Democratic Representatives As Epistemic Intermediaries

This chapter develops a model of democratic representation from the standpoint of epistemic theories of democracy. Such theories justify democracy in terms of its tendency to yield decisions that “track the truth” by integrating asymmetrically dispersed knowledge. From an epistemic point of view, I suggest, democratic representatives are best modeled as epistemic intermediaries who facilitate the vertical integration of knowledge between policy experts and non-experts, and the horizontal integration of knowledge among diverse non-experts. The primary analytical payoff of this model is that it provides a clear rationale for variation in the norms and institutionalization of representative behavior. Sometimes a delegate-like approach is the right one, and sometimes a trustee-like approach is better. The key determinant is the effect of these models on the epistemic quality of outcomes under different circumstances. Toward the end of the chapter, the model is applied to the present revival of populism and considers its implications in that context.

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.

Political Parties and Public Policy

Failures of representation and democracy cannot be solved by weakening parties. Rather, democratic success requires political competition among strong parties that can identify and defend the broad interests of the community as a whole. The fragmentation of political parties reduces spending on public goods, and weakening party discipline diminishes political accountability.

Democracy As Failure

The theory and the practice of democracy alike are entangled with the prospect of failure. This is so in the sense that a failure of some kind is almost always to be found at democracy’s inception. Different kinds of shortfalls also dog its implementation. No escape is found in theory, which precipitates internal contradictions that can only be resolved by compromising important democratic values. The nexus of democracy and failure elucidates the difficulty of dichotomizing democracies into the healthy and the ailing. It illuminates the sound design of democratic institutions by gesturing toward resources usefully deployed to mitigate the costs of inevitable failure. Finally, it casts light on the public psychology best adapted to persisting democracy. To grasp the proximity of democracy’s entanglements with failure is thus to temper the aspiration for popular self-government as a steady-state equilibrium, to open new questions about the appropriate political psychology for a sound democracy, and to limn new questions about democracy’s optimal institutional specification.

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.

Representation Failure

Democracy has failure built into its DNA. The ideals of which it is composed are almost all aspirational, meaning that they cannot be met fully, partly because their full pursuit would conflict with other ideals in the package we mean when we ask what ought to be entailed when the people rule. The obligation involved in pursuing these ideals is therefore not to meet them, but to strive toward them, recognizing the impossibility of their full attainment and making the best accommodations one can to the conflicts with other ideals that arise in the process of that striving. In this process, pursuing the most direct path to the ideal may allow one to capture less of what is important about its meaning than letting the ideal inform democratic practices indirectly. Representation, for example, is on its face antithetical to the democratic ideal of giving a law to oneself. Yet without adopting direct democracy it is possible to capture the shards, threads, and intimations of the ideal of autonomy in certain practices of representation in the elected, administrative, and societal realms. Those practices include “recursive representation,” or mutually responsive, communication between constituent and representative, itself an aspirational ideal.

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 Remedies If Ignorance Threatens Democracy

Darby correctly argues that ordinary people often have more or better knowledge about some political matters than do elites, and that deficiencies in their knowledge can be addressed by creating conditions, typically material, that would provide them with opportunities to gain relevant knowledge. This constitutes an important locus for democratic experimentalism, yielding a democratic form of epistocracy. Any residual gaps in knowledge could then be treated as rational ignorance, a willingness to delegate—though not irrevocably— decisions to those who have greater knowledge.