Democracy Disfigured

Nadia Urbinati

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674727601
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Demokratie

In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy.Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from the governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions.Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the people, " and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.

1

Democracy’s Diarchy

The identification of democracy with “the force of numbers” has traditionally attracted skeptics and detractors of democracy. After having derided the idea that government can be resolved as a numerical issue, Vilfredo Pareto wrote: “We need not linger on the fiction of ‘popular representation’—poppycock grinds no flour. Let us go on and see what substance underlines the various forms of power in the governing classes.… The differences lie principally … in the relative proportions of force and consent.”¹ For Pareto, number was simply a clever means to use force through consent, and democracy was the most effective way to achieve the goal all tyrants have longed for but could not get since they were unable to have the power of numbers on their sides. He did not add, however, the reason tyrants could not have numbers on their sides, and this made his view of democracy predictably truncated, prejudicial, and wrong: numbers work because liberty matters in the formation of consent. For leaders to have numbers on their sides citizens must have liberty on theirs. Yet what is the function of voting?

Revising Pareto’s line of thought without renouncing his skepticism on democracy, Giovanni Sartori argued years ago that voting is what counts in democracy, although it cannot guarantee the quality of decisions because citizens do not learn how to vote by voting. No matter how rich and articulate, the open arena of discussion does not change the arbitrary character of voting and does not make citizens more competent or their decisions more correct.² It is not for the sake of achieving some desirable outcomes that democracy relies upon voting and an “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” public debate, to use Justice Brennan’s classic formula.³ Rather, it is for the sake of citizens enjoying and protecting their liberty. Justifying political rights from the point of view of their consequences is a dangerous path toward democracy depreciation. We enjoy the right to vote not because this allows us to achieve good or correct outcomes (although we might go to the ballot with this aim in mind) but in order to exercise our political freedom and remain free while obeying, even if the outcomes that our votes contribute to producing are not as good as we had foreseen or as would be desirable. For this reason, the First Amendment “recognizes no such thing as a ‘false idea’ ” and “cannot sustain, or even tolerate, the disciplinary practices necessary to produce expert knowledge.”⁴ As I will claim through this chapter and the book, the strength of a procedural interpretation of democracy (in fact, its normative strength) rests on this basic and simple assumption, which is as old as democracy itself.

Before getting to the central theme of this chapter, namely, the characteristics of the public forum (i.e., the meanings, conditions, and quality of doxa), in the following three sections I will elaborate three intertwined arguments: that the recognition of the role of opinion in the process of decision making is internal to a procedural interpretation of democracy; that representative democracy has a diarchic structure; and that the role of the political forum in democracy is essential, not optional. This preliminary clarification will lead me to situate doxa at the core of the democratic process and show the several facets it may take when made part of democratic sovereignty within representative government. Finally, it will take me to the central political claim of the chapter: that the diarchic and procedural perspective—the figure of representative democracy—contains the normative arguments thanks to which we can make the forum of opinion a public good and an issue of political liberty.

The Value and Maintenance of Democratic Procedures

Democratic procedures do not guarantee the improvement of citizens’ decision-making capacities nor do they promise to guide them toward outcomes that are correct according to a criterion that transcends those very procedures. As I will have the chance to explain in the next chapter, what they do is ensure that citizens make decisions in a way that they can always be open to revision. A free and open forum is a sign of liberty and a good in and by itself: first, because the chance of contesting and controlling a regime rises to the extent that citizens’ opinions are not confined within their inward minds or held as private opinions;⁵ second, because it is consonant with the character of democracy as a political system that is based on and engenders the dispersion of power; and third, because it makes possible the formulation of multiple political opinions in relation to which citizens make their choices. “The democratic distribution principle is an end in itself, not a means predicted to lead empirically to some desirable result,” and it holds both for the function of making decisions (voting) and the function of forming and questioning them.⁶ Thus, while electoral power is no doubt the basic condition of representative democracy, the “substantial guarantee is given by the conditions under which the citizen gets the information and is exposed to the pressure of opinion makers.… If this is so, elections are the means to an end—the end being a ‘government of opinion, that is, a government responsive to, and responsible toward, public opinion.”⁷ This is the leading idea that guides me.

Proceduralism in its standard definition comes to us with the mark of the author who made it famous, Joseph A. Schumpeter, who was very unsympathetic to democracy and conceptualized precisely that definition in order to tame the democratic element (political equality) and above all disassociate electoral participation from the achievement of a goal that goes beyond the aggregation of individual interests and claims to be instead inspired by or aim at the general interest. Severing procedural democracy from Schumpeterian proceduralism has been the project of several generations of scholars, from Hans Kelsen, Robert Dahl, and Norberto Bobbio just to mention the most representative of all. Gerry Mackie has recently proposed the following rendering of democratic proceduralism that amends Schumpeter’s: “In a proper democracy, voters mostly control parliaments, and parliaments mostly control leaders, through prospective voting, public opinion between elections, and ultimately through retrospective voting in recurrent elections.”⁸ In sum, procedural democracy does not mean simply voting computation or institutional correctness but also using free speech and freedom of the press and of association in order to make the informal or extrainstitutions domain an important component of political liberty. Democracy is a combination of decisions and judgment on decisions: devising proposals and deciding on them (or those who are going to carry them out) according to majority rule. The character of democracy is diarchic and its nature procedural. This is its figure.

To go a step further, we may say that democratic proceduralism is in the service of equal political liberty since it presumes and claims the equal right and opportunity citizens have to participate in the formation of the majority view with their individual votes and their opinions; it is what qualifies democracy as a form of government whose citizens obey the laws they contribute in making, directly or indirectly. Democracy provides each of its citizens the conditions, legal and political, thanks to which they can, if they so choose, participate in a broad and complex sense: by forming, criticizing, contesting, and changing collective decisions in a climate of “tranquility of spirit,” to use Montesquieu’s effective words.⁹ The normative value of the democratic procedures resides in the fact that they make inclusion and control by the included in the process possible. Suffrage and the forum of ideas are intertwined powers and essential conditions of democratic liberty. They are principled factors and do not need empirical evidence: the equal right to vote is essential even if we do not learn to vote by voting, and our equal chance to take part in a wide-open and robust public forum is essential even if this gives us no guarantee that we will achieve good or rational or correct decisions, that more information translates into knowledge. In this sense in the next chapter I employ the procedural interpretation of democracy to argue against the epistemic theory of democracy that procedures (the rules of the game) rather than content and achievement are the primary goods and what make a procedural conception of democracy normative. Democracy’s normative value lies in its process’s unmatched capacity to protect and promote equal political liberty. “Liberty and equality are the values that lay at the foundation of democracy … a society that is regulated in a way that the individuals who compose it are freer and more equal than in whatsoever other form of coexistence.”¹⁰

Equal political liberty involves not only an equal distribution of the basic political power of making decisions but also participation in politics by freely expressing one’s mind, and doing so under conditions of equal opportunity; the protection of civil, political, and basic social rights is essential to a meaningful equal participation.¹¹ Democracy promises liberty first of all and uses legal and political equality to protect and fulfill this promise. This was so since its ancient inception and is true today, although a robust tradition of liberal thought that grew in an anti-Jacobin climate has sponsored the belief that democracy is driven by the passion of equality rather than the love for liberty, that equality is inimical to liberty. Yet in Athens, democracy began with isonomia, or “equality through the law,” and isēgoria and parrhēsia, or their equal right to talk and vote in the assembly and moreover to talk freely and frankly.¹² Equality through the law means precisely political equality as the equal opportunity all citizens have, protected by the law, to exercise their power to take part in the decision-making process. Thus, Athens was conceived as a politeia en logois (a polis based on speech) and its citizens were defined as hoi boulomenoi (“whoever wishes to do so,” namely, to address the assembly).¹³ The electoral transformation of modern democracy did not change this principle.

If talking frankly and freely is a condition of participation it is because democracy promises social stability or peace through the participation of all (whether directly or indirectly) in lawmaking. Thus, liberty and peace together are the goals of the equal distribution of political power to make authoritative decisions upon which the democratic process of decision rests. This is what makes democratic proceduralism different both from a Hobbesian minimalist definition, which stresses the goal of peace but disregards that of liberty,¹⁴ and from an epistemic interpretation, which situates the good as something that transcends the process itself, like the judgment on the content of the outcome, and laments that “the effort to rely on nothing but proceduralism” makes democratic authority not very valuable.¹⁵

As this chapter will show, if consistently embraced, a procedural interpretation of democracy is very demanding, although for reasons that pertain to its performance rather than the attainment of a specific outcome. Among the demanding conditions there is the open forum of opinion formation. This argument was brilliantly made by Hans Kelsen in 1945: “A democracy without public opinion is a contradiction in terms. Insofar as public opinion can arise only where intellectual freedom, freedom of speech, press, and religion, are guaranteed, democracy coincides with political—though not necessarily economic—liberalism.”¹⁶

The case of ancient Athens shows that democracy pertains to the opportunity of both sitting in the assembly and being treated as equal by the law and voicing opinions in public.¹⁷ Wherein it is clear that the procedures are distinct from the outcome, so that having equal opportunity to take part and a hospitable environment are good because they give each citizen the chance to make his or her contribution valuable.¹⁸ Good outcomes, if and when they occur, are a reward for procedures, not what gives their normative value. Indeed, the Athenians enjoyed and praised their political right to talk in the assembly even if they only rarely used it and even if only some used it (and used it well). Democratic politics was like athletic competition in which all must start in line, wherein it is implicit that the conditions that allowed the citizens to start as equals were essential to make that political order recognizable as democratic.¹⁹

Concerning our contemporary societies, they are democratic because they have free elections and the opportunity to have more than one political party competing, because they allow effective political competition and debate among diverse and competing views, and finally because elections make the elected an object of control and scrutiny.²⁰ Bernard Manin has thus connected representative government’s foundation on opinion to its egalitarian premise since its procedures entail that discord among opinions should not terminate “through the intervention of one will that is superior to the others” but through a majority decision that is open to revision.²¹ Starting from similar premises, Noberto Bobbio came years ago to the conclusion that “democracy is subversive. It is subversive in the most radical sense of the word, because, wherever it spreads, it subverts the traditional conception of power, one so traditional it has come to be considered natural, based on the assumption that power—i.e., political or economic, paternal or sacerdotal—flows downwards.”²²

Clearly, institutions and procedures are exposed to distortion; in a democratic society distortions come from the violation of equality or the increase of inequality in the conditions that determine a fair use of them. “One could hardly take seriously one’s status as an equal citizen, for example, if owing to a lack of resources one was precluded from advancing one’s views effectively in the public forum.”²³ The good work of procedures requires that the overall political system takes care not only of its formal conditions but also of the perception citizens have of its effectiveness and value. Attention to democratic procedures asks for a continuous work of maintenance. The criterion orienting this maintenance should be in agreement with the procedural interpretation of democracy: it should aim to block the translation of socioeconomic inequalities into political power.²⁴ As we shall see, this task is challenging because the insulation of the political system should be achieved without blocking the communication between society and institutions, which is one of the most important features of representative government, what makes it diarchic.

What Is Democratic Diarchy?

Diarchy of will and opinion ...