The Institutions of Democracy

Abstract

My dissertation is devoted to the question of which political decision-making institutions real-world democratic societies ought to adopt. Following a brief introduction in chapter one, it is structured around three sub-issues.

Part one considers how citizens’ conduct in elections ought to be regulated. Chapter two offers a defence of compulsory voting, by appeal to the wrongness of free-riding, and responds to many of the objections raised by compulsory voting’s critics.

Chapter three offers a defence of bans on vote buying. I show that recent arguments in favour of permitting vote buying are implausible. I then go on to criticise existing accounts of the wrongness of vote buying, and offer a novel, respect-based account of the wrongness of the practice.

Part two considers whether, and how, persons conventionally excluded from the franchise ought to be included in the democratic process. Chapter four argues that the disenfranchisement of children is unjust. I argue that all major, plausible approaches to the justification of voting rights converge upon a requirement that children from around the age of twelve be enfranchised, and that none of the principal objections raised to child enfranchisement are persuasive.

Chapter five considers the position of the cognitively disabled. I argue that, contrary to hopes expressed in the literature, enfranchising the cognitively disabled is unlikely to make any difference to the democratic processes’ under-responsiveness to such persons. Ensuring adequate consideration for the cognitively disabled will require deeper institutional reform. I consider a range of possibilities, ultimately arguing for the creation of a deliberative citizens’ assembly to address the issue.

Part three, finally, considers whether the institutions presupposed in parts one and two – universal suffrage, and decision-making via the aggregation of citizens’ expressed preferences – can be justified in light of two significant challenges. Chapter six considers the competence objection, advanced by Jason Brennan. I show that Brennan’s objection is reliant upon a naïve account of citizens’ rights against risk-impositions, and cannot be sustained on any more plausible view. I also criticise Brennan’s preferred ‘epistocratic’ alternative to democracy.

Finally, chapter seven considers the ‘lottocratic’ challenge. Several authors have recently argued that substituting universal suffrage and/or aggregative decision-making with some chance-based device would either preserve, or improve upon, the egalitarian appeal of democracy, while realising higher-quality results. I argue that the positive egalitarian case for lottocracy is implausible, and that the comparative egalitarian and instrumental merits of appropriately structured democratic arrangements will generally be superior. Show more