Democracy Flashcards
(27 cards)
What is, according to Young (2011), the aggregative model of democracy?
Democracy as a process of aggregating the preferences of citizens in choosing public officials and policies. A well-functioning democracy allows for the expression of and competition among preferences and has reliable and fair methods for adding them to bring a result.
Individuals have preferences and know others have preferences. Democracy is a competitive process in which political parties and candidates offer their platforms and attempt to satisfy the largest number of people’s preferences. Citizens with similar preferences often organize interest groups to try to influence the actions of parties and policymakers once they are elected. Individuals and groups may act strategically.
Assuming the process of competition, strategizing, coalition-building, and responding to pressure is open and fair, the outcome of both elections and legislative decisions reflects the aggregation of the strongest or most widely held preferences in the population.
What is, according to Young, the deliberative model of democracy?
Participants in the democratic process offer proposals for how best to solve problems or meet legitimate needs, and so on, and they present arguments through which they aim to persuade others to accept their proposals. Democratic process is primarily a discussion of problems, conflicts, and claims of need or interest.
On this model a democratic decision is normatively legitimate only if all those affected by it are included in the process of discussion and decision-making.
Citizens have political equality
Reasonableness: Reasonable people enter discussion to solve collective problems with the aim of reaching agreement.
Publicity. The conditions of inclusion, equality, and reasonableness, finally, entail that the interaction among participants in a democratic decision-making process forms a public in which people hold one another accountable.
Why, according to Young (2000) should democracy be deliberative
- In democracies there tends to be a reinforcing circle between social and economic inequality and political inequality that enables the powerful to use formally democratic processes to perpetuate injustice or preserve privilege.
- Widening democratic inclusion will promote more just outcomes – deliberative democracy provides important ideals for such inclusive practices.
- The deliberative model is more adequate to the set of commitments that bring us to value democratic practice than is the aggregative.
- The structure and norms of ideal deliberative democracy provide the epistemic conditions for the collective knowledge of which proposals are most likely in fact to promote results that are wise and just. If discussion reflects all social experience, and everyone can speak and criticize freely, then discussion participants will be able to develop a collective account of the sources of the problems they are trying to solve and will develop the social knowledge necessary to predict likely consequences of alternative courses of action meant to address them. Their collective critical wisdom thus enables them to reach a judgement that is not only normatively right in principle, but also empirically and theoretically sound.
What is an ideal Democractic association, according to Cohen (2009)
An association should treat democracy itself as a fundamental political ideal and not simply as a derivative ideal that can be explained in terms of the values of fairness or equality of respect.
Democratic association is tied to notions of autonomy and the common good
Features of an ideal democracy:
- Political debate is organised around alternative conceptions of the public good.
- Egalitarian implications must be satisfied. The reason is that in a just society political opportunities and powers must be independent of economic or social position—the political liberties must have a fair value—and the fact that they are independent must be more or less evident to citizens.
- Democratic politics should be ordered in ways that provide a basis for self-respect, that encourage the development of a sense of political competence, and that contribute to the formation of a sense of justice
What is a deliberative democracy, and what is the notion rooted in, according to Cohen?
Deliberative democracy: an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members.
The notion of a deliberative democracy is rooted in the intuitive ideal of a democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens. Citizens in such an order share a commitment to the resolution of problems of collective choice through public reasoning and regard their basic institutions as legitimate insofar as they establish the framework for free public deliberation.
What is Cohen’s formal conception of a deliberative democracy?
- An ongoing and independent pluralistic association, whose members expect it continue into the indefinite future.
- Members share a commitment to coordinating their activities within institutions that make deliberation possible and according to norms that they arrive at through deliberation
- Pluralistic association in which members have diverse preferences and ideals.
- Members regard deliberative procedures as the source of legitimacy and because of this it is important to them that the terms of their association are a manifestation of their deliberation
- The members recognize one another as having deliberative capacities
What does Cohen think is the ideal deliberative procedure?
Free: the participants regard themselves as bound only by the results of their deliberation and participants suppose that they can act from the results.
Reasoned in that the parties of it are required to state their reasons for advancing proposals, supporting them, or criticizing them.
Parties both formally and substantively equal. They are formally equal in that the rules regulating the procedure do not single out individuals. The participants are substantively equal in that the existing distribution of power and resources does not shape their chances to contribute to deliberation, nor does that distribution play an authoritative role in the deliberation.
Ideal deliberation aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus – to find reasons that are persuasive to all who are committed to acting on the results of a free and reasoned assessment of alternatives by equals. Even under ideal conditions there is no promise that consensual reasons will be forthcoming. If they are not, then deliberation concludes with voting, subject to some form of majority rule.
In what ways does Cohen say the ideal deliberation indicate importance of autonomy in deliberative democracy?
Ideal deliberation scheme indicates importance of autonomy in deliberative democracy. It is responsive to two main threats to autonomy. As a general matter, actions fail to be autonomous if the preferences on which an agent acts are, roughly, given by the circumstances, and not determined by the agent. There are two cases of “external” determination:
- Adaptive preferences: preferences that shift with changes in the circumstances of the agent without any deliberate contribution by the agent to that shift.
- Accommodationist preferences: While they are deliberately formed, accommodationist preferences represent psychological adjustments to conditions of subordination in which individuals are not recognized as having the capacity for self-government.
The phenomenon of adaptive preferences underlines the importance of conditions that permit and encourage the deliberative formation of preferences; the phenomenon of accommodationist preferences indicates the need for favourable conditions for the exercise of the deliberative capacities.
How should a deliberative democracy be organised according to Cohen?
At the heart of the institutionalization of the deliberative procedure is the existence of arenas in which citizens can propose issues for the political agenda and participate in debate about those issues. The existence of such arenas is a public good and ought to be supported with public money.
Political parties supported by public funds play an important role in making a deliberative democracy possible. Why?
- Organisations and parties provide a means through which individuals and groups who lack the “natural” advantage of wealth can overcome the political disadvantages that follow on that lack. Thus, they can help to overcome the inequalities in deliberative arenas that result from material inequality. To play this role, political organizations must themselves be freed from the dominance of private resources, and that independence must be manifest. Thus, the need for public funding.
- Second, because parties are required to address a comprehensive range of political issues, they provide arenas in which debate is not restricted in the ways that it is in local, sectional, or issue-specific organizations. They can provide the more open-ended arenas needed to form and articulate the conceptions of the common good that provide the focus of political debate in a deliberative democracy.
In what way does democracy provide dignity, according to Dworkin?
- Only democracy can provide dignity: Dignity requires independence from government in matters of ethical choice, and that requirement is at the foundation of any plausible theory of negative liberty. A political community must make collective decisions about justice and morality, and it must be able to enforce those decisions coercively. That sets the stage for the question of positive liberty. I cannot be free from coercive control in matters of justice and morality, but my dignity requires that I be allowed a role in the collective decisions that exercise that control.
- Democracy makes it less likely that officials will govern only in their own interests or those of a narrow class.
What is the majoritarian conception of democracy, according to Dworkin?
Majoritarian conception: people govern themselves when the largest number of them, rather than some smaller group within them, holds fundamental political power. It therefore insists that the structures of representative government should be designed to enhance the likelihood that the community’s laws and policies will be those that the largest number of citizens, after due discussion and reflection, prefer.
What is the majoritarian conception of democracy, according to Dworkin (2011) ?
Partnership conception: holds that self- government means government not by the majority of people exercising authority over everyone but by the people as a whole acting as partners. This must inevitably be a partnership that divides over policy, of course, since unanimity is rare in political communities of any size. But it can be a partnership nevertheless if the members accept that in politics they must act with equal respect and concern for all the other partners.
What is the main difference between the majoritarian and partnership conceptions of democracy, and which, according to Dworkin, is better?
The most important difference between the two conceptions of democracy: The majoritarian conception defines democracy only procedurally. The partnership conception ties democracy to the substantive constraints of legitimacy.
The partnership conception makes self- government at least an intelligible ideal. The majoritarian conception does not, because it describes nothing that could count as self- government by members of a political minority.
In what three ways can political equality be elaborated, according to Dworkin?
First, that political power is distributed in such a way that all adult citizens have equal influence over political decisions.
Second, that adult citizens have equal impact in that pro cess: that the opinion each finally forms in the pro cess will be given full and equal weight in the community’s final decision.
Third, that no adult citizen’s political impact is less than that of any other citizen for reasons that compromise his dignity— reasons that treat his life as of less concern or his opinions as less worthy of respect.
Which of Dworkin’s readings of political equality does he think gives case for democracy and what kind of democracy?
Third reading of political equality gives case for democracy: Political equality is a matter not of political power but of political standing. Democracy confirms in the most dramatic way the equal concern and respect that the community together, as the custodian of coercive power, has for each of its members. Democracy is the only form of government, short of rule by lottery, that confirms that equal concern and respect in its most fundamental constitution
Political equality requires that political power be distributed so as to confirm the political community’s equal concern and respect for all its members.
The arithmetic equality of the majoritarian conception therefore has, in itself, no value at all. Majority rule is not an intrinsically fair decision procedure, and there is nothing about politics that makes it intrinsically fair there.
How do the majoritarian and partnership conceptions of democracy regard deliberative democracy, according to Dworkin?
Any significant difference in the political impact of different citizen’s votes is undemocratic and wrong unless it meets two conditions, one negative and the other positive. First, it must not signal or presuppose that some people are born to rule others. Second, it must be plausible to suppose that the constitutional arrangement that creates the difference in impact improves the legitimacy of the community.
The majoritarian conception treats representative government as a necessary evil.
The partnership conception offers a very different— and more successful— justification of representative government. Because it is citizens in general, not any particular group of them, whose political impact is diminished by as signing enormous power to elected officials, the institution is not an automatic deficit in democracy. On the plausible assumption that elected officials, rather than popular assemblies, are better able to protect individual rights from dangerous swings in public opinion, there can be no general democratic requirement that fundamental issues be put to referenda. So, both conditions that our conception of political equality lays down for unequal political impact are met, at least in principle.
What does Mouffe say is the democratic paradox
There is a conflict between individual rights and liberties and claims for equality and political participation.
Paradoxical nature of liberal democracies
Mouffe takes issue with Habermas’ procedural interpretation and Rawls’ substantive-yet-minimal conception of democracy because both approaches, in her view, attempt to eradicate the tension between liberty and equality that is inherent to democracy. Attempting to solve this tension leads to privileging either liberalism (Rawls) or democracy (Habermas).
What issue does Mouffe take with deliberative democracy?
Deliberative democracy ignores the extent to which democratic politics is entwined with power and domination. No amount of dialogue or moral preaching will ever convince the ruling class to give up its power.
What is Mouffe’s idea of agonistic pluralism?
The impossibility of a consensus does not imply that there could not be an alternative form of rapport between citizens; those with whom we disagree, but with whom we nevertheless share an allegiance to basic democratic principles should be treated as ‘adversaries’. Adversaries are legitimate opponents who can arrive at a conflictual consensus. A conflictual consensus would bring together a number of different conceptions of citizenship which nevertheless acknowledge the principles of freedom and equality.
Why is trust between citizens an important issue according to Allen?
Distrust between citizens, such as interracial distrust, is a political problem.
The allegiance that democracy’s legitimate strength and stability derives from endures only so long as citizens trust that their polity does generally further their interests; minorities must be able to trust the majorities on whose opinions democratic policies are based.
Distrust can be overcome only when citizens manage to find methods of generating mutual benefit despite differences of position, experience, and perspective. The discovery of such methods is the central project of democracy.
Majority rule is nonsensical as a principle of fairness unless it is conducted in ways that provide minorities with reasons to remain attached to the polity.
The central feature of democratic politics is not its broad definition of citizenship or its ultimate dependence on majority rule, but rather its commitment to preserving the allegiance of all citizens, including electoral minorities, despite majority rule.
Argues not for institutions that can dissolve distrust but for forms of citizenship that, when coupled with liberal institutions, can do so.
How does Habermas think a deliberative democracy should work, as layed out by Allen?
Habermas advocates a “deliberative” form of democracy where the aim is to make policy decisions by coming to consensus through speech rather than relying on majority vote. He proposes modes of speech that should, if used properly and in ideal conditions, generate perfect agreement. The aim is to achieve unanimity.
Not only will citizens consent to the outcome of deliberations carried out in accord with Habermasian speech techniques, but they’ll be happy about it.
Habermas’ recommendations about deliberation:
- Habermas first recommends that speakers cast their arguments in the form of universalizable principles, and not in terms of their own interests. In fact, they should ban interest from the political forum altogether and agree not to take an interest in one another’s interests.
- Speakers should steer clear of the perlocutionary elements of speech. These are all those manoeuvres by which a speaker engages with the emotions and subjective states of her listener.
- Deliberators must be mutually well-intentioned toward each other and offer one another “reciprocal recognition. Only speakers who employ communicative action, eschewing strategic action, establish the basis for politically legitimate agreement, argues Habermas.
What criticisms of Habermas does Allen point out?
Criticism that interest cannot be ruled out of the deliberative arena, and that its play in politics ensures that agreements will never seem fully acceptable to everyone. Insofar as public policy engages abstract and universalizable principles, it generally concerns their application to concrete contexts, but, in their application, few abstract principles are in fact universalizable. Public discussion that wishes to address problems of distrust, and generate reciprocity, must not banish the problem of interest, but tackle it directly.
The second line of criticism challenges Habermas’s repudiation of rhetoric. Critics argue that it is just as impossible to exclude emotion from politics as to ban interest, and equally so for a speaker to avoid affecting the emotions of his listeners. Also, Habermas’s theory of discursive practice cannot explain how reason, stripped of all affect, can motivate people to action or secure social integration.
these problems with interest and emotion originate entirely in Habermas’s decision to ignore the question of how to create trust. The weak link in his proposed speech techniques is the third rule, that speakers should enter the deliberative forum already mutually well-minded toward one another. If they do so enter, the battle to achieve a reasonable policy outcome is already 75 percent won. The hard part is getting citizens to that point of being mutually well-intentioned.
Why does Christiano think a collective decision-makaing process is important for a democracy?
Equality (equal considerations of interests) rather than liberty is the core value in democracy, public deliberation has only an instrumental value in democracy, in the best political division of labour, citizens would be concerned essentially with ends and representatives with means.
A collective decision-making process is necessary to advance the interests of citizens in the collective properties of society.
In the light of the pervasive disagreements on judgments and conflicts of interests in pluralistic democratic societies, justice demands political equality, or equality in the distribution of resources for influencing the collective decision procedure
Social discussion and deliberation are important components of democracy. They enable citizens to become informed about their society and their own interests, as well as how those interests are similar to and different from those of others. The more understanding citizens have of their society, the more the collective decision-making process can advance their interests.
What does Christiano think the basic functions of institutions are?
First, to transmit the citizens’ conceptions of aims to government officials in such a way that the agendas for negotiating differences among the aims and for deciding on the means to carrying out these aims are basically determined by the citizens.
Second, political institutions must ensure that citizens are able to discuss the basic aims of society in accordance with the standards specified.
Third, political institutions must ensure some kind of adequate monitoring of public officials in charge of negotiating and implementing the aims of citizens.
