The Politics of Getting It Right

Abstract

ABSTRACTHélène Landemore's Democratic Reason marks a crucial achievement in democratic theory, as it successfully shows that democracy is about more than procedural legitimacy—and that it should be. Nonetheless, the procedural argument remains at the heart of the case for democracy. For many democratic decisions, getting the right answer is not what we ask of political institutions. Politics is often about defining what counts as a problem, and no single definition counts as the right one. Furthermore, the epistemic claim that democracy is likely to get moral questions right can obscure the difficulty of getting moral questions exactly “right.” The best political approach to controversial questions is often to strike a balance of competing claims, and every actual democracy does this in ways that leave many citizens dissatisfied. This is why many citizens participate in democratic politics as partisans: they put more trust in their party than in the democratic regime to get it right. Partisanship fuels the never-ending democratic contest over what it means to get it right in politics, but it is also appropriately epistemic, in that it is prompted by the never-ending possibility that even democracy will get things wrong.