Democracy's domain

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 201-228

  Miller, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PAVIA   (Italy)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 69149086231     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01158.x     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. See Arash Abizadeh, "Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,"Political Theory 36(2008): 37-65
2. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, ed. Thomas B. Bottomore (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), pp. 243-45.
3. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 207. For other attempts by Dahl on the domain problem, see Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), chap. 2; Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974); Robert A. Dahl, "Procedural Democracy,"in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fifth Series, ed. Peter Laslett and James Fishkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).
4. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 245.
5. Frederick Whelan, "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,"in Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983), p. 40. See also Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), who speaks of a "paradox internal to democracies,"namely that "democracies cannot choose the boundaries of their own membership democratically,"p. 35.
6. This point has also been made by Gustaf Arrhenius, "The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory"(mimeo), sections II -III.
7. W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts,"Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955-56): 167-98.
8. It should be said that Rousseau himself did not assume that this was necessarily true of the decisions taken by a demos in relation to outsiders. For instance, "it is not impossible that a well-governed republic might wage an unjust war" (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 8). He immediately added, however, that this would not happen "unless the people is seduced by private interests which some few skillful men succeed by their reputation and eloquence to substitute for the people's own interest."For Rousseau's general thinking about the foreign relations of self-governing republics, see Rousseau on International Relations, ed. Stanley Hoffman and David P. Fidler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
9. Historically, those who we now think of as making up the R-democratic tradition excluded large classes of people from the demos on grounds of their alleged incapacity to take part in rational discussion and decision making. I shall not discuss such exclusions here: For a survey, see Dahl, "Procedural Democracy,"pp. 108-20. Instead, my discussion of the domain question takes it for granted that all adults in possession of their faculties will be included in whatever domain is chosen.
10. Evidence for this proposition can be found in Jane Mansbridge's study, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), which found that town meetings in a small New England town were largely consensual, but that this was partly because conflicts of interest were suppressed to avoid disrupting the social fabric of the community.
11. Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy, chap. 2. See also Robert A. Dahl, "A Democratic Dilemma: System Effectiveness versus Citizen Participation, "Political Science Quarterly 109 (1994): 23-34
12. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: Or, The New Constitution, ed. Max Beloff (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 45. I draw here on my discussion of Madison in "Republican Citizenship, Nationality and Europe,"in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2008), where I locate his argument in a wider stream of thought about the virtues of extensive republics.
13. Alexander Hamilton et al., The Federalist, p. 47.
14. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1972), p. 361. Mill was not, of course, a democrat in the strict sense: But his reasons for opposing universal and equal suffrage need not concern us here.
15. John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, p. 361.
16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, p. 114.
17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings.
18. Most thoroughly by Robert Goodin in "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(2007): 40-68
19. Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution, p. 64.
20. See Robert Whelan, "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,"p. 19; Goodin, "Enfranchising All Affected Interests,"pp. 52-53.
21. This assumes that a person's interests are affected by a decision when it makes him or her better or worse off by comparison to the status quo ante. If we remove this baseline and say that interests are also affected by decisions that might have been taken but weren't, then we immediately face the problem described in the remainder of this paragraph.
22. I follow here the terminology suggested in Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, p. 195. For the point that scope and domain are (normatively) interdependent, see also Dahl, "Procedural Democracy,"p. 109.
23. Some issues are such that whatever decision is taken will inevitably have spillover effects: For example, a political unit's choice of energy policy may affect the interests of outsiders whatever it decides to do. Even here, it might rule out any policy whose effects were on balance detrimental to members of other units, since the affected interests principle seems to derive most of its force from cases in which those who have no say in a decision are harmed by it. 'No taxation without representation'is a more compelling slogan than, say, 'no public goods without representation'. See also here Whelan, "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,"section II.
24. For a valiant attempt to grapple with some of these problems, see Harry Brighouse and Marc Fleurbaey, "Democracy and Proportionality,"Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming).
25. Suppose, for example, that an economy contains two groups of manufacturers, one of whom produces primarily for the domestic market and the other for export. Some decisions mainly affect the first group and others mainly the second. Suppose that each group wins on some occasions and loses on others, or better perhaps that a convention emerges whereby the domestic producers are given a greater say over questions that primarily concern them, and similarly for the exporters. This arrangement seems to meet the demands of the affected interests principle as well as can be expected internally. But now it is proposed that representatives of the receiving countries should be given a say in decisions concerning export policy; after all, their interests are also affected. If this proposal were to be accepted, the balance between domestic producers and exporters would be upset, probably to the detriment of the exporters.
26. Grant Lamond, "The Coerciveness of Law," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 20(2000): 39-62, at pp. 43-44.
27. This makes room for the possibility that coercion can fail: A strong-minded or foolhardy person may resist the pressure that the coercer brings to bear.
28. This distinction seems largely to be overlooked in the academic literature on coercion. Nozick's influential analysis, for example, begins by discussing the case in which one agent stops another from performing some action, which is better understood as an account of (one form of) prevention than of coercion. He later switches to examples in which people are forced to act in relatively specific ways without seeing any significance in the switch (see Robert Nozick, "Coercion,"in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fourth Series, ed. P. Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and Q. Skinner [Oxford: Blackwell, 1972]). Nor does the distinction appear in Scott Anderson's otherwise helpful literature review in 'Coercion', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/coercion). The discussion that follows draws upon the fuller analysis in my paper "Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh,"Political Theory (forthcoming).
29. As a moment's reflection shows, prevention and coercion stand at opposite ends of a spectrum, in the middle of which there will be cases where the first agent's intervention significantly shrinks the range of options open to the second without narrowing it to just one. These, then, will be borderline cases. Note as well that coercion is consistent with leaving the coerced person some degree of choice: A mugger who allows his victim to choose which cash outlet he will use to withdraw the sum of money being demanded is still a coercer.
30. I do not claim that the distinction between prevention and coercion is always well marked in everyday language. Intuitions vary on this question: Some are willing to describe as coercive at least the more serious forms of prevention. This may partly be due to inattention to the distinction drawn in this paragraph between actually coercing somebody and threatening future coercion as a way of preventing him. Even if this is not the explanation, the underlying question is whether there is an important normative difference between prevention and coercion that is lost if the distinction is blurred. See the paragraph that follows.
31. Thus if there is a job that I very much want to have, and the person offering it will only give it to me if I agree to serve as her personal slave for a week beforehand, I might rationally accept this proposal. It is worth reflecting on why we regard such agreements as morally unacceptable.
32. For a valuable discussion of this and other methods by which democracies might address the problem of external impact, see Michael Saward, "A Critique of Held,"in Global Democracy: Key Debates, ed. Barry Holden (London: Routledge, 2000). Saward's analysis employs the affected interests principle, but the mechanisms he describes would serve equally well as safeguards against external coercion.
33. It might be said in reply here that there is no guarantee that many other avenues are open to the would-be immigrant. For a discussion of this question, see Miller, "Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive."
34. Thus if we treat the EU as a democratic institution that is more inclusive than the nation-states from which it was formed, it may well be true both (a) that decision making at EU level helps to avoid negative externalities that one member-state might otherwise impose on others, and (b) that EU decision making, precisely because it is coordinated, imposes greater negative externalities on certain outside groups, such as farmers in developing countries, than would be produced by separate decisions taken in member states. If so, there is democratic gain internally and democratic loss vis-à-vis the outside world, judged by the impact criterion.
35. See my essay "Against Global Democracy,"in After the Nation: Critical Reflections on Post-Nationalism, ed. Keith Breen and Shane O'Neill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).