Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 76-110

  List, Christian ^a   Koenig Archibugi, Mathias ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956236099     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01174.x     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Todd Sandler, Global Collective Action (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
2. Scott Barrett, Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods (Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press, 2007). We use the term "public goods" broadly to include common pool resources.
3. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)
4. David Held, "Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a Cosmopolitan Perspective," in Global Governance and Public Accountability, ed. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 240-67.
5. In a related vein, J.H.H. Weiler coined the phrase "no-demos thesis" in relation to the European Union and its post-Maastricht predicament.
6. J.H.H. Weiler, "Does Europe Need a Constitution? Demos, Telos and the German Maastricht Decision," European Law Journal 1 (1995): 219-58.
7. See, however, David Miller's recent article, "Democracy's Domain," Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 201-28, which came to our attention afterwe completed the present article. We briefly compare Miller's interesting analysis with ours in a later note.
8. E.g., Terry Macdonald, "Boundaries Beyond Borders: Delineating Democratic 'Peoples' in a Globalizing World," Democratization 10 (2003): 173-94
9. Thomas Christiano, "A Democratic Theory of Territory and Some Puzzles about Global Democracy," Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (2006): 81-107
10. Robert E. Goodin, "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives," Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2007): 40-68.
11. See Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) as well as other references therein.
12. E.g., David Miller, "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice," Political Studies 40 [special issue] (1992): 54-67
13. Jack Knight and James Johnson, "Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy," Political Theory 22
14. John Dryzek and Christian List, "Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation," British Journal of Political Science 33 (2003): 1-28
15. Christian List, Robert Luskin, James Fishkin, and Iain McLean, "Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls," working paper, London School of Economics and Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy (2000/2007).
16. List and Pettit, Group Agency.
17. As discussed below, on some accounts it only evermakes sense to define the demos in relation to the all-encompassing set of all issues, while on other accounts there can be issue-specific demoi.
18. E.g., Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1970)
19. Frederick G. Whelan, "Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem," in Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1983, pp. 13-47)
20. Macdonald, "Boundaries Beyond Borders"; Goodin, "Enfranchising All Affected Interests"; Miller, "Democracy's Domain."
21. In fact, both criteria have a number of different variants, but we set the details aside here. A third approach-whereby the demos is defined as the set of those individuals who happen to be nationals of a state that is governed democratically-is not relevant here.
22. The sentence "Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur" was first used in a constitutional rather than private law sense in the thirteenth century, most famously in thewrit by King Edward I of England that summoned the bishops and abbots to the so-called Model Parliament of 1295.
23. Brian Tierney, "Freedom and the Medieval Church," in The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West, ed. R. W. Davies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 86-88.
24. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 324.
25. In his recent article, "Democracy's Domain," David Miller has made the interesting suggestion that the difference between two approaches to delimiting the demos-one that stresses the inclusion of all affected interests and another that stresses the role of sympathetic identification, underlying agreement on ethical principles, interpersonal trust, and stable relationships-derives at least in part from a deeper difference between a "liberal" and a "radical" conception of democracy. Miller argues that liberal democrats, for whom democracy is mainly instrumentally valuable, tend to look favorably on the principle of affected interest. By contrast, radical democrats, for whom democracy is principally intrinsically valuable, tend to emphasize sympathetic identification, underlying agreement on ethical principles, interpersonal trust, and the existence of stable relationships as delimitation criteria for the demos. Miller suggests that the latter factors are privileged by radical democrats because they are "qualities that a group of people must possess in order to function as a demos" (pp. 207-8)
26. At first sight, this may seem to suggest that radical democrats are more interested in the "proper functioning" of the demos than liberal democrats are, and thus that the former lean more towards what we call the "performative" approach to conceptualizing the demos, while the latter lean more towards the "compositional" one. However, we would resist this suggestion. Precisely because liberal democrats focus on the ability of democracy to produce desirable outcomes such as a larger aggregate social welfare, they have no less interest in its proper functioning than radical democrats. For this reason, we think that it is more appropriate to maintain that every democrat takes (or should take) an interest in securing the existence of a well-functioning demos, but also that such functioning can be conceptualized in a number of different and potentially contrasting ways. The bulk of our article deals with the task of providing a more precise and operationalizable interpretation of the idea of functioning, in the context of what we call an agency-based approach to conceptualizing the demos.
27. Indeed, many proponents of the affectivity criterion hold that, in reality, a demos requires one level of identity to take priority over others (that is, there cannot be multiple issue-specific demoi).
28. In "A Democratic Theory of Territory," Thomas Christiano argues that democratic boundaries should be drawn around "common worlds." For a group of individuals, a common world is "a world in which all or nearly all the individuals' fundamental interests are intertwined with each other" (p. 97).
29. See, for example, Arash Abizadeh, "Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders," Political Theory 36 (2008): 37-65.
30. David Held and Anthony McGrew, "The End of theOld Order? Globalization and the Prospects for World Order," Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 219-45, at p. 237.
31. Goodin, "Enfranchising All Affected Interests." On the all-inclusiveness criterion, see, further, Raffaele Marchetti, Global Democracy: For and Against (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
32. David Miller, Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 81-96.
33. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. 319-20.
34. Goodin, in "Enfranchising All Affected Interests," retorts: "It is arbitrary, from a moral point of view, to whom we happen to feel sentimentally attached or with whom we happen to share a common history or ancestry. What makes those factors matter, in ways that justify constituting our demoi around them, is the way that those factors lead to people's interests being intertwined. The reason we think that territorial or historical or national groups ought make decisions together is that, typically if not invariably, the interests of individuals within those groups are affected by the actions and choices of others in that group" (p. 48).
35. Macdonald, in "Boundaries Beyond Borders," develops a similar argument about how different approaches mandate either the "alignment" of boundaries of power to the boundaries of legitimate solidaristic peoples or vice versa, although we would not describe the contrast as one between "idealist" and "realist" approaches (pp. 178-79). On the tension between "inclusionary push" and "exclusionary pull," see also Miller, "Democracy's Domain."
36. The use of the term "populist" here is inspired byWilliam Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
37. Inspired by Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 364-66
38. Nancy Fraser, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World," Theory, Culture and Society 24 (2007): 7-30
39. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics: Discourse and Democracy in a Divided World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
40. Jürgen Habermas, "Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik," in Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. P. Niesen and B. Herborth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), pp. 406-59
41. and Patrizia Nanz, Europolis: Constitutional Patriotism Beyond the Nation-State (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).
42. It is entirely conceivable, of course, that there are correlations between certain compositional criteria and certain performative ones, in that groups satisfying the one set of criteria may also be likely to satisfy the other. However, such correlations are a contingent matter and do not undermine the fact that, conceptually, the compositional and performative questions about the demos are distinct.
43. This way of defining an agent follows List and Pettit, Group Agency, and Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
44. List and Pettit, Group Agency.
45. List and Pettit, Group Agency.
46. Robert A. Dahl, "Procedural Democracy," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 5th series, ed. Peter Laslett and James S. Fishkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 97-133.
47. E.g., List and Pettit, Group Agency. Axiomatic social choice theory goes back to Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951/1963).
48. On the question of whether a democratic institutional structure could emerge at the global level, see Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, "Is Global Democracy Possible?" European Journal of International Relations (forthcoming). Moreover, the question of whether a given collection under a particular actual or possible organizational structure counts as a state-like agent permits a continuum of answers, since state-like agency is not a simple on-off phenomenon. There exists a continuum of possible cases ranging from a fully developed, well-ordered state at one end (which, in turn, can take a number of different forms) to an extreme Hobbesian state of nature at the other end. The kinds of institutions we currently find at the level of the European Union, for instance, presumably fall somewhere in the middle.
49. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 2.8.96.
50. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), bk. 4, chap. 2. For further discussion, see List and Pettit, Group Agency, chap. 2.
51. First, it is open to all possible combinations of individual attitudes on the issue in question ("universal domain"). Second, all individuals have equal weight in determining the collective attitude ("anonymity"). Third, the criterion itself is unbiased between a positive and a negative attitude ("neutrality"). And fourth, the collective attitude is a positively responsive function of the individual attitudes ("positive responsiveness")
52. Kenneth O. May, "A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision," Econometrica 20 (1952): 680-84
53. Robert E. Goodin and Christian List, "A Conditional Defense of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem in a Restricted Informational Environment," American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 940-49.
54. A full defense of any given criterion for ascribing collective attitudes is beyond the scope of this article.
55. E.g., Cass Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)
56. Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
57. Christian List, "Two Concepts of Agreement," The Good Society 11 (2002): 72-79
58. revised as "Deliberation and Agreement," in Deliberation, Participation and Democracy: Can the People Govern? ed. Shawn W. Rosenberg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 64-8.
59. These definitions are based on List, "Two Concepts of Agreement." Some subsequent notions of meta-consensus were discussed in John S. Dryzek and Simon J. Niemeyer, "Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals," American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 634-49.
60. As acknowledged in the following discussion, substantive agreement on certain particularly fundamental issues may be a necessary condition for the capacity for democratic agency.
61. See List, "Two Concepts of Agreement"; List et al., "Deliberation, Single- Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy"; Richard G. Niemi, "Majority Decision-Making with Partial Unidimensionality," American Political Science Review 63 (1969): 488-97.
62. William V. Gehrlein, "Condorcet's Paradox," Theory and Decision 15 (1983): 161-97.
63. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism.
64. Andranik S. Tangian, "Unlikelihood of Condorcet's Paradox in a Large Society," Social Choice and Welfare 17 (2000): 337-65
65. Christian List and Robert E. Goodin, "Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem," Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 277-306, appendix 3
66. Ilia Tsetlin, Michel Regenwetter, and Bernard Grofman, "The Impartial Culture Maximizes the Probability of Majority Cycles," Social Choice and Welfare 21 (2003): 387-98.
67. Gerry Mackie, Democracy Defended (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
68. Michel Regenwetter et al., Behavioral Social Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
69. One such measure is the "Laakso-Taagepera index of fragmentation." Suppose n1 (among n) individuals most prefer the first alternative (among k alternatives), n2 most prefer the second, , nk most prefer the k-th. Then the "Laakso-Taagepera index" can be defined as In particular, LT = 1 means perfect consensus; LT ? ∞ means extreme fragmentation. See List et al., "Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy."
70. Duncan Black, "On the Rationale of Group Decision-Making," Journal of Political Economy 56 (1948): 23-34
71. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values. Other contributions to the literature on such structure conditions include K.-I. Inada, "A Note on the Simple Majority Decision Rule," Econometrica 32 (1964): 525-31
72. Amartya K. Sen, "A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions," Econometrica 34 (1966): 491-99
73. and more recently Wulf Gaertner, Domain Conditions in Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
74. Franz Dietrich and Christian List, "Majority Voting on Restricted Domains," Journal of Economic Theory (forthcoming).
75. In the stylized example of the world population subdivided into three groups, the condition is violated: No matter how we align the three options from left to right, one of the three groups will fail to have preferences that fit the pattern of single-peakedness. If, on the other hand, one of the groups were to change their views, transforming their preferences into those of one of the other groups, or into the reverse of their previous preferences, the violation of single-peakedness would disappear.
76. List et al., "Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy"; Niemi, "Majority Decision-Making with Partial Unidimensionality."
77. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, p. 128.
78. Miller, "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice"; Knight and Johnson, "Aggregation and Deliberation"; Dryzek and List, "Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy"; List, "Deliberation and Agreement."
79. Specifically, the deliberation appears to move individual preferences away from combinations leading to cycles, by increasing proximity to single-peakedness, as empirically investigated in List et al., "Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful Democracy." Deliberative Polls have also shown that deliberative exercises may have a negative, neutral, or positive effect on substantive agreement. E.g., R. A. Eggins, K. J. Reynolds, P. J. Oakes, and K. I. Mavor, "Citizen Participation in a Deliberative Poll: Factors Predicting Attitude Change and Political Engagement," Australian Journal of Psychology 59 (2007): 94-100
80. V. N. Andersen and K. M. Hansen, "How Deliberation Makes Better Citizens: The Danish Deliberative Poll on the Euro," European Journal of Political Research 46 (2007): 531-56
81. Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin, and Roger Jowell, "Considered Opinions: Deliberative Polling in Britain," British Journal of Political Science 32 (2002): 455-88.
82. Immanuel Kant, "Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1795/2006), pp. 67-109, at p. 84.
83. Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org, "Publics Around the World Say UN Has Responsibility to Protect Against Genocide," http://www .worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr07/CCGA+_Genocide_article.pdf Accessed April 4, 2007.
84. But it should be noted that, even in national opinion polls, questions are rarely asked in such a way as to capture possible cyclical majority preferences.
85. Fen Osler Hampson and Holly Reid, "Coalition Diversity and Normative Legitimacy in Human Security Negotiations," International Negotiation 8 (2003): 7-42.
86. Fanny Benedetti and John L. Washburn, "Drafting the International Criminal Court Treaty: Two Years to Rome and an Afterword on the Rome Diplomatic Conference," Global Governance 5 (1999): 1-38
87. Christopher Keith Hall, "The First Two Sessions of the UN Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court," American Journal of International Law 91 (1997): 177-87
88. "The Third and Fourth Sessions of theUN Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court," American Journal of International Law 92 (1998):124-33
89. "The Fifth Session of the UN Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court," American Journal of International Law 92 (1998): 331-39
90. "The Sixth Session of the UN Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court," American Journal of International Law 92 (1998): 548-56
91. Roy S. Lee, The International Criminal Court: The Making of the Rome Statute (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999).
92. For instance, if we consider the positions voiced at the beginning of the negotiation process, a hypothetical vote by simple majority rule on pairs of alternatives and on the basis of the "one state, one vote" principle might have produced a majority cycle, as the sum of LM and CS votes could have ensured a majority for Strong against Subordinate, the sum of LM and RS votes could have ensured a majority for Subordinate against Weak, and the sum of CS and RS votes could have ensured a majority for Weak against Strong.
93. Nicole Deitelhoff, Überzeugung in der Politik. Grundzüge einer Diskurstheorie internationalen Regierens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006)
94. "The Discursive Process of Legalization: Charting Islands of Persuasion in the ICC Case," International Organization 63 (2009): 33-65
95. Marlies Glasius, The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement (London: Routledge, 2006)
96. Deitelhoff, Überzeugung in der Politik, pp. 212, 228-37.