Abstract
There are many forms of democracy. Importantly, is there continual accounting to the public via referendums—‘direct democracy’—or do the people choose representatives who govern relatively independently between elections? It is natural in representative democracy for experts to be consulted by the elected government, whereas if directness is the ideal, experts can look like unaccountable elites. Under ‘pluralist democracy’ governments’ power is limited by institutional ‘checks and balances’, such as the judiciary, the free press and alternative parliamentary chambers, ensuring that minorities and minority opinions are not completely suppressed. Checks and balances require experts. There are many other dimensions of democracies including voting systems and the degree of devolution, but an uncritical advocacy of ‘rule by the people’ is antagonistic to pluralist democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Waldron (2012, 187).
- 2.
Held in his 1995 book sub-divides the choice into three: “direct or participatory democracy”, “liberal or representative democracy”, and “one-party” democracy but since the latter is hardly democracy at all, the basic choice is that between direct and indirect. One-party democracies might go by names such as ‘The People’s Democratic Republic of X’ exemplified by, say, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Yemen and Ethiopia. Quite a few such nations are characterised by human rights violations, control or suppression of the press, and a police and/or judiciary under the thrall of the state so that political pluralism is a sham at best; one party ‘democracies’ are breaching experiments which indicate some of the essential features of what we are calling pluralist democracy. Held elsewhere distinguishes between participatory democracy, which can be pluralist, and direct democracy, which is not. Direct democracy would be something like full-blown communism in which ideal egalitarianism leads to the identity of interests of every citizen and the state so pluralism is otiose. But, as already mentioned, while this might be admirable as an ideal it seems that nation-scale experiments suggest that such regimes are rarely desirable in practice.
- 3.
Osborne (2012, 7–28).
- 4.
Dahl (1956, 33–37) offers various formulations of what democracy means.
- 5.
Rousseau (1987 [1762], 198).
- 6.
See Urbinati (2006a, 60–100) for the best treatment of Rousseau’s justification for direct democracy.
- 7.
Sartori (1965, 108).
- 8.
For Turner (2003), it appears the answer is that liberal democracy has moved on to a stage where the franchise is complicated by information asymmetries between experts and non-experts and the solution that has been adopted amounts to a makeshift pragmatic move to house debates in commissions of enquiry. Turner calls the stages Liberal Democracy 1.0 (democracy that is actually just rule by notables), 2.0 (democracy by recognition and inclusion) and 3.0 (democracy by delegation to commissions and bureaucracies).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Urbinati (2006b, 25, 27). Both Turner (2003) in his discussion of liberal democracy and Urbinati (2006a) in her discussion of representational democracy share the idea that both forms of democracy depend on vibrant discussion, beyond electoral competition, in order for the conditions of legitimate decision-making to persist. How vibrant the discussion should be is a matter of dispute, with ‘radical democracy’ theorists emphasizing the role conflict and identity differences play in redressing marginalization and ensuring the autonomy of minorities by stressing that they must be respected. Theorists like Mouffe (2000) charge that Habermas over-emphasizes consensus-seeking behaviour and under-appreciates the role conflict or agonistic relations play in addressing marginalization and inequality in our democracies. Taylor (1998) argues in a like-minded vein, but stresses the way “people can bond together in difference without abstracting from their differences” (p. 153) to highlight the role the preservation of group-based differences plays in sustaining citizen autonomy.
- 12.
- 13.
Lippmann (2007).
- 14.
- 15.
For a detailed analysis of the British Colombia Citizens’ Assembly, a bold experiment in deliberative democracy, and its implications for democratic theory, see Warren and Pearse (2008).
- 16.
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Collins, H., Evans, R., Durant, D., Weinel, M. (2020). What Is Democracy?. In: Experts and the Will of the People. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26983-8_3
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