Equality by lot

Rejecting “realism”

One of the strengths of Open Democracy is its normative ambition. Rather than lecturing readers about the need to be realistic and to accept elitism in various ways, Landemore insists that the democratic ideal of political equality should be taken literally. Calls for various forms of compromise are the norm throughout the scholarly literature of democracy. Often such calls are to some extent implicit (e.g., Dunn, see part 2 of this post series). Occasionally they are unabashedly explicit. In this genre Landemore focuses her wrath on Achen and Bartels.

Achen and Bartels take the Lippmann-Schumpeter-Dunn line of argument one step farther by explaining to their readers that while their impression that government does not in any way reflect public opinion is wholly justified by the facts, their frustration with this situation is wholly due to unrealistic expectations. Democracy implies elections, elections imply elite control, and elite control implies unresponsivity. It’s time to be realistic and readjust our expectations.

Landemore points out that it is the first link in the chain of implications that is false. Elections do imply unresponsivity, but that is simply good reason not to adopt elections as a mechanism for delegating power. Achen and Bartels’s argument that the Progressive-era “popular initiative” mechanism results in elite control as well should again be taken as an argument against the use of this mechanism, not as an argument for elections or as an argument against the “realism” of democratic ideals. The “realist” argument reflects a failure of the imagination, a willing submission to the status quo (p. 45).

Breaking with the mainstream of “reform”

The rest of chapter 2 is devoted to quickly discussing some reform proposals by other political scientists and to a question of terminology. Proposals by Jeffrey Green, John Keane, Ian Shapiro, Philipp Pettit, John McCormick and Michael Saward. All of these, Landemore says, are either “various rationalizations of the status quo” or “participatory variations on deliberative democracy” (p. 47). Again, Landemore’s willingness to dismiss this type of work as hidebound, and thus not only of little use but counterproductive, sets her apart from the run-of-the-mill academic reformers and makes Open Democracy a milestone in contemporary political theory.

In terms of terminology, Landemore argues against using the term representative democracy. She argues that it is at best redundant – since democracy is about representation – and historically tainted by the electoral, and hence elitist, associations of this term.

Landemore sums up (p. 52):

Our task should be […] to offer a substantively different paradigm of democracy, one that would take us past and beyond representative democracy rather thabn offer a few friendly amendments to it. Such a model would take representation for granted, with no assumption that it should necessarily translate into electoral mechanisms, and the emphasis would be placed instead on other things, including openness of the entire decision process to ordinary citizens. This emphasis is a radical departure from the principles of representative democracy as a historical construct, which is built on the exclusion of ordinary citizens from most of the spaces where real power is exercised.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory |