Normative systems theory for sustaining democracy

Democracy is the most widely admired type of political system but also perhaps the most difficult to maintain. If democracy does not operate by the principles of justice, the people may prefer to be governed through their own consent. Legitimacy requires effective performance. But effectiveness may be sacrificed to consent. Democracy is sustainable when its institutional framework promotes normatively desirable and politically desired objectives. It can be said that the viability of a democratic system depends on the principle of justice, which leads to the functioning of autopoietic system in the complex environment of civil society.     

The Fairness of National Decision‐making Procedures: The Views of Adolescents in 18 European Countries

This study examines adolescents' evaluation of the fairness of three forms of democratic decision‐making procedures (direct democracy, representative democracy and group representation) and one non‐democratic procedure (oligarchy). Social dominance orientation‐Egalitarianism (SDO‐E), religious group identification and the countries' level of democracy are examined as predictors. The 2008 Europroject dataset was used, which contained 4441 native majority adolescents (mean age = 16.1 years) in 18 European countries. Adolescents evaluated direct democracy as most fair, followed by group representation, representative democracy and oligarchy. This rank order was found independent of the issue under consideration (moral or social), and of SDO‐E and religious identification, and across the countries. In addition, adolescents scoring higher on SDO‐E and on religious identification found group representation and non‐democratic oligarchy fairer. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Populism and democracy: The challenge for deliberative democracy

Theorists of democracy have long grappled with the question of how to uphold the promise of popular government while restraining populist excesses. The deliberative conception of democracy proposes to do so by subjecting power to collective decision making through procedures of free and equal public deliberation. Critics of this idea often target its realizability. Though valid in theory, they claim, deliberative democracy is hopelessly utopian. The paper argues that, given a proper understanding of the deliberative approach and its underlying ideal of collective self‐government, this line of criticism is not very potent. However, another line of criticism, less pronounced in the contemporary debate, is more effective, questioning the very cogency of public discussion, even by a competent public, as a means of collective self‐government. Open public discussion is prone to various forms of manipulation and deception, which subvert rather than facilitate self‐government. Deliberative democracy's egalitarianism and populism therefore run counter to its deliberative aspiration, which underpins its ideal of democratic legitimacy.     

Injustice in American liberal democracy: Foundations for a Rawlsian critique

Conclusion Rawls stipulates that nonideal theory must include theories of punishment and compensatory justice, as well as a justification for the forms of opposition to unjust regimes, from civil disobedience and conscientious refusal to militant resistance, rebellion and revolution. (TOJ, p. 8) Given the Kantian interpretation of nonideal theory we now can see that each of its parts must be constructed to contribute to the teaching of justice. The preferred theory of moral development enables us to understand how persons come to adopt nonideal conceptions and practices, and how they can be convinced to change their thinking. The theory of history enables us to determine which traditions contain empirical causes of contemporary conceptions and practices.We recall that Rawls identifies the parties in the original position as we ourselves; when we ground our judgments upon its procedures, then we can perceive the world as persons in that position do. Our view need not be obscured by the economic determinism of traditional Marxism, nor does it require a psychoanalytic corrective in the manner stipulated by contemporary critical Marxists. A Rawlsian critique of American liberal democracy resolves the question of these determinants in the same way as it resolves all questions of an empirical nature, by placing them in their systematic unity according to a Kantian moral anthropology. If we can see what judgments result regarding empirical injustices and their removal we may ourselves learn something of how to redesign nonideal culture to conform to ideal principles of justice. And this prospect in turn is identical to the prospect of constructing a bridge between social theory and practice within liberal democracy.An earlier draft of this paper was read at the Tenth Interamerican Congress of Philosophy on Human Rights, Tallahassee, Fla., 1981.     

Privacy and democracy

The meaning of privacy has been frequently disputed in the philosophical and legal literature since Warren and Brandeis first argued for it as a distinct and important personal and social value. Nevertheless, while the meaning of privacy is held to be vague, there is general agreement that Warren and Brandeis were correct in their assessment of its value. Theorists of democracy, on the other hand, have been ambivalent towards the realm of the private. This paper interrogates the intersection between privacy and democracy, questioning the place of privacy as a distinctly democratic value.     

Cooperation, competition, and democracy

Rawlsian framework is based on a cooperation model, which takes a democratic society as a cooperation system. Such a conception of democracy not only obscures the distinction between democracy and despotism, but also makes it hard to argue for the superiority of democracy over despotism. This article develops a different model, the competition model, to explain the historical development towards democracy and to justify democracy as a social order superior to despotism. The article argues that once we adopt the competition model to understand democracy, its distinctive characters as well as its merits will fully bear out.     

Education for democracy

Abstract

This article takes it cue from John Dewey and his views on the interrelationship between democracy and education. The basic premise is that education and democracy are inextricably linked and that in a free society the link is severed only at our peril. Education must be both public and democratic if we wish to preserve our democracy’s public spaces. We should resist calls for ‘excellence’ if this means educating only ‘the best’ and excluding those most likely to fail. On the other hand, we should likewise resist the tendency to jettison excellence (or just plain competence) in the name of educational equality.     

Political Legitimacy,the Egalitarian Challenge,and Democracy

This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy become intractable. I then argue that the egalitarian challenge is addressed where the requirements of (1) horizontal equality, (2) acceptable vertical inequality, and (3) publicity, are met and where (4) citizens have some institutionalized opportunity for a voice in decisions. I show that these conditions can be realized in non‐democratic form and conclude by explaining how the four conditions can be employed to make the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy more tractable. Overall, my ambitions are limited. I do not offer an all‐things‐considered case against democracy but I do show that (some) forms of non‐democratic government are permissible.     

Mainland Chinese and Canadian adolescents’ judgments and reasoning about the fairness of democratic and other forms of government

This study examined the judgments and reasoning of adolescents (ages 12–19 years) from three sites in urban and rural China (n = 270) and in an urban Canadian comparison sample (n = 72), about the fairness of various forms of democratic and non-democratic government. Adolescents from both China and Canada preferred democratic forms of government, such as representative or direct democracy, to non-democratic systems, such as a meritocracy and an oligarchy of the wealthy, at all ages. Adolescents appealed to fundamental democratic principles, such as representation, voice, and majority rule, to justify their judgments. Similar age-related patterns in judgments and reasoning were found across cultures and across diverse settings within China.     

Technology and the civil epistemology of democracy

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ‘civil religion’ as a system of ‘positive dogmas’, ‘without which’, as he observed, ‘a man cannot be a good citizen’, this paper advances the concept of ‘civil epistemology’ as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ‐ in the widest sense of the word ‐ as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses.     

A Taste for Justice: Unpacking Identity Politics in a Nascent Democracy

This article examines attention to justice cues in the novel context of the nascent democracy of Tanzania. Using secondary national survey data, we illustrate Tanzanian citizens' attention to justice cues. We then test two competing hypotheses about the impact of religious identity on attention to justice cues. The first hypothesized model, based on System Justification Theory, predicts that subordinate group members (Muslims) will stay more loyal than dominant group members (Christians) to their government due to a decreased attention to justice cues. The second hypothesized model, based on the relational model of procedural justice, predicts that subordinate group members (Muslims) will dissent more than dominant group members (Christians) from their government due to an increased attention to justice cues. Multiple regression and mediational analyses indicate support for the procedural justice framework, with trust in the dominant political party mediating the relationship between process satisfaction and party identification. Implications for political and psychological theorizing about democratic processes will be discussed.     

Autonomous vs. comparative status: Must we be better than others to feel good about ourselves?

Previous research has shown that people's self-esteem and their group-oriented behavior are influenced by their judgments about the status of the groups to which they belong (pride) and assessments of their status within those groups (respect). These findings are important to justice researchers because the key antecedent of such status judgments is typically found to be the assessment of the fairness of group procedures (i.e., procedural justice). Research suggests that (1) procedural justice shapes status and that (2) status shapes self-esteem and group-oriented behavior. The paper reports the results of three studies comparing two different forms of these status judgments. The first form are autonomous judgments of pride and respect that are linked to the characteristics associated with membership in different groups. People link such judgments to inclusion or membership in the group. The second are comparative judgments of pride and respect that are linked to comparisons of one's status to the status of other people or groups. The results indicate that, within groups, people are influenced primarily by autonomous assessments of status based on their internal standards, which develop from the status associated with prototypical characteristics linked to inclusion in a group. People are less strongly influenced by comparisons of their status to the status of external comparison standards. Further, justice-based status inferences are shown to be primarily autonomous, and not comparative, in nature.     

A Pluralist Reconstruction of Confucian Democracy

In this paper, I attempt to revamp Confucian democracy, which is originally presented as the communitarian corrective and cultural alternative to Western liberal democracy, into a robust democratic political theory and practice that is plausible in the societal context of pluralism. In order to do so, I first investigate the core tenets of value pluralism with reference to William Galston??s political theory, which gives full attention to the intrinsic value of diversity and human plurality particularly in the modern democratic context. I then construct a political theory of Confucian pluralist democracy by critically engaging with two dominant versions of Confucian democracy??Confucian communitarian democracy and Confucian meritocratic democracy. My key argument is threefold: (1) the unity in Confucian democracy should be interpreted not as moral unity but as constitutional unity; (2) Confucian virtues should be differentiated (or pluralized) between moral virtues and civic virtues; (3) in Confucian democracy minorities have the constitutional right to contest public norms in civil society.     

Humanisation,democracy and trust: The democratisation of the school ethos

A democratic state is characterised by more than its particular principles and institutions; its citizens must have the democratic virtues and attitudes. One such important attitude is trust, as commentators on the current attempts to create democratic institutions in the USSR emphasise. The paper gives an account of social trust and also the important, though problematic, role that distrust plays in a democracy. Finally the paper considers how the school can instantiate social trust in its own ethos.     

Experiences of justice in school and attitudes towards democracy: A matter of social exchange?

In a democratic society, school has the goal to foster democratic attitudes in students. Besides explicit attempts to do so, justice experiences in school may be crucial to develop positive attitudes towards democracy. Therefore, we studied the relationship between different dimensions of justice experiences in school and democratic attitudes. We further examined a potential mechanism underlying this relationship, namely general trust, and hypothesized that the relationship between justice experiences in school and democratic attitudes can be understood on the basis of social exchange theory. A total of 210 participants who had visited a public school gave information about their justice experiences in school, general trust, and democratic attitudes. First, it was shown that overall experiences of distributive and interactional justice predict democratic attitudes, more specifically the approval of civic and human rights and the approval of the democratic institutions. Second, we found that the relationships between overall distributive and interactional justice and the approval of civic and human rights, the approval of the democratic institutions, and the approval of democracy-supporting behaviors are each mediated by general trust which can be interpreted as a social exchange process. This study therefore highlights the role of general justice-related school experiences for the development of democratic attitudes.     

No Justice Without Democracy: A Deliberative Approach to the Global Distribution of Wealth

Abstract

The debate about global distributive justice is characterized by an often stark opposition between universalistic approaches, advocating an egalitarian global redistribution of wealth (Beitz, Pogge, Barry, Tan), and particularistic positions, aiming to justify a restriction of redistribution to the domestic community (D. Miller, R. Miller, Blake, Nagel, Rawls). I argue that an approach starting from the deliberative model of democracy (Habermas) can overcome this opposition. On the one hand, the increasingly global scope of economic interactions implies that the range of individuals concerned with the redistribution of wealth should also be increasingly universal. On the other hand, the need for democratic deliberation refers to the fact that demands of justice should be contextual and should take into account the particular circumstances, needs and values of the people concerned. Both concerns can be realized simultaneously only within a multi‐layered democratic system in which redistribution is a concern at the domestic, the international and the global level.     

Why Toleration Is Not the Appropriate Response to Dissenting Minorities' Claims

For many liberal democrats toleration has become a sort of pet‐concept, to which appeal is made in the face of a myriad issues related to the treatment of minorities. Against the inflationary use of toleration, whether understood positively as recognition or negatively as forbearance, I argue that toleration may not provide the conceptual and normative tools to understand and address the claims for accommodation raised by at least one kind of significant minority: democratic dissenting minorities. These are individuals, or aggregates of them, who oppose, on principled grounds, the outcomes of the majoritarian decision‐making process. I argue that democratic dissenting minorities' claims are better understood as calls for respect for a person's capacity for self‐legislation. I view respect as the cornerstone of justice in a liberal democracy: all norms resulting in a constraint on a person's conduct should be appropriately justified to her. I argue that the reconciliation of democratic dissenting minorities' claims requires an enhancement of the justificatory strategies of democratic decisions by enhancing in turn citizens' rights to political participation. This should be done both during decision making and after a provision is enacted by also securing space for contestation through such forms of illegal protest as civil disobedience and conscientious objection.     

“It kind of fosters a culture of interdependence”: A participatory appraisal study exploring participants' experiences of the democratic processes of a peer‐led organisation

Peer‐led mental health organisations operate through participatory democracy, enabling participants to take an active role in decision making about the running of these organisations. U.K. national policy recommends increased involvement of people accessing statutory mental health services in service development, for example, through co‐production. This study employed a participatory research method to explore participants' perspectives of the democratic processes of a U.K.‐based peer‐led mental health organisation, The Bridge Collective, and the influence of these processes on participant wellbeing. A range of data collection methods were used to gather the perspectives of 16 participants. Participatory thematic analysis identified how the organisations' democratic processes both nurtured and challenged participants' wellbeing. Three main themes captured the influences of the democratic processes on participant wellbeing: (a) negotiating relationships, (b) feeling the responsibility of involvement, and (c) sharing power. The findings identify the value of democratic processes in enabling meaningful social support and empowerment, and also identify the challenges of inclusion and workload management in participatory democracy. These insights may inform the development of co‐production methods and enable The Bridge Collective and other peer‐led organisations to further develop their processes.     

Hyperpluralism,political liberalism,and Confucian democracy

In his recent book, Zhuoyao Li presents one of the most pointed criticisms of Confucian democracy from a political liberal standpoint. Li’s central argument is that liberal democracy, predicated on Rawlsian political liberalism, is the only legitimate form of democracy in East Asia’s pluralist societal context. Li advances his normative argument against Confucian democracy, first by reaffirming Rawls’s public conception of morality, then shifting his point of reference from Rawls to Alessandro Ferrara, and finally, defending a multivariate democracy in East Asia’s pluralist societal context from the viewpoint of Ferrara’s idea of hyperpluralism. In this paper, I defend Confucian democracy as a viable political theory in pluralist East Asia by critiquing Li’s change of the point of reference from Rawls to Ferrara, his imposition of the condition of hyperpluralism on East Asia, and his sweeping logical framework that allows no normative space for Confucian democratic theory.     

Our element: Flesh and democracy in Merleau-Ponty

Although Merleau-Ponty??s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty??s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty??s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a ??no that is a yes????i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power??he would politically embrace the Weberian ??heroic liberalism????or his ??non-communist left????of parliamentary democracy.