Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy

Political Theory

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 1994, Pages 277-296

  Knight, Jack ^a   Johnson, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84970772283     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591794022002004     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. See, for example, Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980);
2. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and
3. James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (New Haven; CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927), 207-208, 144.
5. We borrow the phrase “moral resources” from Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss, “Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources,” in Political Theory Today, editèd by David Held (Stanford; CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
6. For variations on this theme, see Cass Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” Yale Law Journal 97 (1988): 1539-90, 1552f;
7. Jane Mansbridge, “Hard Decisions,” Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 10(1990): 2-4;
8. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation; and
9. Offe and Preuss, “Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources.”
10. Although this threat is real, it is not very well understood. Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, “Popular Sovereignty, State Autonomy and Private Property,” European Journal of Sociology 27 (1986): 215-59, for example, explore aiguments regarding a range of external impediments to democracy (e. g., private property and autonomous state agencies). They conclude that although such impediments surely constitute a potential threat, we currently know very little, either theoretically or empirically, about how they operate.
11. For example, Jane Mansbridge, “Feminism and Democracy,” The American Prospect, no. 1 (1990): 126-39; and
12. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). See, too,
13. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1539, who rightly points out that historically “the republican belief in deliberation about the common good was closely tied to… practices of exclusion” based on gender, race or property ownership. For a trenchant critique of deliberation on this score, see
14. Lynn Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory; forthcoming.
15. See Barber, Strong Democracy; or
16. Carole Pätemän, “Social Choice or Democracy?” Ethics 97 (1986): 39-46. From this perspective, then, it is a historical irony that earlier advocates of deliberation—from Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, to
17. John Stuart Mill, “On Representative Government,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), through
18. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), for example—precisely present it as a liberal bulwark, however inadequate, against the advance of democracy. For criticism of deliberation from this perspective, see
19. Sanders, “Against Deliberation.”
20. “Legitimacy means that there are good arguments for a political order's claim to be recognized as right and just; a legitimate order deserves recognition. Legitimacy means a political order's worthiness to be recognized.” JÜrgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979), 178. What is central in this view for present purposes is that the political order consists of rules and procedures that revolve around the requirement that collective decisions be criticized and defended with reasons. This minimal claim informs, at least tacitly, the positions of theorists of diverse political positions. See, for instance,
21. Habermas, Communication, 186, 188;
22. Mill, “On Representative Government,” 282, 314;
23. John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New York University Law Review 64 (1989): 247-48; and
24. John Schaar, “Legitimacy in the Modem State,” in Legitimacy and the State, edited by William Connolly (New York: New York University Press), 106, 111, 126. This obviously is an underdeveloped and contested position, which we do not defend at length here. For various alternative views, see
25. William Connolly, ed., Legitimacy and the State (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
26. We do not refer directly to the large technical literature on social choice theory. For brief surveys, see Amartya Sen, “Social Choice,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), and
27. Gerald Strom, The Logic of Lawmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
28. William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), reviews a wide range of technical results in a quite accessible way. We focus on his attempt to draw implications from the technical literature for normative issues in democratic theory. For a more technical treatment of the same results, see
29. Norman Schofield, Social Choice and Democracy (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985).
30. We borrow the terms “ambiguity” and “instability” from Jules Coleman and John Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” Ethics 97 (1986): 6-25. As will become clear, although we largely agree with the way Riker summarizes the social choice results, we differ with him on how they should be interpreted.
31. It is important to be clear about what we mean by stability here. In the social choice literature, stability or its absence is an attribute of a collective decision, of an outcome. It means only that the decision does not generate a cycle. In this sense, we are not talking about the concept of regime stability that was central to pluralist theory. In fact, Nicholas Miller, “Pluralism and Social Choice,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 134-47, shows that the conditions for regime stability (i. e., heterogeneous preferences, cross-cutting cleavages, etc.) are precisely the opposite of the kinds of condition (i. e., constrained preference structures) that social choice theorists identify as necessary for stable collective decisions. We discuss the latter conditions below. That said, we must enter two additional caveats that will become clear in light of subsequent discussion. First, although stability may be a desirable attribute, it confers no special normative status on a collective decision. Therefore, a stable decision is not immune to revision. Second, because in any particular case several different outcomes might be stable, the justification for why one rather than another is implemented must come from elsewhere. We suggest below that a justified outcome is the product of reasoned deliberation.
32. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 115-95, 236-38. The problem is not that every outcome is generated by manipulation. Rather, it is that all outcomes are subject to manipulation, that some in fact result from manipulation, and that we have no reliable basis for differentiating manipulated from unmanipulated outcomes.
33. Liberalism Against Populism., 65-99. Riker demonstrates this for three different and presumably exhaustive classes of aggregation mechanism: Majoritarian methods, such as the Condorcet rule and various refinements of it that seek pairwise winners; positional methods, such as approval voting or a Borda count that seek comprehensive rankings over all possible alternatives; and utilitarian methods that seek to establish cardinal rankings over outcomes.
34. Liberalism Against Populism., 99-113, 234-36.
35. Liberalism Against Populism., 238-46.
36. There are at least two important issues here. First, there is an exegetical question about whether Rousseau is a populist in Riker's sense. For doubts, see Joshua Cohen, “An Epistemic Conception of Democracy,” Ethics 97 (1986): 28-29. We do not pursue this issue here. For if we understand populism minimally as a position that identifies democratic legitimacy by reference to a popular will, it seems that Rousseau is, in this sense at least, a populist. Thus a populist need not be committed to Rousseau's strong vision of the “general will” but only to—as we will refer to it in the text—some popular or collective will that serves as the basis for legitimacy. Similarly, we do not take up the question of whether or not Rousseau advocated deliberation. For conflicting views, see
37. Bernard Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 338-68; and
38. Joshua Cohen, “Reflections on Rousseau,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15(1986): 275-97. As we suggest below, however, advocates of deliberation tend to be equivocal, at best, about the source of democratic legitimacy. Second, there is an ambiguity in Riker's objection to populism. He at times complains that populism is politically suspect because it relies on a notion of the general or popular will that “reinforces the normal arrogance of rulers with a built in justification for tyranny.” But his argument does not depend on such contingent claims. In fact, the results he reports sustain a more modest but still very troubling position. “Populism fails” in this latter sense “not because it is morally wrong, but merely because it is empty.”
39. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 249, 239.
40. Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice”; and
41. Cohen, “An Epistemic Conception.” It is not entirely clear whether these authors actually endorse epistemic populism or whether they simply elaborate it in the effort to demonstrate that Riker's position is not so robust as he claims.
42. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 188-92, admits as much. For very brief and more extended nontechnical surveys of this work, see
43. Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 23-24, and
44. Strom, The Logic of Lawmaking, respectively.
45. Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 25; and
46. Cohen, “An Epistemic Conception,” 31.
47. “Consider the problem of aggregation in another context. In American football, teams are awarded six points for a touchdown, three for a field goal, one for an extra point, and two for a safety. The outcomes of football games depend on these assignments of points for events. A different assignment of points for events, or a different way of aggregating them, might well lead to different outcomes: Some wins would be losses and vice versa. Different scoring rules would, of course, lead to changes in strategy, but changes in aggregation procedures, if known, would also affect voting strategies. Even though we could score football games differently— according to different rules—it does not follow that the outcomes of football games are ambiguous or that the score does not reveal what occurred in the game. Just showing that different outcomes result from applying different procedures, all of which are minimally fair or plausible on other grounds, is not enough to establish a troubling result for democracy.” Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 13, 23.
48. “Democracy and Social Choice,”., 19.
49. “Democracy and Social Choice,”., 15-19; and
50. Cohen, “An Epistemic Conception of Democracy,” 29-31.
51. This is especially important. As Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 188, for example, readily concedes, we do not empirically encounter the sort of widespread democratic instability that social choice theory predicts. This suggests, not surprisingly, that “there must be more to the world” than social choice theorists capture in their austere models. We aigue elsewhere that much stability derives from institutional and cultural constraints on social and political interaction. But such constraints have differential effects and are most appropriately analyzed in terms of distributional consequences rather than efficiency outcomes. See Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and
52. James Johnson, “Symbol and Strategy: On the Cultural Analysis of Politics” (Ph. D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991). This, therefore, raises in stark form the need to develop normative justifications for social or political arrangements. Put another way, social choice theory constructs a counterfactual world in which cycling is rampant. It prompts us to both inquire into why we do not encounter this instability in our world and to ask whether and how the mechanisms that prevent it in our world might be defended.
53. Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 25.
54. We view this effort as strained for two reasons. First, the relation between democratic outcomes and the general will becomes suspiciously tenuous—the correspondence is at best indirect, imperfect, and limited. Second, there is, as Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 16-17, suggest, a real problem in ascertaining the reliability of the evidence that democratic procedures provide. The essential question is how the epistemic populist might discriminate better or worse evidence of the general will.
55. See Barber, Strong Democracy, 135, 151; and
56. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1555.
57. See, for example, Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, 31-33;
58. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1550, 1554-55; and
59. Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity, edited by A. Hamlin and R Pettit (New York: Blackwell, 1989),
60. For more recent qualms on this point, see Jane Mansbridge, “A Deliberative Theory of Interest Representation,” in The Politics of Interests, edited by Mark Petracca (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992), 36.
61. Mansbridge, “A Deliberative Theory,” 36. See also
62. Barber, Strong Democracy, 136;
63. Manin, “On Legitimacy,” 352;
64. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1545;
65. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Deliberation,” 23, 24, 25-26, 29;
66. Offe and Preuss, “Democratic Institutions,” 167f.; and
67. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 36.
68. For a range of positions on this issue, see Robert Goodin, “Laundering Preferences” in Foundations of Social Choice Theory, edited by Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
69. Cass Sunstein, “Preferences and Politics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991): 3-34; and the subsequent comment by
70. John Ferejohn, “Must Preferences Be Respected in a Democracy?” in The Idea of Democracy, edited by David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30.
71. On neither count is it sufficient, for example, simply to reject “liberal” politics because it is conducted in the medium of “noise: Animal expletives meant to signify bargaining positions in a world of base competition.” Barber, Strong Democracy, 174, 154. Conflicts of interest and the divergent preferences to which they give rise cannot be wished away quite so easily. For kindred, if less colorful, criticisms of nondeliberative democracy, see Mansbridge on “adversary democracy” or Sunstein on “pluralist” politics.
72. This might involve either eliminating possible sources of disagreement—we might discover that we agree—or it might simply mean separating dimensions. Stephen Holmes, “Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission,” in Constitutionalism and Democracy, edited by Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), identifies in a pointed way the need to justify any such process for altering the political agenda.
73. Single-peakedness can be understood as follows: On a vertical axis, represent an individual's ordinal ordering over a set of alternatives arrayed along a horizontal axis. If, as her preference curve moves away from the origin, it rises continuously, falls continuously, or rises to a unique point or plateau and then falls continuously, her preferences are single-peaked. For a discussion, see Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 124-28.
74. Liberalism Against Populism., 126.
75. Liberalism Against Populism., 128. This seems to be what
76. Mansbridge, “A Deliberative Theory,” 36, has in mind when she claims that “deliberation can and should lead those affected by a decision to recognize and understand the character of their conflicts.” For an apparently similar view, see
77. Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference,” in Feminism and Political Theory, edited by Cass Sunstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 131.
78. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 122, 128, concedes that deliberation might have this effect.
79. Daniel Farber and Philip Frickey, Law and Public Choice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 55-56, 45-46, and
80. David Miller, “Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice” (Manuscript, Nuffield College, Oxford, 1991), 12-14, also make this point in passing.
81. See Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 23;
82. Manin, “On Legitimacy”; and
83. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy.
84. Coleman and Ferejohn, “Democracy and Social Choice,” 17.
85. Barber, Strong Democracy, 136-37, 200. He is representative but not alone.
86. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1546, for instance, offers an even more elusive expression of this equivocation. He begins by criticizing “pluralist” views of democracy because, among other things, the notion of a “ public will … is an incoherent one within pluralist theory.” But he then warns in a footnote that “one should not, however, overstate this conclusion by denying that there is a connection between democratic outcomes and the public will.” Sunstein seems to be defending the public will as a criterion for democratic legitimacy. But it is difficult to tell, and he never addresses the issue in explicit terms. Thus, however equivocally, advocates of deliberation seem to occupy what Barber calls the tradition of Kant and Rousseau.
87. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 53-55.
88. On this crucial point, see esp. Manin, “On Legitimacy,” 352; and
89. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 22, 21.
90. See Mansbridge, “Hard Decisions.” On the suppressed deliberative aspects of extant institutions, see Manin on political parties, Mansbridge on interest groups, and Sunstein on the courts.
91. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, ix.
92. See Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1549;
93. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 22, 26; and
94. Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 108-109.
95. See Barber, Strong Democracy, 180-81;
96. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy”; and
97. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 108-14. On the implications of this point, see
98. Jack Knight and James Johnson, “Pragmatism, Realism and the Politics of Legal Theory” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science, 1992).
99. Barber, Strong Democracy, 174.
100. Manin, “On Legitimacy,” 352-53; and
101. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 22. In the first instance this will require that parties to deliberation define what is at stake in a given conflict by, for example, tracing the contours of and negotiating the connections between public and private concerns. See
102. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems;
103. Barber, Strong Democracy, 123-24;
104. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 128-32; and
105. Hanna Pitkin and Sara Shumer, “On Participation,” Democracy, no. 2 (1982): 43-54, 46.
106. The point here is not simply that asymmetries are bracketed or set aside but, rather, that under ideal conditions reasoned deliberation could call existing asymmetries into question. On this point, see Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 23;
107. Young, “Polity and Group Difference,” 129, and
108. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 118-21. This, in turn, makes it especially pressing to specify the criteria for “reasonableness.” It is not entirely clear how, for instance, the task of calling extant asymmetries into question can be made to conform to the criteria that
109. Rawls, “The Domain of the Political,” 238-39, 49, suggests should govern “reasonable discussion.”
110. Barber, Strong Democracy, 198, 182-86.
111. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy;
112. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism; and
113. Manin, “On Legitimacy.”
114. Barber, Strong Democracy; and
115. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival.”
116. Manin, “On Legitimacy”; and
117. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 23.
118. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1562, 1575; and
119. Barber, Strong Democracy, 119, 128-29, 135.
120. We are indebted to Russell Hardin for this formulation. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, 128, makes the point somewhat more colorfully. The fact that the relevant constituency shares an understanding of what is at stake in a political conflict, he suggests, “will not prevent civil war, but it will at least ensure that the civil war makes sense.”
121. Rawls, “The Domain of the Political,” 235.
122. Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick, Power and Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 16, 115-17.
123. Lani Guinier, “Comment: Voting Rights and Democratic Theory,” in Controversies in Minority Voting, edited by Bernard Grofman and Chandler Davidson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1992), 288-92, for instance, argues persuasively that in “a deliberative, collective decision-making body” protection of minority interests requires that minority representatives not only be present but that institutional arrangements insure that the process is responsive to their views. She then suggests that this requires that minority representatives occupy crucial strategic locations in the assembly, making it impossible for majorities not to solicit and accommodate their views. Young, “Polity and Group Difference,” seems to be committed to something like this as well. But clearly such institutional arrangements must be justified by something other than the strategic advantage they confer on minority representatives.
124. On this point more generally, see Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict.
125. Thomas Nagel, “What Makes a Political Theory Utopian?” Social Research 56 (1989): 903-20. It is important to see that there is a real tension here. “An ideal, however attractive it may be to contemplate, is utopian if real individuals cannot be motivated to live by it. But a political system that is completely tied down to individual motives may fail to embody any ideal at all.”
126. Nagel, “What Makes a Political Theory Utopian?” 904. We focus on the first side of this tension because we suspect that deliberative theorists are especially prone to err on the side of utopianism rather than in the direction of resignation.
127. Barber, Strong Democracy, 135; and
128. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 21.
129. On this view, deliberation is central to the broader “transformational” or “educative” function that advocates attribute to democratic participation. See Carole Pätemän, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 42; and
130. Bachrach and Botwinick, Power and Empowerment, 29. It can change not only preferences but “may even involve changing character.”
131. Mansbridge, “A Deliberative Theory,” 36. See also
132. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 19. For a recent analysis of this thesis, see
133. Mark Warren, “Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992): 8-23. For a healthy skepticism that we share, see
134. David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 280-81. Our skepticism increases once we recognize that there is no necessary connection between deliberation and “face to face” direct or participatory democracy. See
135. Habermas, Communication, 186; and
136. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 30. It may be plausible to see the courts, for example, as engaged in “a continuing colloquy with the political institutions and with society at large.”
137. Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 240. Dissenting opinions might be interpreted as one embodiment of this tacit deliberative process. This raises a related point. We disagree with those who, like
138. Benjamin Radcliff, “Majority Rule and Impossibility Theorems,” Social Science Quarterly 73 (1992): 511-22, claim that democratic arrangements can be justified because they promote personal growth, character transformation, and so on regardless of whether they generate stable outcomes. As
139. Mill, “On Representative Government,” 226-30, points out, the “machinery” of government can contribute to the moral and intellectual improvement of citizens only if it is efficient or effectual in doing its more “direct work.” And nothing will more quickly undermine the moral and intellectual qualities of the citizenry than if the machinery functions poorly in instrumental terms. Thus arguments that justify democracy solely in terms of “by-products” are simply not cogent. See
140. Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum,” in Foundations of Social Choice Theory, edited by Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a contrary view, see
141. Joseph Chan and David Miller, “Elster on Self-Realization in Politics,” Ethics 102 (1991): 96-102.
142. Sunstein, “Beyond the Republican Revival,” 1545n; and
143. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 24.
144. There are at least two plausible directions in which to search for an answer here. There may be psychological pressures against consistently engaging in such behavior. And there may be, pace Habermas, conceptual pressures built into the structure of language that induce pragmatic contradiction among those who seek consistently to defend narrowly self-interested policies. Elster, “The Market and the Forum,” 986, 112-13. For an argument that the latter possibility is not so far-fetched as skeptics might think, see
145. James Johnson, “Is Talk Really Cheap?” American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 74-86.
146. Young, “Polity and Group Difference”;
147. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); and
148. Anne Phillips, “Democracy and Difference,” Political Quarterly 63 (1992): 79-90.
149. Barber, Strong Democracy, 182. Jack Knight teaches social and political theory at Washington University in St Louis. He is author of
150. Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1992). James Johnson teaches social and political theory at the Univeristy of Rochester. His articles have appeared in Political Theory and the American Political Science Review.