Improving on Democracy

Abstract

This is a critique and explication of a representative account of democracy in the tradition of quasi-empirical “democratic theory.” Indeed, there is what amounts to a consensus about what democracy is and what it requires. Stein Ringen presents an overt example of what Dahl called a “scalar” notion of democracy, in which Scandinavian social democracy gets the highest marks and “unequal” democracies the lowest. Ringen is unusual in this consensus for attending to the sociological and organizational details of the conception. In this respect, it is especially revealing of the preferences concealed in the commitment to social democracy. He nevertheless does not avoid the problem with this kind of scalar account: that it is itself radically anti-democratic. The idea of democracy it endorses is one that the actual voters in the various democracies in question reject. It is a conundrum for this kind of democratic theory that it is itself anti-democratic.