Privacy and Democracy

What the Secret Ballot Reveals

Bibliographic Data

ID12885703
AuthorsAnnabelle Lever (0000-0002-3756-1835, University of Geneva, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume11
Issue2
Pages164-183
Publication date2012-10-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw Culture and the Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1743-8721 • E-ISSN: 1743-9752
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1743872112458745
OpenAlexW2123886559
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Does the rejection of pure proceduralism show that we should adopt Brettschneider’s value theory of democracy? The answer, this article suggests, is “no.” There are a potentially infinite number of incompatible ways to understand democracy, of which the value theory is, at best, only one. The article illustrates and substantiates its claims by looking at what the secret ballot shows us about the importance of privacy and democracy. Drawing on the reasons to reject Mill’s arguments for open voting, in a previous article by A. Lever, it argues that people’s claims to privacy have a constitutive, as well as an instrumental, importance to democratic government, which is best seen by attending to democracy as a practice, and not merely as a distinctive set of values

Ballot · Democracy · Democratic Theory · Direct democracy · Government (linguistics · Internet privacy · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Representative democracy · Secret ballot · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Voting · Computer Science · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theory and Influence · Public Administration

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