PANEL 15 /// DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND THE
DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPANT'S PERSPECTIVE
CONVENORS: ANNABELLE LEVER (SCIENCE PO, PARIS) AND ATILLA MRÁZ (STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY)
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected] or [email protected]
How should democratic theory and the ethics of political participation take into consideration the participants’ perspectives in their theories of rights, institutions and the ethics of political participation? Recent work in democratic theory has revived perspectives on democratic politics that account for the value of democratic institutions, rights, and participation without much regard for how participants of democratic practices see these values. Realism in political philosophy asks us to refocus our attention from individual and collective agency and political equality to the sheer anti-oligarchic potential of democracy (e.g., Schumpeter 1942; Przeworski 2018; Shapiro 1999, 2016; Bagg 2018). Some new work on political equality also supports mostly anti-oligarchic institutions of participation—notably, sortition instead of or in addition to elections, and deliberative mini-publics (Guerrero 2014, 2021; Stone 2016; Abizadeh 2020; Landemore 2020). But how can we redeem the methodological significance of grounding democratic theory—together with its commitment to political agency and political equality—in the moral phenomenology of participants of democratic politics, while acknowledging they may not always be accurate? This panel aims to address this broader methodological question from both critical and liberal democratic perspectives, while engaging with substantive issues in the design of democratic institutions concerning elections, sortition and deliberative mini-publics; the right to vote and the right to stand for election in democratic and arguably non-democratic regimes; and the implications of realist and practice-dependent methods for democratic theory.
The panel addresses the following particular questions:
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected] or [email protected]
How should democratic theory and the ethics of political participation take into consideration the participants’ perspectives in their theories of rights, institutions and the ethics of political participation? Recent work in democratic theory has revived perspectives on democratic politics that account for the value of democratic institutions, rights, and participation without much regard for how participants of democratic practices see these values. Realism in political philosophy asks us to refocus our attention from individual and collective agency and political equality to the sheer anti-oligarchic potential of democracy (e.g., Schumpeter 1942; Przeworski 2018; Shapiro 1999, 2016; Bagg 2018). Some new work on political equality also supports mostly anti-oligarchic institutions of participation—notably, sortition instead of or in addition to elections, and deliberative mini-publics (Guerrero 2014, 2021; Stone 2016; Abizadeh 2020; Landemore 2020). But how can we redeem the methodological significance of grounding democratic theory—together with its commitment to political agency and political equality—in the moral phenomenology of participants of democratic politics, while acknowledging they may not always be accurate? This panel aims to address this broader methodological question from both critical and liberal democratic perspectives, while engaging with substantive issues in the design of democratic institutions concerning elections, sortition and deliberative mini-publics; the right to vote and the right to stand for election in democratic and arguably non-democratic regimes; and the implications of realist and practice-dependent methods for democratic theory.
The panel addresses the following particular questions:
- Why is the democratic participant’s perspective important for accounting for the value of democracy?
- How can we make sense of the value of democratic rights—the right to vote, and also the right to stand for election—by reference to the perspective of the voter or aspiring candidate, rather than an external perspective on the functions of these rights?
- How can the partisan perspectives of democratic politics be reconciled with democratic innovations such as sortition or deliberative mini-publics? What is the significance of participants’ conflicting perspectives for democratic innovations?
- What does the voter’s perspective in non-democratic regimes tell us about the applicability of democratic norms to the ethics of voting in non-ideal democratic or non-democratic contexts?
