Perspective Of Democratic Theory Research Articles

The democratic deficit of the G20

ABSTRACT In the last few decades, the democratic credentials of global governance institutions have been extensively debated in the fields of international relations and political philosophy. However, despite their prominent role in the architecture of global governance, club governance institutions like the Group of Seven (G7) or the Group of Twenty (G20) have rarely been considered from the perspective of democratic theory. Focussing on the G20, this paper analyses its functions in international political practice and discusses whether, in exercising these functions, the G20 exhibits a democratic deficit. As a standard of democracy, the analysis uses the all-affected principle, according to which all those who are affected by a policy decision should be given the opportunity to participate in decision-making. This paper identifies several democratic shortcomings of the G20, for instance related to the exclusion of citizens of non-member states and a lack of parliamentary and public control. By describing realisable reforms that could to some degree alleviate these shortcomings, it is shown that more democratic institutional alternatives are feasible. Thus, the ascription of a democratic deficit to the G20 is warranted.

Digitalisierung, Internet und Demokratie – Theoretische und politische Verarbeitungen eines ambivalenten Feldes

In contemporary political, social, and communication research, it is a controversial question if digitisation and World Wide Web are going to strengthen and renew democracy or, instead, will undermine its main principles, characteristics, and preconditions. However, the hitherto debates, models and conceptualizations of digital democracy have predominantly proceeded from a rather classical idea of democracy insisting on the already established communication channels between government and citizens. In contrast to this, the following article contributes to the interdisciplinary discussion with an overview of recent publications concerning the mutual relations between democracy and digitization in an explicit or implicit manner. In this respect, it should be acknowledged whether there can be observed new approaches and innovative contents according to the perspective of democratic theory.

Can Disintegration Be Democratic? The European Union Between Legitimate Change and Regression

While the emerging debate about the disintegration of the European Union focuses on descriptive and explanatory questions, this article approaches the phenomenon from the perspective of democratic theory. Building on a concept of disintegration as a form of constitutional politics that includes various possibilities of dismantling supranational polities, I argue that disintegration gives rise to a democratic puzzle. While it must be possible, for democratic reasons, to partially or entirely reverse European integration, any such step threatens the European Union’s democratic achievements. Disintegration seems to be caught between legitimate change and regression. To address this democratic puzzle, I examine to what extent European integration has produced democracy-related ‘ratchet effects’ that limit the scope for legitimate reversal. This analysis leads to three principles of legitimate disintegration that can be applied to any supranational polity and have important implications for the post-Brexit relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Corruption and citizen participation in local government: Evidence from Latin America

Prior research indicates that corruption hampers economic growth and imposes high social costs. From the perspective of democratic theory, corruption does not just violate the fiduciary obligations with which the public entrusts government officials; it has detrimental effects on the legitimacy of the democratic process as a whole. If citizens view their government as corrupt and dishonest, they become cynical about political life, and as a result, they are less likely to participate in democratic governance. This article examines the effect of corruption—measured through both perception and experience—on citizen participation in local government. Using data from the AmericasBarometer survey on the new democracies in Latin America, we test whether the withdrawal effects registered in terms of participation in elections hold for the participation in city administration. The results show that citizens' willingness to participate in local governance relates positively with their experience of corruption, but not with their perception of corruption.

Legitimate actors of international law-making: towards a theory of international democratic representation

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the identity of the legitimate actors of international law-making from the perspective of democratic theory. It argues that both states or state-based international organisations, and civil society actors should be considered complementary legitimate actors of international law-making. Unlike previous accounts, our proposed model of representation, the Multiple Representation Model, is based on an expanded, democratic understanding of the principle of state participation: it is specifically designed to palliate the democratic deficits of more common versions of the Principle of State Consent. Second, it endorses a qualified version of the Principle of Civil Society Participation, one that is much more restrictive and more critical of the democratic defects of civil society actors than most of its current supporters. Finally, it reveals how the democratic strengths and deficits of both models are best approached as mirroring one another and need to be combined in a complex account of representation.

The ‘Mixed’ Constituent Legitimacy of the European Federation

AbstractConstitutional lawyers and political scientists have described the European Union as a federation of states (fédération, Bund). They deny that federations generate a new union‐wide constituent authority besides the pouvoirs constituants of the member states. Habermas argues that federative constituent power lies with individuals in their dual roles as citizens of the several states and as citizens of the Union. I argue that from the perspective of democratic theory, this view is methodologically superior to other ‘dualist’ views of federative constituent power (J. Cohen), but go on to criticize it in two respects. It gives insufficient justification for the persistence of domestic pouvoirs constituants, and it reifies their defensive function.

What the 2016 Elections Revealed Regarding Taiwan's Politics, as Seen in Democratic Theory

This article attempts to decipher the meaning of Taiwan's January 2016 general elections by focusing on the factors that underscored the landslide victories by the opposition DPP party over the long-time ruling KMT. The ultimate aim is to answer the larger question of how to understand Taiwan's politics from the perspective of democratic theory. Two of the attributes that a true democracy must have are: (1) an opposition party loyal to the common weal of society, as opposed to the party's own egoistic interests; and (2) an independent free media. My study fails to find either in Taiwan under the shadows of DPP's maneuverings.

Authenticity in Political Discourse

Judith Shklar, David Runciman, and others argue against what they see as excessive criticism of political hypocrisy. Such arguments often assume that communicating in an authentic manner is an impossible political ideal. This article challenges the characterization of authenticity as an unrealistic ideal and makes the case that its value can be grounded in a certain political realism sensitive to the threats posed by representative democracy. First, by analyzing authenticity’s demands for political discourse, I show that authenticity has greater flexibility than many assume in accommodating practices common to politics, such as deception, concealment, and persuasion through rhetoric. Second, I argue that a concern for authenticity in political discourse represents a virtue, not a distraction, for representative democracy. Authenticity takes on heightened importance when the public seeks information on how representatives will act in contexts where the public is absent and unable to influence decisions. Furthermore, given the psychological mechanisms behind hypocrisy, public criticism is a sensible response for trying to limit political hypocrisy. From the perspective of democratic theory and psychology, the public has compelling reasons to value authenticity in political discourse.

Developing democracy: cooperatives and democratic theory

Impoverished communities often suffer not only from the lack of wealth, but also from a kind of democratic deficit. To be poor means not only not having money, but also being buffeted by the winds of fortune, with little sense of control over the major forces that commonly affect people’s lives. As a model of development, cooperatives have been promoted not only as a model for community wealth-building, but also as a form of empowerment due to their inherently democratic nature. But how democratic are they, really? This paper explores this question from the perspective of democratic theory, using a theoretical framework developed by the nineteenth-century political economist William Thompson, who laid out the principles on which the cooperative movement is based. An important element of Thompson’s theory is that the cooperative structure alters the socio-economic relations of their members, aligning their interests with one another on the basis of a strong principle of equality. It is this alignment of interests on the basis of equality that gives cooperatives their strongly democratic character. However, the paper finds that the democratic nature of cooperatives is challenged by a number of factors. These include internal dynamics, such as managerialism and size, and external dynamics such as the tensions that may arise between workers and consumers or between members’ interests and those of the broader community. The existence of these tensions and dynamics means that an effective community wealth-building strategy needs to incorporate mechanisms for the harmonisation of interests and the integration of different perspectives in a network model that promotes internal exchange and integration.

The European Citizens’ Initiative: Transnational Democracy in the EU at last?

The European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, in force since December 2009, introduced the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) as a means of strengthening citizen involvement in EU decision making. A minimum of one million citizens from at least seven of the EU’s current 27 member states can request that the European Commission submit a legislative proposal on the issue of the initiative. But the ECI is not only a means of strengthening participatory democracy in the EU. It also bears the potential for a more fundamental transformation of democracy, namely in the direction of transnational participatory democracy. Starting with a short introduction to how the ECI will work in practice as well as a brief history of participatory democracy in the EU, this article therefore examines the ECI from the perspective of democratic theory. How profound an impact will the ECI have on democracy in the European Union?

Democratic Theory and Policy Analysis: Four Models of “Policy, Politics and Choice”

This essay considers four ideal-type governance mechanisms from the perspective of democratic theory. It argues that democratic theory may help to make explicit the implicit value-choices embodied in these governance mechanisms, and so provide the basis for cross-value critical discourse. In addition, this cross-value discourse may be used to identify the appropriate normative, political and institutional settings for each mechanism.

Horace Mann's troubling legacy: the education of democratic citizens

A righteous reformer committed to the power of education, Horace Mann became a national figure by championing the common school movement. Mann's message, which he preached at every opportunity, was that universal public education was the only means to transform America's disorderly masses into a disciplined, judicious republican citizenry, thereby removing the dangers of anarchy and class warfare. In his new look at Mann's work and thought, Bob Pepperman Taylor shows that Mann's ideas on civic education have had a lasting impact on the way that we still think today about education and its relation to our civic life. Written from the perspective of democratic theory and practice, Taylor's work reassesses Mann's philosophy of civic education and deeply resonates with today's pervasive and highly political debates about the role of education. By conceiving of public schooling as serving primarily political ends, this nineteenth-century reformer fostered an enduring tension between educational values and political purposes. Taylor contends that Mann's approach to civic education marginalized the role of schools in training the intellect, and that this anti-intellectual component has been retained in the current model of schooling in the United States. He contends that Mann's schooling model promotes moral certainty and political consensus over intellectual doubt and political disagreement an imbalance that erodes and weakens both educational and democratic ends. By considering Mann's unique influence as a theorist of civic education, Taylor argues, we find both his greatest strengths and most significant weaknesses. And when we take Mann seriously as a contributor to American political thought, we find that the challenge he presents is more significant than concerns about the lack of originality or the unscientific nature of some of his ideas. Ultimately, Mann can tell us a great deal about the very best in our educational tradition, as well as help us see some of its significant flaws and show us how both strengths and weaknesses have played out in our current public and higher systems of education. By examining how Mann was the first to articulate a cohesive vision of the relationship between civic education and democratic practice, Taylor demonstrates that Mann belongs among the key founders of the American political tradition.

Governance-driven democratization

While democratic reforms of electoral institutions continue, their capacities for deepening democracy are limited by the large, pluralized, complex, and territorial political units through which they work. Much of the institutional innovation in democracy has shifted elsewhere – into ‘governance’, the development and administration of public policy. The democratic potentials of governance reside in the potentially responsive linkages between what governments do and what citizens receive. From the perspective of democratic theory, however, this ‘governance driven-democratization’ is a frontier. Concepts inherited from participatory democratic theory such as citizen engagement and direct democracy obscure more than they reveal. Most of the new experiments engage a relatively few citizens. Many involve only self-selected stakeholders and activists, and so by-pass broader public interests, or generate new forms of exclusion. In this paper, I specify the concept and domains of governance-driven democratization, and suggest a method for critical assessment. We can ask, on a case by case basis, about opportunities and dangers as measured by the democratic values of inclusion of the affected, empowerment, representation, and deliberation.

Digitising the Public Sphere: Two Key Issues

The discussion on how democracy is affected by the introduction and functioning of digital media and the Internet has been going on for at least two decades. Starting from the perspective of democratic theory and specifically theories of the public sphere, this article tries to outline two key issues and what the current status of knowledge and debates on these appears to be. Referring to and drawing on all the other contributions to this issue of Javnost‒The Public, the theoretical as well as the empirical, it is argued that while there is no doubt digitisation of the public sphere adds new dimensions and new forms of discourse, the implications of these for the overall quality or health of democracy are still quite differently understood by scholars working in these issues. Consequently, further theoretical work is required, but, perhaps even more important, a variety of empirical studies.

Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption

While corruption has long been recognized as an appropriate object of regulation, concern with appearances of corruption is of recent origin, coinciding with declining trust in government in the mid‐ to late‐1960s. The reasoning that would support regulations of appearances, however, remains flawed, as it depends upon a “public trust” model of public service that is incomplete and often misplaced when applied to political representatives. The justification for regulating appearances is unambiguous, however, from the perspective of democratic theory. Democratic institutions of representation depend upon the integrity of appearances, not simply because they are an indication of whether political representatives are upholding their public trust, but because they provide the means through which citizens can judge whether, in particular instances, their trust is warranted. Representatives, institutions, and ethics that fail to support public confidence in appearances disempower citizens by denying them the means for inclusion in public judgments. These failures amount to a corruption of democratic processes.

The "Nation's Conscience:" Assessing Bioethics Commissions as Public Forums

As the fifth national bioethics commission has concluded its work and a sixth is currently underway, it is time to step back and consider appropriate measures of success. This paper argues that standard measures of commissions' influence fail to fully assess their role as public forums. From the perspective of democratic theory, a critical dimension of this role is public engagement: the ability of a commission to address the concerns of the general public, to learn how average citizens resolve moral issues in healthcare, and to monitor public opinion on the topics addressed in the commission. Such a public forum role is supported by the critical literature within bioethics, which has deemed some commissions successful, supported more generally by the history of bioethics as a reform discourse that has brought socially important values into the medical domain, and supported more generally still by the example of the great social issues commissions of the 1960s.