Random selection for political office—or “sortition”—is increasingly seen as a promising tool for democratic renewal. Critics worry, however, that replacing elected and appointed officials with ...randomly selected citizens would only exacerbate elite manipulation of political processes. This article argues that sortition can contribute to democratic renewal, but that its genuine promise is obscured by the excessive ambition and misplaced focus of prevailing models. Casting random selection as a route to accurate representation of the popular will, most contemporary proposals require randomly selected citizens to perform legislative tasks, whose open‐endedness grants substantial discretion to elite agenda setters and facilitators. The real democratic promise of sortition‐based reforms, I argue, lies in obstructing elite capture at critical junctures: a narrower task of oversight that creates fewer opportunities for elite manipulation. In such contexts, the benefits of empowering ordinary people—resulting from their immunity to certain distorting influences on career officials—plausibly outweigh the risks.
The growing movement seeking to revive an aggressive, “neo-Brandeisian” approach to antitrust policy sees it partly as a way of protecting democracy against concentrated economic power. Yet on closer ...inspection, prevailing theories of democracy as collective decision making offer weak support, at best, for a neo-Brandeisian approach. Rather than abandoning the insight that an aggressive approach to antitrust can help protect democracy, however, this essay argues that we should adjust our theories of democracy to accommodate it. I first show why prevailing accounts are ill suited to explaining the democratic virtues of a neo-Brandeisian approach. I then outline an alternative ideal of democracy—defended in greater detail elsewhere—and draw out its implications for antitrust. While vindicating the intuition that aggressive antitrust policy serves democratic goals, my account also incorporates genuine worries about such an approach, and thus enables neo-Brandeisians to reformulate their democratic ambitions in more precise and promising terms.
Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in ...the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy.
Camila Vergara’s Systemic Corruption is an extraordinarily rich, provocative and original work of political theory, which makes several compelling interventions in the normative literature. It ...develops a forceful critique of overly narrow definitions of corruption, insisting that a more ‘systemic’ conception is required in order to grasp the scale of oligarchic domination in contemporary democracies. It also points out the limitations of the ‘proceduralist’ model of contestation adopted by neo-republicans, and outlines a persuasive conception of the people as a partisan actor with specific interests to defend. Yet Vergara’s alternative vision of how popular power might be institutionalized is less convincing. Though she rightly insists on the importance of organized countervailing power and plebeian solidarity, the system of nested local assemblies that she proposes is not well-suited to foster the development of either.
Most democratic theorists agree that concentrations of wealth and power tend to distort the functioning of democracy and ought to be countered wherever possible. Deliberative democrats are no ...exception: though not its only potential value, the capacity of deliberation to ‘neutralise power’ is often regarded as ‘fundamental’ to deliberative theory. Power may be neutralised, according to many deliberative democrats, if citizens can be induced to commit more fully to the deliberative resolution of common problems. If they do, they will be unable to get away with inconsistencies and bad or private reasons, thereby mitigating the illegitimate influence of power. I argue, however, that the means by which power inflects political disagreement is far more subtle than this model suggests and cannot be countered so simply. As a wealth of recent research in political psychology demonstrates, human beings persistently exhibit ‘motivated reasoning’, meaning that even when we are sincerely committed to the deliberative resolution of common problems, and even when we are exposed to the same reasons and evidence, we still disagree strongly about what ‘fair cooperation’ entails. Motivated reasoning can be counteracted, but only under exceptional circumstances such as those that enable modern science, which cannot be reliably replicated in our society at large. My analysis suggests that in democratic politics – which rules out the kind of anti-democratic practices available to scientists – we should not expect deliberation to reliably neutralise power.
How might discourse generate political change? So far, democratic theorists have focused largely on how deliberative exchanges might shift political opinion. Responding to empirical research that ...casts doubt on the generalizability of deliberative mechanisms outside of carefully designed forums, this essay seeks to broaden the scope of discourse theory by considering speech that addresses participants’ identities instead. More specifically, we ask what may be learned about identity-oriented discourse by examining the practice of religious preaching. As we demonstrate, scholars of homiletics—the study of preaching—have identified three core features that support its focus on identity: its unconditionality, its appeal to authoritative texts and traditions, and its diffuse instrumentality. We then ask what each of these features might look like in more straightforwardly political contexts. Finally, we address several normative questions raised by this practice, as a way of exploring the promises and dangers accompanying identity-oriented discourse more generally.
Intra‐party Democracy: A Functionalist Account Bagg, Samuel; Bhatia, Udit
The journal of political philosophy,
September 2022, 2022-09-00, 20220901, Volume:
30, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The organization of political parties presents a serious puzzle for democratic theory. On the one hand, nearly everyone recognizes their essential role in supporting collective decision-making and ...popular accountability. On the other hand, many parties are internally undemocratic, inviting precious little input from ordinary members and supporters. Indeed, political parties have often been accused of entrenching various interests and blocking democratic progress.
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