Abstract
If we take into view modern democracies in their institutional complexity, an unlikely source of support for a conciliatory conception of democracy comes to the fore. Anthony Downs’s theory of multiparty electoral competition is rightly associated with an elitist strand of political theory. Downs argues that party elites tailor political platforms to the preferences of median voters in order to capture positions in government. As it stands, this view is in stark opposition to the civic ideal of public deliberation amongst citizens aiming to advance the justice of their societies. Once we adopt the view to fit the motivational profile of citizens as deliberative democrats conceive them, however, Downs’s model offers important insights into the conciliatory dynamic of multiparty competition. Furthermore, political parties appear as central institutions in modern democracies and vital to establishing the equal epistemic authority of citizens and achieving the ideal of epistemic conciliation in politics. They constitute collective epistemic agents which develop conceptions of justice sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific for the task of governing modern societies. The inbuilt tendency of multiparty competition and the post-election coalition formation process display an inbuilt tendency toward the epistemic conciliation of these political platforms.
This section is partly based on considerations first offered in Ebeling (2016).
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Gallagher et al. (2005): p. 72f.
- 2.
Budge and Keman (1990): p. 1.
- 3.
This appreciation does not always lead to a favorable view of their role, of course. See, for example, von Beyme’s critique of the modern democratic state as a “party state” in von Beyme (1993).
- 4.
Rosenblum (2008): p. 3.
- 5.
Hamilton et al. (2003): Federalist No. 10.
- 6.
Cf. ibid.
- 7.
Cf. Hamilton et al. (2003): Federalist No. 51.
- 8.
Quoted in Rosenblum (2008): p. 9.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Cf. Rosenblum (2008): Chap. 3. She calls the defense “Proto-Millian” because Mill did not share the optimistic vision that parties can in fact deliver “the serious conflict of opposing reasons” which his positive view of social antagonism prescribed.
- 11.
Quoted in Rosenblum (2008): p. 145.
- 12.
Cf. Rosenblum (2008): pp. 136ff.
- 13.
Hamilton et al. (2003): Federalist No. 10.</Emphasis>
- 14.
Burke (1770): p. 134.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
Cf. Gunther et al. (2002): p. 2.
- 18.
Schattschneider (1942): p. 3.
- 19.
Gallagher et al. (2005): p. 58.
- 20.
- 21.
Clark et al. (2008): p. 8.
- 22.
Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 7.
- 23.
Fiorina (1980): p. 26.
- 24.
von Beyme (1985): p. 29.
- 25.
Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 8.
- 26.
I do not claim, however, that the beliefs attributed to a party are in any significant sense independent from the beliefs of its members or that a party’s rational belief formation is in any significant sense independent from the rational belief formation of its members, but only that rationally formed beliefs of a relevant subset of the party’s members are attributed to the party as a collective entity without it being the case that all members hold the belief or form it in a rational manner. For a stronger thesis about collective epistemic agency, see Deborah Tollefsen, “Organizations as True Believers,” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 395–410.
- 27.
For a congenial idea on the vital role of platforms (of political parties) as guides to the just provision and distribution of intermediate goods as the relevant objects of public policy, see Weinstock (2015).
- 28.
Ware (1996): p. 320.
- 29.
- 30.
Niemeyer (2011): p. 109.
- 31.
White and Ypi reject public deliberation as a substitute for political parties also on motivational grounds, cf. White and Ypi (2010): p. 820.
- 32.
Clark et al. (2008): p. 3.
- 33.
Cf. Mansbridge et al. (2012).
- 34.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 37.
Ibid., p.15.
- 38.
Cf. Bohman (1998).
- 39.
See also Ebeling, M., Wolkenstein, F. (manuscript). Deliberative Agency and Democratic Legitimacy.
- 40.
Cf. Hotelling (1929).
- 41.
Downs (1957): p. 25.
- 42.
Notice that he conceives voting as an investment decision.
- 43.
- 44.
Cf. Downs (1957): Chap. 8.
- 45.
This effect is known as Duverger’s law, named after Maurice Duverger; cf. Duverger (1954).
- 46.
Bargaining theory lends additional support to this observation; cf. Laver and Schofield (1990).
- 47.
Gallagher et al. (2005): p. 382.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
This dynamic is most easily observed in US politics with widely reported on primaries for the nomination of the presidential candidates of the two major parties. In the case of the 2012 presidential elections in the US., a common observation was that the median of the Republican Party forced Mitt Romney to a position too far right to then credibly move far enough to the overall median position to beat Barack Obama.
- 50.
Cf. Palfrey (1984).
- 51.
- 52.
Cf. Grofman (2004b): p. 38.
- 53.
Cf. Wittman (1983). If we adopt a citizen–candidate model according to which citizens only bother to run for public office if this results in a greater chance to influence the course of policy-making in their favor, convergence of two parties is not an equilibrium outcome because at least one party would lose interest in competing altogether; cf. Besley and Coate (1997).
- 54.
This problematic entailment of his theory was already noted by Downs. He introduced the long-term participation value of maintaining a democratic system which increases not only the benefit of voting for the correct party but the benefit of voting per se even if one makes an uninformed or misinformed choice. Cf. Downs (1957): Chap. 14.
- 55.
Coate and Conlin (2004) develop a group rule utilitarianism resting on John Harsanyi’s work on rule utilitarianism.
- 56.
Ferejohn and Fiorina (1974) model and contrast expected utility maximizers, minimax regret decision makers, and maximin decision makers.
- 57.
See, for example, the early refutation in Key (1966).
- 58.
Cf. Downs (1957): p. 29, fn 11.
- 59.
Not only did Schumpeter think that voters are misinformed, but he also thought that their preferences are the result of manipulation by political elites. Hence, responsiveness could not even appear as an important benefit in his theory. I return to this below.
- 60.
- 61.
- 62.
- 63.
- 64.
Cf. Budge and Keman (1990).
- 65.
Ibid., p. 189.
- 66.
Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 254.
- 67.
Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 2.
- 68.
Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 254.
- 69.
- 70.
Downs (1957): p. 27.
- 71.
- 72.
Downs (1957): p. 29.
- 73.
Downs (1957): p. 29, fn 11.
- 74.
This idea, of course, goes back to Adam Smith’s invisible hand and it is little wonder that Downs explicitly traces it back to his The Wealth of Nations; cf. Downs (1957): p. 28.
- 75.
Downs (1957): p. 28.
- 76.
Downs (1957): p. 30.
- 77.
Downs (1957): p. 28.
- 78.
Downs (1991): p. 148.
- 79.
Downs (1991): p. 149.
- 80.
Petracca (1991): p. 178.
- 81.
Ibid.
- 82.
Consider also this quote from Mancur Olson: “Indeed, unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests” (Olsen [1965] 2002: p. 2; emphasis in the original).
- 83.
Hume (1994): p. 24.
- 84.
Shepsle and Bonchek (1997): p. 16f.
- 85.
The original model did not provide an explanation for why people vote their narrow self-interest either. Instead, it was assumed to be self-evidently true.
- 86.
Recall the definition of equal epistemic authorities as prima facie equally reliable judges of the rightness of political decisions according to a procedure-independent criterion of rightness (reliable in an epistemic sense).
- 87.
- 88.
- 89.
Some cite the consistent records of parties in government as evidence for the prevalence of policy-seeking parties. See, for example, Budge and Keman (1990): p. 144.
- 90.
Wolinetz (2002): p. 149f.
- 91.
Wolinetz (2002): p. 150.
- 92.
Variations in the motivation of candidates and voters do affect the Downsian model and resulting equilibria. The emphasis here is on “fundamentally.” The general conciliatory implication of the model is left intact by the various ways of modeling these motivations. For an overview, see Duggan (2006).
- 93.
In some models, such as Whitman’s, it does alter the predictions slightly as policy-seeking parties might be less inclined to give up their ideological commitments in order to maximize votes. See also Kollman et al. (1992), whose simulations allow candidates to give weight to their own ideologies when choosing positions, and to have imperfect information on voters’ preferences and nevertheless predict convergence on centralist positions.
- 94.
Lipset (1967): p. 117.
- 95.
Bartolini (2002): p. 88.
- 96.
Ibid.
- 97.
Along with the general negligence of the role of political parties in deliberative conceptions of democracy, intra-party deliberation has received almost no scholarly attention. For an exception to the rule, see Wolkenstein (2016).
- 98.
Shepsle and Bonchek (1997): p. 30; emphasis in the original.
- 99.
Shepsle and Bonchek (1997): p. 31f.
- 100.
Habermas’s theory of communicative action, for instance, does not reject the idea of instrumental rationality. It supplements the idea with a conception of communicative rationality (or “reason”) and aims to defend its practical significance precisely against an understanding of practical rationality as exhausted by the instrumental conception. It is this understanding which he perceives as misguided and indeed as morally and politically pernicious. His theory is an example, then, that the instrumental conception has its place in a theory of practical rationality as long as it does not make the strong claim that other conceptions of rational action are obliterate. Cf. Habermas (1984).
- 101.
Recall the example I used in the previous chapter. See also the composition of the left–right dimension in Klingemann et al. (1994): p. 40. The authors include stands on economic policies, foreign policy and defense, and endorsements of “traditional morality.”
- 102.
Cf. McDonald and Budge (2005).
- 103.
Cf. Powell (2006).
- 104.
Cf. McDonald et al. (1999).
- 105.
McDonald and Budge (2005): p. 135.
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Ebeling, M. (2017). Representative Democracy and the Role of Political Parties. In: Conciliatory Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57743-6_6
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