is called for in the Age of Globalization is a new critical theory of acceleration, the contours of which I briefly sketch out in the third and last part of this essay.     

Social Democracy or Social Liberalism? Ideological Sources of Liberal Democrat Policy

Liberal Democrat policy has been labelled as social democratic, yet the party has been reluctant to so describe itself. Taking Crosland's The Future of Socialism as a reference point, there appears to be much shared ground between social democracy and Liberal Democrat policy. Meanwhile, the party's tax policy adopted in 2006 takes the Croslandite approach of taxing wealth rather than income. Despite this, the article argues that the party is a social liberal rather than a social democratic one. These two political philosophies have so much in common that it is understandable that some commentators see the influence of social democracy where they might instead perceive social liberalism. Yet the two differ in their attitudes to the state. Both see a positive role for the state in furthering social goods. However, social liberalism shares classical liberal concerns about the dangers of an over-mighty state. This approach underpins Liberal Democrat policy.     

AMERICAN LIBERALISM AND THE DEMOCRATIC DREAM: TRANSCENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM

The "American Dream" is a compromise between an elitist dream and a democratic dream. While citizens enjoy equal political and legal rights, democracy is undermined in the economic sphere by vast inequalities of wealth, status and power. The American Dream can and should be transcended through a rediscovery of the "democratic dream" of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a defender of popular government and equality, who viewed vast inequalities of wealth as incompatible with a society of free and independent citizens living together in social harmony. Jefferson favored a variety of policies to expand economic equality. In Jefferson one finds an authentically American set of ideas for challenging the consensus that limits democracy to political and legal rights.     

Sketches for a Democratic Utopia

I want to sketch the general shape of several new structures that would in my view provide stronger support for democracy than is provided by any existing society. I call these sketches for a democratic Utopia not because I would expect these structures to inaugurate a perfect democracy, whatever that might be, nor because they are beyond human reach. On the contrary the institutions I want to suggest are well within human reach. I call them Utopian only because I am not able to point with confidence to the historical forces that are likely to bring them about.
The structures I have in mind are designed to strengthen freedom and equality among citizens of democratic orders.     

What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?

Despite a growing interest in corruption, the topic has been absent from democratic theory. The reason is not a lack of normative issues, but rather missing links between the concepts of corruption and democracy. With few exceptions, political corruption has been conceived as departures by public officials from public rules, norms, and laws for the sake of private gain. Such a conception works well within bureaucratic contexts with well-defined offices, purposes, and norms of conduct. But it inadequately identifies corruption in political contexts, that is, the processes of contestation through which common purposes, norms, and rules are created. Corruption in a democracy, I argue, involves duplicitous violations of the democratic norm of inclusion. Such a conception encompasses the standard conception while complementing it with attention to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within democratic politics. By distinguishing the meanings of inclusion and exclusion within the many institutions, spheres, and associations that constitute contemporary democracies, I provide a democratic conception of corruption with a number of implications. The most important of these is that corruption in a democracy usually indicates a deficit of democracy.     

Review Article: Modus vivendi versus public reason and liberal equality: three approaches to liberal democracy

Liberal democracy constitutes a particularly attractive political model with its emphasis on both popular sovereignty and individual liberty. Recently several new and innovative articulations of the liberal democratic ideal have been presented. This article reviews three of these recent theories and particularly their democratic credentials. The selection includes theories emphasizing modus vivendi, Rawlsian political liberalism and liberal equality. Taken together these theories show different ways to conceptualize democracy within liberal thought. I argue that ultimately all three approaches struggle with articulating a persuasive conception of democracy, but nevertheless these theories show that liberals do think seriously about the role of democracy in their theories.     

Die Dividende der Demokratie: Politische Herrschaft und gesamtwirtschaftliche Produktivität

In social sciences exists a broad consensus about the impact of political institutions on economic development. There is dissent, however, about the influence of democratic order on economic performance. Based on arguments from economic institutionalism, this paper argues that democracy has a significant and positive impact on productivity growth. In contrast to autocratic order, democratic systems can be interpreted as a competition-friendly regulation of a natural monopoly, which results in comparatively high productivity gains. This hypothesis is tested for a sample of 81 countries for the 1975–2000 period. Different regression models provide empirical support for the assumption that increasing levels of democracy produce a productivity dividend.     

Participatory Versus Radical Democracy in the 21st Century: Carole Pateman,Jacques Rancière,and Sheldon Wolin

What is the relationship between participatory and radical democracy and why are they relevant? This paper answers these questions by bringing into conversation the participatory theory of Pateman and the radical theories of Rancière and Wolin to see what they can learn from each other. I argue that participatory democracy demonstrates the value of attending to questions of institutional transformation, due to the ability of greater participation to both empower citizens and legitimize democratic authority structures. Radical democracy, on the other hand, calls attention to the ways in which the conditions of democratic possibility have changed in the past half century, thus making the dream of institutionalizing a participatory democracy much more difficult to realize. In doing so, I demonstrate that participatory and radical theories of democracy have much to offer to one another and to broader ongoing debates within democratic theory.     

Economic Development,Violent Leader Removal,and Democratization

This article argues that autocratic regime strength plays a critical mediating role in the link between economic development and democracy. Looking at 167 countries from 1875 to 2004, I find that development strengthens autocratic regimes, as indicated by a reduced likelihood of violent leader removal. Simultaneously, greater development predicts democratization, but only if a violent turnover has occurred in the recent past. Hence, development can cause democratization, but only in distinctive periods of regime vulnerability. Although development’s stabilizing and democratizing forces roughly balance out within autocracies, they reinforce each other within democracies, resolving the puzzle of why economic development has a stronger effect on democratic stability than on democratization. Further, the theory extends to any variable that predicts violent leader removal and democracy following such violence, pointing to broad unexplored patterns of democratic development.     

Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism: A Critical Juxtaposition

In this essay I argue that neoliberalism is both an economic and a political doctrine and that its historical trajectory, both conceptual and political, especially in the United States, is better understood in relation to its complex relationship of affinity with liberal democracy. The intersection between liberal democracy and neoliberalism is thus better apprehended from the perspective of the separation of the economic and the political in capitalism and the relative autonomy that it structurally grants to each field of power. Liberal democracy has provided a depoliticized framework that nurtures neoliberalism, while providing it with a cloak of legitimacy. Stated somewhat differently, the historical trajectory of liberal democracy, as a theory and as a practice of power, betrays an anti-democratic tendency that leads to depoliticization and has quelled the democratic politics that once gave credence to it, thus paving the way for the rise of neoliberalism.     

Is Liberal Democracy Sliding into ‘Democratic Despotism’?

Post‐democracy and cognate concepts suggest that the postwar period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative and unaccountable, as exemplified by the rise of multinational corporations and their influence on democratic politics. This article goes further to argue that this does not fully capture the triple threat facing liberal democracy: first, the rise of a new oligarchy that strengthens executive power at the expense of parliament and people; second, the resurgence of populism and demagogy linked to a backlash against technocratic rule and procedural politics; third, the emergence of anarchy associated with the atomisation of society and a weakening of social ties and civic bonds. In consequence, liberal democracy risks sliding into a form of ‘democratic despotism’ that maintains the illusion of free choice while instilling a sense of ‘voluntary servitude’ as conceptualised by Tocqueville.