Table of Contents
Inclusion and openness
In Part 1 I wrote about Don Lavoie’s argument that robust liberalism requires an open (democratic) politics that can make the tacit, diffused knowledge of the “interests, concerns and demands of voters” useful in providing governance structures that people will use to resolve political differences. peaceful.” Liberalism needs open democracy, just as it needs open markets, for many of the same reasons.
It would be hard to find a better place to go than Kevin J. Elliott’s Democracy for busy people.
Elliott, a political scientist at Yale, riffs twice to the late political theorist Judith Shklar to make a case for “putting inclusion first” – making inclusion the first (but not the only) consideration when thinking about democratic theory. His argument complements Lavoie’s concerns about “openness.”
Democratic inclusion is important to Elliott because of his commitment to political equality. He also states that externalities and the associated injustices are the result of political apathy. By apathy Elliott does not mean indifference or ignorance, but complete inattention to politics; he is not even aware of the actions, good or bad, of the government or of the challenges faced by people in a government’s jurisdiction.
Inclusion is more important than equality because equal but exclusive politics, as in Athenian democracy or an ‘epistocratic’ system creates an entire category of unrepresented people. Unrepresented people depend on politically skilled people to a) know best what the disenfranchised want and need, and b) actually pursue those things on behalf of the powerless. In other situations, classical liberals might point out that no one knows what they want and need better than individuals.
Adam Smith warns how weak is the spark of benevolence when it is expected to counteract the power of self-love. The value of control over political institutions creates a political “rent” that can be used to secure economic returns. This creates an incentive for representatives to restrict access to them. Clear tenancy arguments lead us to expect that rights holders will retain their special access. Special political power allows those who hold it to politically extract what would be economically more difficult to obtain from (and at the expense of) the disenfranchised.
In an inclusive political system, people can stand up for themselves. Even where inequality exists, as long as people are allowed to represent themselves, there is a path to representation through sheer numbers that simply does not exist without inclusion.
Demand democracy
Lavoie was an anarchist and therefore he proposed increasing the openness of democracy by abolishing its dependence on government elections. Lavoie worried about the meaning of elections and noted that the mere presence of something called elections is insufficient for democracy without openness and publicity.
Instead, Lavoie suggested a radical expansion of our conception of democratic politics, one that goes beyond voting to include ongoing public debate about rights and responsibilities throughout public life.
According to Lavoie, appropriate grounds for democratic participation include:
- all conversations about rights and responsibilities and public contestations (advocacy and protest efforts) that shape public opinion/political culture, and
- all open institutions that incorporate the revealed preferences of citizens (the common law, market outcomes).
Political institutions can make it easier or more difficult to achieve inclusive democracy. If it is true that broader participation is better for democracy, and that democracy is crucial to liberalism, then Lavoie falls short if he fails to anticipate the problems with such a demanding model of democracy.
Elections could be both inadequate and essential for democratic inclusion. Representative government has an important advantage over Lavoie’s model: it dramatically reduces the demands that politics places on ordinary people. Lavoie’s demanding view of democratic institutions would make these institutions an effective barrier to entry into democratic politics. Such a demanding democracy can be expected not to encourage openness but, on the contrary, to frustrate it. People are political, yes, and politics is important. But people are not just political, and politics is not the only thing there is.
Kevin J. Elliott comes to the rescue.
Real-life barriers to political inclusion
One of the most valuable insights from Democracy for busy people is Elliott’s discussion of busyness and what he calls the paradox of empowerment. These are simple, important ideas.
Busyness is inevitable: people have to get to and from work; children need to be cared for; emotional exhaustion – from poverty, discrimination, tragedy or trauma, or even something as trivial as difficult neighbors – also takes time. Elliott doesn’t say it like that, but the hustle and bustle flows directly from it opportunity cost.
People have – and have the right to have – non-political demands on their time, and the demandingness of politics gives citizens a claim to an overly demanding democratic system. Busy people are a fact of life, so a democratic system that is too demanding to include busy people will fail to prioritize inclusivity and openness.
The paradox of empowerment is more complicated, but obvious once explained. A democratic system cannot increase the participation of busy people by adding more ways to participate. Someone who cannot make time to vote in regular elections will not become more involved if they also have the opportunity to attend meetings or vote directly on more issues. They don’t even have time to vote! The people who are looking for more ways to devote time and resources to politics are becoming disproportionately more influential.
Whatever their intent, democratic innovations that add more ways to participate without reducing the demands of politics continue to exclude those who are already underrepresented. More demands from politicians give even more power to those who already have the time, expertise, money and inclination to participate.
Lavoie’s vision of a radically expanded democracy suffers greatly from its lack of attention to busyness and the paradox of empowerment. A system in which everyone continually participates in conversations in which our rights and responsibilities are contested and established could, in an ideal world, be ‘open’. But inside this world, the hustle and bustle and the importance of our lives outside of politics mean that Lavoie’s proposed system would deliver exclusive politics and empower those who are already overrepresented, while neglecting normal people who have more demands on their time.
Lavoie’s vision of democracy therefore cannot solve the problem of balancing interests and values to secure the buy-in and legitimacy that enable democracy to achieve political peace.
Elliott, on the other hand, proposes a model he calls “standby citizenship.” Standby citizenship has three requirements: habitual attention to politics, knowledge of how to participate, and the ability to increase involvement when necessary. Awareness of politics ensures that citizens monitor their government and hold elected officials accountable. It also gives citizens the opportunity to determine whether they consider political participation worthwhile.
With habitual attention, government responsibility becomes a small part of daily life rather than a demand for deep resources and attention. Ordinary attention is a common feature in Lavoie’s and Elliott’s democratic views, but in Elliott’s view the division of democratic labor and the specialization that results relieves ordinary people of much of the burden of democratic governance. For example, some people become elected representatives, others learn about and advocate in the policy areas they consider most important, while others specialize in citizenship education more broadly.
Useful knowledge of the political system gives teeth to political consciousness. Citizen knowledge ensures that citizens understand what is politically possible and that their dissatisfaction can be supported by political action. People without civic knowledge are also more vulnerable to demagoguery; they are less able to judge whether the often vague political aspirations encouraged by charismatic leaders are realistic.
Knowledge of political systems enables every citizen to represent themselves and their political groups, making self-interest an important force supporting political representation.
Finally, the ability to increase political involvement, rather than the demand for continuous, intensive political involvement, limits the demands that democracy usually places on most citizens.
This much less demanding model of democratic citizenship prioritizes openness. And it recognizes the problem that democracy solves. It provides a stronger foundation for liberals committed to democratic openness in a world that seems ready to take a step back from democracy, markets and liberalism.
Read more:
Socialist fantasies by Sarah Skwire
Why libertarians distrust political power by Steve Horwitz
Intellectual Portrait Series: An Interview with James M. Buchanan
Janet Bufton is an education consultant and copy editor in Ottawa, Ontario, working primarily on projects in the areas of Adam Smith, trade and regulatory policy, and indigenous and labor market economics.