Democracy and Its Critics

Robert A. Dahl

Yale University Press, 1989 (1991 reissue); Pages: 397

Discusses democracy as a unique process of making collective and binding decisions. Develops the notion of polyarchy to label the existing "democratic" states, which have the rudimentary institutions for evolving into more comprehensive democracies.

Sources of Modern Democracy

Classical Greece: (i) citizens must be sufficiently harmonious in their interests so that the idea of general good does not contradict their personal aims; (ii) they must be highly homogeneous with respect to characteristics that otherwise tend to produce political conflict; (iii) the citizen body must be quite small; (iv) citizens must be able to assemble and directly decide on the laws; (v) citizens must participate in the administration of the city; (vi) the city-state must remain fully autonomous (p.19).
Limits: (i) citizenship was highly exclusive rather than inclusive, both internally and externally; (ii) Greeks did not acknowledge the existence of universal claims to human rights; (iii) Greek democracy was inherently limited to small-scale systems (p.23).
Republicanism: (i) human beings must live together in a political association; (ii) citizens must be equal before the law and must be able to participate in ruling; (iii) a major threat to civic virtue is generated by factions and political conflicts; (iv) rulers might also seek to enhance their own position and power; (v) mixed government of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy to balance the interests of the one, the few, and the many (p.25).
The aristocratic view fears the many, whose role ought to be a limited one - not to rule but to choose the leaders. These prefer the solution of mixed government. The democratic view fears the few and seeks to design a system to counter the tendency toward oligarchy or despotism. These prefer the solution of constitutional and institutional separation of powers (p.27).
Limits: (i) orthodox concept of interest is too simple for complex systems; (ii) how to design a republic to handle the conflicts generated by the diversity of interests; (iii) if the republic depends on the virtue of the citizens, can it exist in large heterogeneous societies; (iv) can republican theory be applied to the scale of the nation-states (p.27).
Representative government: a solution that eliminated the ancient limits on the size of democratic states and made the doctrine applicable to the large nation-states (p.29).
Limits: (i) its institutions remove government far from the reach of the demos; (ii) pluralist system, in which autonomous political associations are not only legitimate but necessary; (iii) the public good fragmented into individual and group interests (p.30).
Political equality: all members of the association are adequately qualified to participate on an equal footing with the others in the process of governing the association - the Strong Principle of Equality (p.31).
Limits: the principle need not apply very broadly and can be interpreted in a highly exclusive way (p.32).

Critiques of Democracy

Anarchism: because all states are necessarily coercive, all states are bad; hence, no one has an obligation to obey or support any state; in addition, a society without a state is feasible; therefore all states ought to be abolished (p.42)
Critique: (i) coercion will occur even without a state, therefore it might be justifiable to use and regulate it through a state; (ii) the modern world does not permit the stateless societies envisioned by anarchists (p.46).
Guardianship: (i) the good of the citizens requires that they be subject to some binding collective decisions; (ii) the interests of all human beings should be given equal consideration; (iii) the process of governing ought to be restricted to those qualified to govern. Hence, guardianship is a regime, in which the state is ruled by meritorious rulers, who consist of a minority of adults, and who are not subject to the democratic process (p.57). The rulers will have (i) moral understanding; (ii) virtue; and (iii) instrumental knowledge, which define political competence (p.58).
Critique: (i) knowledge of the public good and the means to achieve it is not a science composed of objectively validated truths; (ii) merely instrumental knowledge is inadequate to solve problems involving moral judgments; (iii) to understand the general good of the collectivity usually requires knowledge of the interests of persons and nothing more; (iv) risk, uncertainty, and trade-off mean that there may not be an expert answer to the problem; (v) it is dubious that guardians will seek the general good rather than their own (p.76).

A Theory of Democratic Process

Idea of Intrinsic Equality: expressed in the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests, which implies that during a process of collective decision-making, the interests of every person who is subject to the decision must (within limits of feasibility) be accurately interpreted and made known (p.86)
Problems: the idea does not specify (i) what are to be counted as interests or goods; and (ii) what goods or interests should be given priority (p.96).
Personal autonomy: no person is more likely that yourself to be a better judge of your own good or interest or to act to bring it about. Therefore, you have the right to judge whether a policy is in your best interest. You may delegate the choice of means to bring certain results to those more qualified in that respect. But you cannot yield the right to judge whether the results were in your interest (p.99).
The Strong Principle of Equality: taken together, the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests and the Presumption of Personal Autonomy justify adopting the Strong Principle of Equality - every adult member of an association is sufficiently well qualified to participate in making binding collective decisions that affect his interests (full citizen of the demos, and no adult member is so definitely better qualified that the others that they should be entrusted with making binding collective decisions (p.105).
Justifications for democracy: (i) it tends to produce the best feasible system all around with respect to the idea of intrinsic equality; and it is instrumental to (ii) maximum feasible freedom; (iii) human development; (iv) the protection of personal interests (p.93).
Criteria for a democratic process: (i) effective participation - throughout the process of making binding collective decisions, citizens ought to have an adequate opportunity, and an equal opportunity, for expressing their preferences as to the final outcome, placing questions on the agenda, and expressing reasons for endorsing one outcome rather than another; (ii) voting equality - at the decisive stage of collective decisions, each citizen must be ensured an equal opportunity to express a choice that will be counted as equal in weight to the choice of any other citizen, and it is only these choice that must be taken into account; (iii) enlightened understanding - each citizen ought to have adequate and equal opportunities for discovering and validating the choice on the matter to be decided that would best serve his interests; (iv) control of the agenda - the demos must have the exclusive opportunity to decide how matters are to be placed on the agenda of matters to be decided by means of the democratic process (p.113); and (v) inclusion - the demos should include all adult members of an association except transients and persons proved to be mentally defective (p.129).

Problems in the Democratic Process

Majority Rule: (i) maximizes the number of persons who can exercise self-determination in collective decisions; (ii) it is the only decision rule that is decisive, anonymous, neutral, and positively responsive; (iii) if each individual is more likely to make a correct choice over a number of decisions, then MR is more likely to lead to correct decisions; (iv) it necessarily maximizes average benefit of the laws among all citizens if each member of the majority will gain at least as much utility as each citizen in the minority will lose (p.143).
Problems: (i) with more than two alternatives, cyclic majorities are possible; (ii) control of the agenda can be used to manipulate the outcome; (iii) it is possible to maximize self-determination by allowing individuals or groups to decide certain matters autonomously - the boundary for collective decisions; (iv) a minority might reject majority rule in a particular political unit and insist on altering the unit itself - the boundary of the collective unit; (v) MR is attenuated by representation and factors that impede political equality and consensus in the real world; (vi) nothing in MR requires the special conditions necessary for maximizing utility; (vii) the decision-making process in most countries is not neutral with respect to issues (p.152).
Favorable Conditions: (i) the more homogeneous the people of a country are, the less likely it is that the majority will support policies harmful to the minority; (ii) strong expectations among members of a minority that they will enter into tomorrow's majority; (iii) members of a minority are confident that the collective decisions will never fundamentally endanger the basic elements of their way of life (p.161).
Alternatives: (i) supermajorities - allows a minority to veto a majority decision, does not get around voting cycles, privileges the status quo; (ii) limited democracy - a system sufficiently democratic to enable citizens to remove elected officials (Riker), ambiguities with social choice still present, overemphasizes the problem of voting cycles; (iii) quasi guardians (such as the US Supreme Court) - within the limited scope, the authority of guardians is subject to objections to guardianship, does not escape difficulties of MR because guardians have to make decisions and may not agree perfectly (p.155).
Process and Substance: the supposed failure of democratic process to guarantee desirable substantive outcomes is spurious because integral to the process are substantive rights, goods, and interests that are often mistakenly thought threatened by it (such as the right to self-government). Also, the democratic process is not ``merely formal'' because it is a form of distributive justice. It is also not ``merely an abstract claim'' because it is a claim to general and specific rights that are necessary to it. Thus, it endows citizens with an extensive array of rights, liberties, and resources sufficient to permit them to participate fully, as equal citizens, in making collective decisions by which they are bound (p.175).
Process versus Process: the democratic process may impair important substantive rights or requirements of justice if some groups, possibly a majority, employ imperfect democratic process to violate (i) rights essential to the process; (ii) rights external to the process, but necessary to it; or (iii) rights not necessary to the process but required by the principle of equal intrinsic worth (p.176).
Solutions: (i) changing the composition of the citizen body by inclusion (so that those who are subject to the laws participate in their making) or exclusion (so that a minority may govern itself); (ii) designing voting, election, or legislative procedures that will protect the interests of minorities; (iii) the evolution of public opinion; (iv) protection by officials not subject to the democratic process, quasi guardians (p.188).
Criteria for a Democratic Unit: (i) domain and scope are clearly identified; (ii) the people in the domain strongly desire political autonomy within the scope; (iii) they also desire to govern themselves according to democratic principles; (iv) the scope is within justifiable limits and does not violate primary political rights; (v) within the scope, the interests of persons in the unit are strongly affected by decisions over which they have no significant control; (vi) consensus will be higher than it would be with any other feasible boundaries; (vii) the gains must outweigh the costs (p.208).

The Limits of Democracy

The Second Transformation. Consequences of the increase in scale in moving from the city-state to the nation-state: (i) representation has displaced direct participation; (ii) no theoretical upper limit on the size of the demos; (iii) participatory democracy has become even more limited; (iv) greater diversity of people in ways relevant to political life; (v) political cleavages are multiplied and political conflict is inevitable; (vi) development of polyarchy as a set of institutions; (vii) social and organizational pluralism; and (viii) expansion of individual rights in polyarchies (p.219).
Institutions of Polyarchy: (i) policy control by elected officials; (ii) free and fair elections; (iii) inclusive suffrage; (iv) right to run for office; (v) freedom of expression; (vi) alternative sources of information; (vii) associational autonomy (p.221).
Conditions for Polyarchy: (i) civilian control of instruments for violent coercion, with civilians subject to the democratic process; (ii) a modern dynamic pluralist society; (iii) absence of significant subcultural pluralism, or presence of consociational arrangements to manage subcultural conflicts; (iv) political culture and beliefs, especially among political activists, that support the institutions of polyarchy; (v) no intervention by a foreign power hostile to polyarchy (p.263).
The Common Good: (i) in collective decision, the good of all persons significantly affected by the decision should be taken into account - complicated due to pluralism within democracies, among them, and existence of persons outside the country who are seriously affected by it; (ii) pluralism compounds the difficulties of determining the common good (p.298); (iii) an essential substantive element of the common good is what the members of the group would choose if they possessed the fullest attainable understanding of the experience that would result from their choice and its most relevant alternatives; thus, enlightened understanding, which involves the rights and opportunities of the democratic process, and the institutions of polyarchy necessary to employ the process on a large scale, are all elements of the public good (p.308).

June 28, 2001. BLS

@BOOK{dahl-89:critics,
    TITLE     = {Democracy and Its Critics},
    AUTHOR    = {Robert A. Dahl},
    YEAR      = {1989},
    PUBLISHER = {Yale University Press},
    ADDRESS   = {New Haven},
    ISBN      = {0-300-04938-2 (pbk.)},
    NOTE      = {Pp. 397, 1991 reissue}
}