Du Bois’s Defense of Democracy

This chapter reconstructs W. E. B. Du Bois’s defense of democracy in “Of the Ruling of Men,” a chapter in his neglected work Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Du Bois’s examination of why blacks and other citizens were denied the right to vote, how this contributes to democratic failure, and how this can be averted provides useful insight as we look for ways to address the current crisis of democratic rule in America and around the world. Du Bois proposes that the way to avert democratic failure is to guarantee civil and political rights, social equality, and economic justice for every citizen.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume and its theme of democratic failure. It highlights the problems of democratic legitimacy, representation, and economic, epistemic, and racial inequality that place democracy at risk. It explains the tripartite structure and summarizes the main arguments of each chapter, drawing connections across the various chapters.

Failing Democracy

This chapter explores a set of modalities of democratic failure in response to Aziz Huq’s analysis of failure. Not all of the disappointments produced by democratic decision-making should be construed as failures, and we should distinguish between “intransitive” and “transitive” failing, i.e., between “failed democracy” and a community’s “failing democracy.” Although democratic institutions and constitutional practices may be deformed, democratic failure may also derive from participants’ unwillingness to hold other agents accountable for defying democratic norms and values.

Why No Good, Very Bad, Elitist Democracy Is an Achievement, Not a Failure

Is a flawed democracy a failure or an achievement? In this chapter, I claim it is often an achievement—just as an NBA basketball season in which a team loses just ten games is a great accomplishment. My case has three elements. First, I show that we have good reason to treat the nonfulfillment of a demanding ideal as an achievement when the sources of nonfulfillment make even worse outcomes probable. This is the case for democracy (as it is for basketball). Second, I argue that the most important sources of democratic failure blight democracies and autocracies alike. By implication, the mere fact that a democracy suffers from those flaws provides no reason to prefer the alternative. Third, and finally, I show that we can develop a persuasive account of democracy’s value that does not ignore the deep flaws afflicting democracies. I claim that imperfect, inegalitarian, Schumpeterian democracies are respectful of citizens’ agency in ways that polities like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela are not. Democratic regimes fail to meet our ideals. We should be cognizant of those limitations. But those failures give us little reason to pursue alternative forms of government.

Democratic Theory and Democratic Failure

Democracies inevitably fail by not living up to their ideals (failure writ small). They may also fail in the more dramatic sense by eroding or collapsing into a non-democratic regime (failure writ large). The task of democratic theory is to establish baselines—ceilings and floors—by which such failures can be identified, conceptualized, and judged. The task of the democratic theorist is thus twofold: to articulate the ideals and principles of democracy while simultaneously considering its failures writ small and large. This dual task, I claim, is aided by the adoption of a contextual approach. A contextual approach views democratic principles as being located within particular configurations of power, institutions, actors, and incentive structures. A contextual approach takes account of the fact that the practice of democracy is highly complex, diverse, and dynamic. When applied to particular circumstances, democratic ideals are contingent and are often in tension with one another. A contextual approach to the dual task of democratic theory is attentive to both the promise and the perils of democracy.

Democratic Failure

Today we confront the prospect that some of the world’s oldest and most durable democracies may be backsliding, at risk of failure. But how should we conceptualize and measure democratic failure, given the imperfect nature of all existing political regimes? How should we identify those institutions that might be most vulnerable? Democratic Failure draws together leading scholars from philosophy, political science, and law to clarify the key challenges facing democracies, past and present, and to locate the intellectual resources available to actors and institutions under threat. It analyzes pressing problems of legitimacy and political representation, and inequality within democracies, addressing the rise of populism and the future of democratic citizenship. While timely, this latest addition to the NOMOS series demonstrates that democratic erosion constitutes a perennial concern.

Revisiting Shugart and Carey’s Relation of Executive Powers and Democratic Breakdown

This work reassesses the central thesis of Shugart and Carey’s Presidents and Assemblies, that weak presidencies make stronger, more lasting democracies. We argue that a thorough review of the literature that has evaluated this thesis thus far reveals a persistent methodological flaw that has hindered an adequate conclusion on its accuracy. While many scholars have revisited the role of presidential systems in democratic failure, comparative analyses of presidential systems have relied on additive, rather than combinatorial, measures of presidential power. We demonstrate why this produces misleading inferences about presidential power, and offer a novel methodology for its assessment. Following an investigation and replication of Shugart and Carey’s original work that incorporates the progress of the cases they studied since 1992, we test our new method on their hypothesis, and find little support for their argument. However, our combinatorial approach invites future researchers to make their own theoretically informed arguments about the relative weight of different presidential powers within a methodological framework that avoids the errors of previous work on the topic.