Democracy Requires Organized Collective Power

Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely.11 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper, 2006), p. 198. Alexis de Tocqueville To turn from mechanisms and concepts to the social forces in play ...22 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 206. Karl Polanyi What is the value and function of democratic institutions? One prominent answer could be broadly called "liberal proceduralist": democratic institutions, by embodying fair procedures for resolving disagreements, contribute to a politically valuable ideal of relating to each other as equals.33 Representative defenses of this view include Elizabeth S. Anderson, "What is the point of equality?", Ethics, 109 (1999), 287–337; Charles R. Beitz, Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Harry Brighouse, "Egalitarianism and equal availability of political influence," Journal of Political Philosophy, 4 (1996), 118–41; Allen Buchanan, "Political legitimacy and democracy," Ethics, 112 (2002), 689–719; Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Christopher G. Griffin, "Democracy as a non-instrumentally just procedure," Journal of Political Philosophy, 11 (2003), 111–21; Niko Kolodny, "Rule over none, I: what justifies democracy?", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 42 (2014), 195–229; Niko Kolodny, "Rule over none, II: social equality and the justification of democracy," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 42 (2014), 287–336; Daniel Viehoff, "Democratic equality and political authority," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 42 (2014), 337–75; Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Lindley Wilson, Democratic Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). As attractive as it is, this view falters, because it rests on a flawed understanding of democratic institutions. In place of the liberal proceduralist view of democratic institutions, I develop a democratic power approach. The democratic power approach advances a dynamic account of democratic institutions, one that focuses on how procedures and outcomes, taken together as having effects on the organization of power in society, sustain valuable relationships of equality. Like liberal proceduralism, the democratic power approach affirms that the value of democratic institutions resides in how they help sustain relationships of equality. However, according to the democratic power approach, that equality cannot be realized primarily by the internal, formal structure of democratic institutions or by ensuring equal effective power within a decision-making procedure. Instead, the democratic power approach treats such institutions as simultaneous formal procedures and substantive mechanisms for organizing different actors, interests, and groups in society. I contend that by appreciating the distinction between democratic institutions seen as formal procedures versus substantive mechanisms, we can challenge the binary that has dominated recent debates about the value of democratic institutions—that is, the debate surrounding whether to emphasize democratic institutions either as fair procedures or as producing reliable outcomes. This either/or obscures the fact that democratic institutions instantiate (virtuous or vicious) recursive feedback loops between formal rules and the broader balance of social forces. Consequently, the binary between procedure and outcome fails to capture what democratic actors should care about: the integrity of political equality over time, an integrity that is, under realistic conditions, sustained only by virtuous feedback loops between institutional procedures and the ongoing organization of the generally disorganized majority of a society's members. From this perspective, an institutional order is democratic insofar as it satisfies minimal criteria of inclusion and equal consideration while also organizing popular constituencies such that its institutional order has endogenous tendencies towards equalizing political power. Even granting, as the following does, that democratic institutions are intrinsically valuable because of how they help realize the value of political equality, the question remains of how those institutions realize the value. Liberal proceduralists argue that democratic institutions realize the value of equality through fair procedures. But this misapprehends the nature of such institutions. Democratic institutions are both formal procedures and mechanisms for organizing collective power. Further, while at times these two functions of democratic institutions will align, in many cases achieving the organization of collective power will require relaxing the principle of procedural fairness. Evaluating the relationship between democratic institutions and political equality thus requires intersecting normative and empirical analysis of the dynamic relationship between the structure of procedures and the context in which those procedures operate. To advance the democratic power view, I first identify why even those liberal proceduralists concerned with substantive fairness nevertheless fail to adequately address how such fairness is instantiated. I argue that the impoverished liberal conception of power neglects the need for the organized collective power that democratic institutions require. I then turn to the architecture of the democratic power approach itself, which depends on an alternative view (1) of the people, the agents of democracy, and, (2), of the state, the medium through which the people act, as infrastructures of power. The democratic power approach begins from the sociological generalization that political majorities, as larger groups, face collective action problems and so are less organized than smaller and more cohesive powerful minorities. Given those background conditions, democratic institutions both constitute fair decision-making procedures and organize the naturally disorganized citizenry, enabling them against powerful individuals and more cohesive and powerful social groups.44 My argument builds on recent work emphasizing the pro-wealthy bias of current political institutions and the contemporary threat of oligarchic elites; Gordon Arlen, "Aristotle and the problem of oligarchic harm: insights for democracy," European Journal of Political Theory, 18 (2019), 393–414; Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebian Theory of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Organized collective power enables the people to act on and through the state, even as particular powerful actors threatened by democracy will use state institutions to seek to assert their interests and disorganize the people. The model is recursive in that democratic institutions help organize virtuous or vicious feedback loops among organized collective power, the people, and the state. My argument provides a framework for evaluating and comparing competing institutional designs for democratic procedures. Such evaluations require comparative analyses of how different democratic institutions facilitate or thwart the organization of popular power. To illustrate this, I show that the democratic power approach can better justify the importance of majoritarianism for democracy. Put most bluntly, democracy may be a more partisan ideal—associated with certain political actors and underlying interests, those of the majority as opposed to the relatively powerful and wealthy—than liberal proceduralists acknowledge. My argument also suggests a different method by which democratic theory can be realistic. The following contends that a theory of democracy is realistic if it encompasses both the normative principles that animate democracy and the structure of the political avenues, coalitions, and equilibriums that could sustain the institutional realization of those principles in large-scale, modern societies.55 This contrasts with "realist" theories of democracy that begin from more minimal normative principles, such as legitimacy, or focus on democracy as elite competition. For accounts of democracy that begin from the problem of legitimacy under conditions of deep moral disagreement, see Richard Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defense of the Constitutionality of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Laura Valentini, "Justice, disagreement and democracy," British Journal of Political Science, 43 (2013), 177–99; for recent critiques of citizen competence and fruitful rejoinders, see Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Samuel Bagg, "The power of the multitude: answering epistemic challenges to democracy," American Political Science Review, 112 (2018), 891–904; Lachlan Montgomery Umbers, "Democratic legitimacy and the competence objection," Res Publica, 25 (2019), 283–93. For a critique of elitist realism that focuses on the value of popular mobilization for democracy, see John Medearis, Democracy Is Oppositional (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). I depart from Medearis in emphasizing the positive role democratic institutions play in facilitating the organization of collective power that is the precondition for oppositional mobilization. Are democratic institutions valuable because of the structure of their internal procedures or because they tend, over time, to produce outcomes that maximize normative values?66 By democratic institutions, liberal proceduralists mean, most characteristically, electoral and voting procedures that lead to a collective choice. Many also focus on the inclusive and egalitarian quality of the deliberative and agenda-setting aspect of those institutions. The democratic power approach shares this focus, while also being more open to alternative institutions, such as differential voting rights, group-based representation, and sortition, if they can be shown to enhance the organization of collective power. Liberal proceduralism, as I understand it, is the family of views that defend the first answer: democratic institutions are intrinsically valuable because of how they constitute or contribute to certain valuable relationships or embody a principle, such as equality, that can only be realized relationally. While they variously refine the idea, liberal proceduralists generally agree "that a fair procedure has value that derives from the contribution that the outcome-independent qualities of the procedure make to certain other things that are of value: for instance, treating our fellow citizens with respect, as equals, and so on."77 Daniel Viehoff, "The truth in political instrumentalism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 117 (2017), 273–95, at p. 277. Defenses of the intrinsic value of democratic institutions position themselves against instrumentalist views, according to which democratic institutions, as the distribution of rights to coercion, are justified only insofar as they reliably produce outcomes that accord with some normative standard.88 See, for example, Richard J. Arneson, "Democracy is not intrinsically just," Keith Dowding, Robert E. Goodin, and Carole Pateman (eds), Justice and Democracy: Essays for Brian Barry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 40–58; Viehoff, "The truth in political instrumentalism"; Steven Wall, "Democracy and equality," Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (2007), 416–38. Liberal proceduralists contend that such instrumental justifications of democracy miss part of the essential meaning of democracy: organizing decision-making in a way that is fair to everyone is a way of providing equal respect to the members of a democratic society. And it is this realization of a principle through an institutional procedure that explains the obligation to obey the discrete decisions of such institutions, even if we may disagree with the decision vis-à-vis some substantive normative standard. While the debate between intrinsic and instrumental views of democracy focuses on the justification of democracy, it also entails a theory of how to apply whatever value justifies democracy to political institutions. Implicit in such a theory is a view of what political institutions are, how they function, the relationship between formal rules and their actual operation, and, finally, how they relate to or realize different normative values. That is, a theory of what justifies democracy also contains an implicit account of the characteristic features of the institutions that realize those principles. Democratic theories provide stylized descriptions of the facts of political life to show how normative values relate to different institutional options. These competing stylizations have implications for ranking features of institutions and so evaluating democratic institutions. In particular, both the intrinsic and the instrumentalist views of democracy concur that the internal procedure of a democratic institution can be evaluated separately from the outcomes of the institution. We should note that, to varying degrees, liberal proceduralists are attuned to how different forms of social or economic inequality could undermine the fairness of democratic procedures. They worry about the gap between the formal promise of a democratic institution and their actual fairness, with whether such institutions do genuinely guarantee equal opportunities to influence or roughly equal power over the outcome of a collective decision.99 Elena Ziliotti provides a useful distinction between political egalitarian and relational egalitarian defenses of the intrinsic value of democracy. Political egalitarians, like Christiano, argue that fair procedures directly realize equality. Relational egalitarians see democratic institutions as a necessary constituent of, but not reducible to, equality. Similarly, contractualists, like Beitz, admit that both procedure and outcome have a constituent role in realizing political equality. The political egalitarian view would have a harder time accommodating my argument, as deviations from procedural fairness would undermine the public recognition of equality. Relational egalitarians and contractualists, on the other hand, could be more open to such deviations under non-ideal conditions. Kolodny, for example, argues his position could be open to deviations from procedural fairness under non-ideal conditions. But this creates a tension within the relational egalitarian framework. If what explains obligation is that fair procedures realize relational equality, then departures from procedural fairness would seem to undermine the legitimacy of the legal order for those who are burdened by those deviations. See Kolodny, "Rule over none, II," p. 309; Elena Ziliotti, "Democracy's value: a conceptual map," Journal of Value Inquiry, 54 (2019), 407–27. I do not assume that liberal proceduralists take formal procedures at face value. My concern is that they tend to take such potential threats to the fairness of a procedure as ex ante inequalities that are exogenous to the procedure itself, undermining individual-level genuine influence or power within that procedure. As a result, liberal proceduralists are limited to two primary responses to such threats to procedural fairness: to insulate the procedure from such inequalities or to provide ceteris paribus arguments whereby we could only identify a procedure as fair under conditions of social and economic equality. In each case, they maintain the distinction between procedure and outcome. What the democratic power approach adds is a theory of the dynamic interaction between democratic institutions and the organizational structure of the actors that seek to sustain or undermine existing distributional patterns in society. The very idea of relational equality should lead theorists to question the distinction between procedure and outcome as a description of democratic institutions. If we are after the constitution of broad relationships of equality throughout society, then we must inquire into the effects of both procedures and outcomes on the organization of different social groups and collective activities. The question is whether procedures and outcomes together, over time, produce and preserve broad social relations of equality. The following argument focuses then, not just on what justifies democracy, but also on how democratic institutions realize the value that is taken to justify them. My core claim is that liberal proceduralist views fail to apprehend the conditions under which democratic institutions can realize valuable political goods. The democratic power approach shares the core intuition that there is something intrinsically valuable about the relationships democratic institutions can help constitute and sustain. But it provides a different account of how democratic institutions can realize such value; and so rejects the underlying theory of institutions on which the liberal proceduralist view rests—a theory that separates procedure and outcome. From my perspective, democratic institutions are mechanisms that function through recursive feedback loops between procedures and outcomes. Insofar as the operation of procedures depends on the background organization of social actors and how they relate to the procedure, the general outcomes of the procedure will alter the potential fairness or integrity of the procedure itself. But to bring this insight into democratic theory, we must begin, not from an ideal of procedural fairness, but from a theory of collective power whereby such power gets actualized through procedures that organize the generally more disorganized majority. This view of collective power and democratic institutions points to a revised concept of the people and the state, articulating how both relate to the constitution of political equality over time. Democratic institutions are always more than procedures. Like all political institutions, they are both procedures and mechanisms. As procedures, democratic institutions consist of explicit rules that distribute decision-making authority within the institution—how inputs get translated into outputs—as well as rules that determine who has standing in the decision-making process and so are the relevant actors—where the relevant inputs come from. But as mechanisms, political institutions are also nodal points in the broader organization of power in society, shaping the identities, interests, and organizational capacities of the actors who form the "inputs" into their formal procedures. This section develops, first, an account of political institutions as social mechanisms and, second, the conceptions of power and organization that inform the democratic power approach. Liberal proceduralists are concerned with how informal inequalities of power or influence could undermine the promise of procedures. What they miss is the collective dimension of political power—the "power-with" that emerges through ongoing cooperative practices. But to capture this aspect of power requires a more sociological approach to democratic institutions, one that relates formal procedures to the formation of organized collectivities, ranging from relatively formalized organizations like labor unions and political parties to more diffuse actors such as the people. Political institutions are social mechanisms as well as procedures. As I understand it, an institution is a social mechanism insofar as it structures patterns of activity both within and outside of that institution in a relatively stable and predictable manner. If we want to know what sort of relationships a political institution realizes, we need to examine more than the fairness of its procedures or how those formal procedures interact with individual-level inequalities of wealth or influence. We also need to inquire into how it functions as a social mechanism to organize cooperative activity—what I am calling organized collective power. Only then can we determine whether the procedures constitute the sort of relationship in question. As mechanisms, democratic institutions coordinate diverse actors into more organized groups who will then act through formal procedures. In empirical political science, scholars point to how "policy makes politics"—institutional procedures have broader effects on society, creating new political constituencies who will then either sustain or seek to challenge different political procedures, or find ways to alter their practical functioning.1010 Andrea Louise Campbell, "Policy makes mass politics," Annual Review of Political Science, 15 (2012), 333–51. These effects of democratic institutions are not outcomes, discrete from procedures. Instead, the effects of institutions, in redefining the collective actors that interact with a procedure, affect the ongoing functioning of the procedure itself. The language of mechanisms is helpful because it reminds us that certain features of institutions will have relatively consistent effects even in otherwise different contexts, even as we must examine more than their formal rules to determine those effects. When examining a democratic institution as a mechanism, we have to inquire into its structuring effects on the organization of different actors in society. These effects are distinct from both the internal procedures of those institutions and the immediate outcomes of those procedures. Rather, the effects of democratic institutions as mechanisms only become clear in the context of recursive feedback loops between procedures, outcomes, and the interests and identities of different social actors. As mechanisms, democratic institutions organize and constitute collective actors that can then work through them—ranging from different groups and constituencies through to the people as a whole. But those actors then exert influence on those same institutions. Democratic institutions constitute political agents like the people insofar as those institutions function as mechanisms that rearrange power in the broader social world, enabling the political activity of different collective actors. But this entails a view of power that extends beyond individual-level influence or rights within decision-making procedures—the sort of power on which liberal proceduralists focus. As mechanisms, democratic institutions affect the organization of power in society. But how should we understand this sort of power? In this section, I argue that the power in question here is the power that arises from organization and cooperation, and not the coercively backed power of the law, the equal control of which is the focus of liberal proceduralists. Scholars of power often distinguish between "power-over," in which power indicates the capacity to cause another agent to do something they would not otherwise do, and "power-with," where power to a more general capacity to realize through with For the distinction between and see "The of social and Political and concept of trans. Thomas Liberal proceduralists focus on at the of In this is an "power-over," insofar as it the potential for coercion, particular For liberal democratic institutions realize equality insofar as they guarantee something like equal power over the rules that from collective disagreement then from how or broadly to such it to for inequalities in as whether we should focus on equality of actual or of opportunities for or of the of being the influence. if the justification of such even if in in how democratic institutions sustain relations of social equality, and if we are examining such institutions under but the most conditions, then democratic theorists need to their to also examine power as democratic procedures will the organization of such so which social actors and social have their and organizational capacity and which find their as I understand it, requires organized collective arises through the of of action and the point "What people together after the of action has we and at the same time, they through together is The University of Press, p. we can collective power as a where an has the to affect an outcome if and only if some other without that other being by the power of the first For more of the sort of power that arises from social cooperation, see "The of social a theory of social Philosophical my not make or a necessary precondition for collective power, in the context of democracy, organized collective power with will be more To take a example, we see that our power, in the of our capacity to realize certain is through organized patterns and structures such as But while collective power from the of democratic institutions we will be in the of social power that organization with For the and aspect of power, see Journal of Political Philosophy, effective insofar as there are organized opportunities for collective action that people to their capacities in an organized and The to "power-with" entails a in how democratic theorists about equalizing power. The liberal proceduralist view of fair institutions that such institutions distribute at an that is, they provide equal influence over decisions as the equal of each to influence that decision of the voting decisions of The liberal proceduralist view can turn power into an of fair distribution only insofar as it that power is as control over the outcome of an institutional procedure, where control over that outcome is not on the or of See, of equal influence as a of being over the a where has the same of being the the that of by is more than other Kolodny, "Rule over none, II," pp. in This of power to is with the idea that what we are equalizing is not just formal procedural equality, but a more substantive equality on effective political power, the role of and so The point remains that the is equal effective power the or of In collective power cannot be at the because it an ongoing cooperative even as we may that an power is by In this respect, organized collective power is also distinct from the concept of influence. some liberal proceduralists have we should focus not on formal procedural fairness, but on genuine equal influence or equal opportunities for where influence things like But one can influence without A may be able to influence a and so power over as the of the to do what the This is different from within the context of an ongoing cooperative where the of that cooperative activity then the of In that power as influence has but the of the in social power is the cooperative See Brighouse, "Egalitarianism and equal availability of political The Theory and of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Organized political power not have to the distribution of control

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