Against Anti-Democratic Shortcuts: A Few Replies to Critics

Cristina Lafont

doi:10.16997/jdd.367

Abstract

In this essay I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as ‘embodiment’ and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights; and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle.

Highlights

In this essay I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts
Far from deferring blindly, citizens choose the agent they are deferring to precisely for the reason that they think it is the choice most likely to lead to political decisions that are aligned with their interests, values and policy objectives and the decisions that they can come to own and identify with
In the second hypothetical scenario that Goodin discusses a citizen has read Estlund’s (2008) book and has ‘come to believe that majority voting is the procedure that is most likely to yield epistemically correct conclusions.’ (Ibid: 27) Since deferring to majority decisions under these conditions would be the result of exercising judgment, it would not be a case of reflectively blind deference

Summary

Introduction

Far from deferring blindly, citizens choose the agent they are deferring to precisely for the (defeasible) reason that they think it is the choice most likely to lead to political decisions that are aligned with their interests, values and policy objectives and the decisions that they can come to own and identify with.4 By contrast, in the second hypothetical scenario that Goodin discusses a citizen has read Estlund’s (2008) book and has ‘come to believe that majority voting is the procedure that is most likely to yield epistemically correct conclusions.’ (Ibid: 27) Since deferring to majority decisions under these conditions would be the result of exercising judgment, it would not be a case of reflectively blind deference.

Results

Conclusion