Citizenship and National Identity

David l. Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745623948, 9780745623931
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A good political community is one whose citizens are actively engaged in deciding their common future together. Bound together by ties of national solidarity, they discover and implement principles of justice that all can share, and in doing so they respect the separate identities of minority groups within the community.

In the essays collected in this book, David Miller shows that such an ideal is not only desirable, but feasible. He explains how active citizenship on the republican model differs from liberal citizenship, and why it serves disadvantaged groups better than currently fashionable forms of identity politics. By deliberating freely with one another, citizens can reach decisions on matters of public policy that are both rational and fair. He couples this with a robust defence of the principle of nationality, arguing that a shared national identity is necessary to motivate citizens to work together in the name of justice. Attempts to create transnational forms of citizenship, in Europe and elsewhere, are therefore misguided. He shows that the principle of nationality can accommodate the demands of minority nations, and does not lead to a secessionist free-for-all. And finally he demonstrates that national self-determination need not be achieved at the expense of global justice.

This is a powerful statement from a leading political theorist that not only extends our understanding of citizenship, nationality and deliberative democracy, but engages with current political debates about identity politics, minority nationalisms and European integration.

1

Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice

If we are in the business of thinking about liberal democracy and possible alternatives to it, we must begin by drawing a distinction between institutions and their regulative ideals. Liberal democracy may be taken to refer to the set of institutions – free elections, competing parties, freedom of speech – that make up the political system with which we are familiar in the West; or it may refer to the conception of democracy that underlies and justifies that system. The relationship between institutions and regulative ideals is not necessarily simple or one-to-one. The same institution may be justified from different points of view, although characteristically those who favour contrasting regulative ideals will aim to shape the institution in different ways. Thus, to take a familiar case, the practice of electing representatives to a legislative assembly may be seen as a way of subjecting legislators to popular control; alternatively, it may be seen simply as a means of removing visibly corrupt legislators from office. Which of these views you take will affect your preferences as to the form of the practice. (How frequent should elections be? Should the voting system be first-past-the-post or something else? And so forth.)

The argument that follows has mainly to do with competing regulative ideals of democracy. In comparing liberal democracy with what I shall call deliberative democracy, my aim is to contrast two basic ways of understanding the democratic process. In favouring deliberative democracy, therefore, I am not recommending wholesale abolition of the present institutions of liberal democracy, but rather a reshaping of those institutions in the light of a different regulative ideal from that which I take to be prevalent now. I shall only address the institutional questions briefly. My main aim is to bring out what is at stake between liberal and deliberative democracy, particularly in the light of social choice theory, which appears to challenge the cogency of anything beyond the most minimal of democratic ideals.

Liberal democracy and deliberative democracy

Let me now sketch the contrast between liberal and deliberative democracy as regulative ideals. In the liberal view, the aim of democracy is to aggregate individual preferences into a collective choice in as fair and efficient a way as possible.¹ In a democracy there will be many different views as to what should be done politically, reflecting the many different interests and beliefs present in society. Each person’s preferences should be accorded equal weight. Moreover, preferences are sacrosanct because they reflect the individuality of each member of the political community (an exception to this arises only in the case of preferences that violate the canons of liberal democracy itself, such as racist beliefs that deny the equal rights of all citizens). The problem then is to find the institutional structure that best meets the requirements of equality and efficiency. Thus liberal democrats may divide on the question of whether majoritarian decision-making is to be preferred, or whether the ideal is a pluralist system which gives various groups in society different amounts of influence over decisions in proportion to their interest in those decisions. This, however, is a family quarrel in which both sides are guided by the same underlying ideal, namely how to reach a fair and efficient compromise given the many conflicting preferences expressed in the political community.

The deliberative ideal also starts from the premise that political preferences will conflict and that the purpose of democratic institutions must be to resolve this conflict. But it envisages this occurring through an open and uncoerced discussion of the issue at stake with the aim of arriving at an agreed judgement.² The process of reaching a decision will also be a process whereby initial preferences are transformed to take account of the views of others. That is, the need to reach an agreement forces each participant to put forward proposals under the rubric of general principles or policy considerations that others could accept. Thus even if initially my aim is to support the claims of a particular group to which I belong or which I represent, I cannot in a general discussion simply say ‘I claim that group A – farmers, say, or policemen – should get more money’. I have to give reasons for the claim. These might be that the group in question has special needs, or that it is in the common interest to improve the living standards of the group. By giving these reasons, however, I am committing myself to a general principle, which by implication applies to any other similarly placed group. Thus I am forced to take a wider view, and either defend the claim I am making when applied not only to my group but to groups B, C and D which are like A in the relevant respects or else to back down and moderate the claim to something I am prepared to accept in these other cases too. Although finally when a decision has to be reached there may still need to be a vote taken between two or more options, what participants are doing at that point is something like rendering a judgement or a verdict on the basis of what they have heard. They are expressing an opinion about which policy best meets the various claims that have been advanced, or represents the fairest compromise between the competing points of view that have been expressed.

The deliberative view clearly rests on a different conception of ‘human nature in politics’ from the liberal view. Whereas the latter stresses the importance of giving due weight to each individual’s distinct preferences, the former relies upon a person’s capacity to be swayed by rational arguments and to lay aside particular interests and opinions in deference to overall fairness and the common interest of the collectivity. It supposes people to be to some degree communally-oriented in their outlook. It also seems to be more vulnerable to exploitation, in the sense that the practice of deliberative democracy can be abused by people who pay lip-service to the ideal of open discussion but actually attempt to manipulate their colleagues to reach decisions that serve private interests.³ We shall shortly see, however, that liberal-democratic procedures are themselves vulnerable to political manipulation. At this stage, therefore, we must take it as an open question which of the two democratic ideals is more likely to be subverted by manipulative individuals or groups.

In presenting my account of deliberative democracy, I mean to distinguish it not only from liberal democracy but from what has been called ‘epistemic’ democracy.⁴ The epistemic conception of democracy sees the aim of democratic procedures as being to arrive at a correct answer to some question facing the political community. It is assumed here, in other words, that there is some objectively right or valid answer to the question that has been posed, but because there is uncertainty as to what the answer is, a decision-procedure is needed, and democracy, in the form of majority voting, is the procedure most likely to produce the right answer. This was, for instance, the view of Condorcet,⁵ and it has also been attributed to Rousseau,⁶ although my own belief is that Rousseau’s view is ambiguous as between deliberative and epistemic conceptions of democracy.⁷

I believe the epistemic conception sets an unrealistically high standard for political decision-making. Although occasionally a political community may have to decide on some question to which it is plausible to suppose a correct answer exists (say some scientific question in circumstances where there is complete consensus on the ends which the decision should serve), it is much more likely that the issue will concern competing claims which cannot all be met simultaneously in circumstances where no resolution of the competition can be deemed objectively right. In the deliberative conception, the aim is to reach agreement, which might be achieved in different ways. One way is for the participants to agree on a substantive norm, which all concur in thinking is the appropriate norm for the case in hand. Another way is to agree on a procedure, which abstracts from the merits of the arguments advanced by particular claimants. (Thus suppose the question is how an available resource such as a tract of land should be allocated as between several groups that lay claim to it. One possibility would be to agree on a principle such as that the resource should go to the group which needs it most or which could use it most productively, and then on the basis of the arguments advanced decide which group that was. Alternatively the deliberating body might feel that it was not competent to make such a judgement, and opt instead for a procedural solution, such as sharing the resource out equally between the groups, rotating it between them, or deciding by lot.) In either case, the outcome is a decision which all the parties involved may feel to be reasonable, but this does not entail that it reflects any transcendent standard of justice or rightness. The emphasis in the deliberative conception is on the way in which a process of open discussion in which all points of view can be heard may legitimate the outcome when this is seen to reflect the discussion that has preceded it, not on deliberation as a discovery procedure in search of a correct answer.⁸

Social choice theory and the democratic models

My aim in this chapter is to see whether deliberative democracy may be less vulnerable than liberal democracy to the problems posed by social choice theory for democracy in general. In arguing in this way, I am apparently reversing a common opinion which is that social choice obliges us to abandon ‘populist’ models of democracy in which democratic decisions are represented as expressions of ‘the people’s choice’ or the ‘popular will’ in favour of ‘liberal’ models in which democratic elections are construed merely as a safeguard against the emergence of tyrannical rulers. Democracy on this view is a matter of the voters having the right, at periodic intervals, to remove from office governments which they have come to dislike. Any notion that the voters should in some more positive way determine public policy is misguided. This argument plays some role in the classical defences of liberal democracy by Schumpeter and Dahl⁹ and has recently been developed at length and with great intellectual force by William Riker.¹⁰

From my perspective, however, both liberalism and populism as understood by Riker count as variants on the liberal ideal of democracy. For populism is the view that individuals’ preferences should be amalgamated, by voting, to yield a general will which then guides policy. Liberalism in Riker’s sense is less ambitious in that it sees the purpose of elections in negative terms as involving the removal of unpopular leaders. Both views see democracy as a matter of aggregating voters’ preferences: they differ over the question whether policy can be chosen in this way, or only the personnel of government. The idea that democratic decisions are not a matter of aggregating preferences at all but of reaching agreed judgements is foreign to both.

Let me now remind readers of the challenge which social choice theory poses for these liberal views of democracy. Suppose a voting public has to decide between a number of policy options – suppose, to take a concrete case, that the issue is how Britain should generate its electricity, and the public has to choose between coal-fired, oil-fired, gas-fired and nuclear power stations. The message of social choice theory, and in particular its most celebrated constituent, Arrow’s general possibility theorem,¹¹ is that one cannot devise a mechanism for making such decisions which simultaneously meets a number of quite weak and reasonable-sounding conditions that we might want to impose, such as monotonicity or the requirement that if a voter raises the position of one option in his own personal ranking, this cannot have the effect of lowering it in the social ranking.

This, one might say, is the problem posed by social choice for democracy – that is, in general there is no fair and rational way of amalgamating voters’ preferences to reach a social decision – but it entails two more specific problems. The first is the arbitrariness of decision rules and the second is the near-unavoidability of strategic voting, or more strictly of opportunities for strategic voting. Decision rules fall broadly speaking into two classes, which following Riker we may call majoritarian and positional methods of selecting a preferred outcome. Majoritarian rules proceed by offering voters a series of binary choices and, depending on which option wins which encounters, identify an overall winner. So, in our example, voters would be asked to choose between coal and oil for generating electricity, between coal and gas, and so forth. There would be a series of majorities on the questions asked, and then some rule for discovering the overall choice. Positional rules ask voters to rank the available options and then compute a winner using all or part of this fuller information. Thus voters might be asked to rank order the energy options from 1 to 4 on their ballot papers and then a winner might be found by some rule such as giving an option two points each time it is someone’s first choice and one point each time it comes second.

The problem of arbitrariness arises because it is not clear which of the many possible rules best matches our intuitive sense of ‘finding the option which the voters most prefer’ or to put the point another way, for any given rule it is possible to give examples where using that rule produces an outcome that seems repugnant to our sense of what a democratic decision should be. Among majoritarian rules, a strong contender is the Condorcet rule that any option which beats all the others in a series of binary choices should be the social choice. But there is no guarantee in any particular case that such a Condorcet winner can be found, so the rule is incomplete. Thus gas might beat coal and oil but lose to nuclear power, which in turn was beaten by one of the other options. If the rule is to be complete it has then to be extended to cope with this possibility, but there is no extension that is obviously the right one.¹² Among positional rules, the one most often favoured is the Borda count, which scores each option according to the place it holds in each voter’s ranking, so that my top option gets n points, my second option n – 1 points and so on right the way down. One problem with this is that it may make the decision among quite popular options depend upon the way some voters rank way-out or eccentric options if these are on the ballot paper. Finally, it is an embarrassment that the Condorcet and Borda rules do not necessarily converge; that is, a Condorcet winner may exist, but a different option may be selected by use of the Borda count. This might occur where the Condorcet winner – nuclear power, let’s say – was the first choice of a fair number of people but tended to be ranked very low by those who were against it, whereas another option – gas, let’s say – was the first preference of just a few, but ranked second by quite a lot. Here it is not at all clear which way we should jump. There is a case for the option with most first preferences, and a case for the compromise proposal which comes reasonably high in most people’s rankings.

The second problem is strategic voting, which means misrepresenting your true preferences when you vote with the aim of increasing the chances of your favoured option. Obviously the success of this depends on your having some knowledge of the preferences of other voters. It can be shown that there is virtually no decision rule that is not vulnerable to strategic manipulation if some voters choose to act in this way.¹³ Again a couple of examples may help to bring this out. Suppose we are using a majoritarian decision rule. It is possible by strategic voting to block the emergence of a Condorcet winner. Thus suppose in our example nuclear power is the Condorcet winner if everyone votes sincerely. I am not particularly averse to nuclear power, but I am very strongly committed to coal-fired stations. I cannot prevent nuclear power defeating coal in a run-off between these options, but if others think like me we can stop the nuclear power bandwagon by voting insincerely for gas when the choice between gas and nuclear power is posed, thus preventing the emergence of nuclear power as a Condorcet winner and triggering whatever subsidiary rule is being employed in the hope that coal will win. Equally, if a Borda count is being used and I know that gas, say, is the likely winner, then I can boost the chances of coal by insincerely pushing gas down into fourth place. There is of course no guarantee that my strategy will work, since my opponents may behave strategically too. But this only serves to underline the arbitrariness of the eventual decision which in these circumstances would have very little claim to be called anything like a popular will.

So the challenge posed by social choice to democratic theory can be reduced to two basic claims: that there is no rule for aggregating individual preferences that is obviously fair and rational and thus superior to other possible rules; and that virtually every rule is subject to strategic manipulation, so that even if it would produce a plausible outcome for a given set of preferences if everyone voted sincerely, the actual outcome is liable to be distorted by strategic voting.

Working from within the liberal view of democracy, pessimists such as Riker respond to this challenge by reducing the significance of the electoral process to that of providing a safeguard against what Riker calls ‘tyranny’. But even this safeguard is quite weak, since if the outcome of elections is to some degree arbitrary (as the social choice analysis shows), it is not apparent why they should pick out for removal unpopular or ‘tyrannical’ leaders. Coleman and Ferejohn put this point well:

Nonreasoned removal from office is precisely what follows if Riker is correct in interpreting the instability results of social choice theory as demonstrating the meaninglessness of voting. If outcomes are arbitrarily connected to the preferences of the electorate, we cannot infer from his removal from office that an officeholder’s conduct was in fact disapproved of by the voters. This is hardly the ideal of officeholders being put at risk by elections that we associate with liberalism.¹⁴

Social choice theory seems to undermine the liberal view of democracy in a systematic way, regardless of the precise function that is assigned to the act of voting in elections.

Deliberative processes and social choice

Can the problems of social choice be avoided altogether by switching to the deliberative ideal of democracy? Social choice theory postulates voters with given preferences over outcomes, and it is sometimes suggested that, once we allow that voters’ preferences may alter in the course of decision-making, its results no longer apply.¹⁵ But this response is too simple-minded. So long as there is a problem of amalgamating the voters’ wishes at the point of decision –...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice
• 2. In Defence of Nationality
• 3. Citizenship and Pluralism
• 4. Group Identities, National Identities and Democratic Politics
• 5. Bounded Citizenship
• 6. Communitarianism: Left, Right and Centre
• 7. Secession and the Principle of Nationality
• 8. Nationality in Divided Societies
• 9. Is Deliberative Democracy Unfair to Disadvantaged Groups?
• 10. National Self-Determination and Global Justice
• Notes
• Index