Abstract
Chapter 5 fleshes out some of the institutional consequences of our republican account of justice. While it is clear that freedom as non-domination entails some form of a right to political participation, the question this chapter focuses on is how to conceptualize such a right, and which institutions a society should have in order to realize and protect this right. The central issue for addressing this question is to analyse’ the relationship between the free and autonomous agency of the individual and instances of collective agency. Chapter 5, therefore, offers an account of collective agency and democracy which hopes to guarantee both the protection of the individual’s free agency and the effective workings of collective decision-making processes. Thus, the chapter presents a range of criteria which legitimate institutions must fulfil.
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Notes
- 1.
The key point in this sentence is that all decisions must be ‘sensitive to every person’s fundamental interest and basic rights’, which really means every person’s fundamental interests, globally, and not just within one society. The reciprocity and normativity conditions described in Chap. 1 are universally valid, which means that a rational agent cannot identify with and accept as legitimate decisions which directly violate in another country a person’s basic rights. I will return to this issue in Chap. 6.
- 2.
- 3.
I discuss the intricate relationship between collective agency and global non-domination in Schuppert (2013c).
- 4.
Another way of expressing the idea of epistemic legitimacy would be to say that decision-making processes can only claim legitimacy if they (in cases in which that is possible) track the truth (Goodin 2003, Chap. 5). However, as many political questions are not concerned with the truth, but with ranking policy options, I prefer to describe epistemic legitimacy in terms of coherence, quality of reasoning and evidence-responsiveness.
- 5.
The idea of democratic accountability has been subject of a range of diverse discussions. As it lies outside the scope of this section to give a comprehensive overview, simply because my main focus lies on what accountability means for an agency-centred view of democratic decision-making, let me refer the reader for in-depth background information to a range of insightful discussions of accountability in Castiglione (2007), Behn (2001), Pitkin (1967), Manin (1997), Held (1996), and Mansbridge (2003, 2004).
- 6.
- 7.
However, this does not mean that elections would not be an important means for holding representatives accountable. On the contrary, electoral control is a necessary (but not sufficient) tool for holding people responsible, as it constitutes a fundamental political practice.
- 8.
The idea of decisions serving the best interest of society is a controversial one, which I do not want to go further into at this point. While there certainly are decisions which clearly serve the best interest of society, such as actions which promote everybody’s chances of realizing their fundamental interest in social agency, in most cases it will probably be difficult to agree on one shared best interest of society. On the idea of a public interest and its role in democratic decision-making, see Goodin (1996).
- 9.
On the horizontal level contestation is fairly rare, however channels of contestation for these rare cases should be provided.
- 10.
However, it is important to note that in order to be legitimate it is enough that an agent should (theoretically) recognise the institution’s legitimacy, that is to say, legitimacy is not dependent on actual expressive recognition, even though such expressive recognition would obviously strengthen the trust people have in a set of institutions.
- 11.
- 12.
For the remainder of this section I will talk about the political institutions of ‘society’, though I hope it is clear that what I say also applies to institutions below, above and beyond the society-level. In fact, I will deal with global democracy in more detail in Chap. 6.
- 13.
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Schuppert, F. (2014). Collective Agency, Democracy and Political Institutions. In: Freedom, Recognition and Non-Domination. Studies in Global Justice, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6806-2_5
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