Jane Mansbridge: Participation, Deliberation, Legitimate Coercion 9781138053366, 9781315167268

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JANE MANSBRIDGE PARTICIPATION, DELIBERATION, LEGITIMATE COERCION Edited by Melissa S. Williams

Jane Mansbridge

Jane Mansbridge’s intellectual career is marked by field-­shifting contributions to democratic theory, feminist scholarship, political science methodology, and the empirical study of social movements and direct democracy. Her work has fundamentally challenged existing paradigms in both normative political theory and empirical political science and launched new lines of scholarly inquiry on the most basic questions of the discipline: the sort of equality democracy needs, the goods of political participation, the nature of power, the purposes of deliberation, the forms of political representation, the obstacles to collective action, and the inescapable need for coercion. The editor has focused on work in three key areas: Participation and power Mansbridge’s early work on participatory democracy generated a key insight that has informed all of her subsequent work: the kind of equality we need to legitimate decisions under circumstances of common interests (equal respect) differs from the kind of equality we need when interests conflict (equal power). Deliberation and representation In the chapters in this section, Mansbridge adds nuance to democratic theory by disaggregating different modes of political representation and explicating the ways in which each can contribute to the deliberative, aggregative and expressive functions of democratic institutions. Legitimate coercion Mansbridge exemplifies a collaborative spirit through the practice of deliberative co-­ authorship, through which she and colleagues construct a taxonomy of procedures that can legitimize enforceable collective decisions. Essential reading for anyone interested in liberal conceptions of equality, participation, representation, deliberation, power and coercion. Melissa S. Williams is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Her published work addresses, inter alia, the relationship between structural injustice and democratic ideals of egalitarian inclusion, comparative political theory, and the future of democracy in the global era.

Routledge Innovators in Political Theory Edited by Terrell Carver University of Bristol

and Samuel A. Chambers

Johns Hopkins University

Routledge Innovators in Political Theory focuses on leading contemporary thinkers in political theory, highlighting the major innovations in their thought that have reshaped the field. Each volume collects both published and unpublished texts, and combines them with an interview with the thinker. The editorial introduction articulates the innovator’s key contributions in relation to political theory, and contextualises the writer’s work. Volumes in the series will be required reading for both students and scholars of 21st century politics. For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-­Innovators-in-­Political-Theory/book-­series/RIPT George Kateb Dignity, Morality, Individuality Edited by John Seery Hanna Fenichel Pitkin Politics, Justice, Action Edited by Dean Mathiowetz Richard E. Flathman Situated Concepts, Virtuosity Liberalism and Opalescent Individuality Edited by P. E. Digeser John G. Gunnell History, Discourses and Disciplines Edited by Christopher C. Robinson Fred Dallmayr Critical Phenomenology, Cross-­cultural Theory, Cosmopolitanism Edited by Farah Godrej Jane Mansbridge Participation, Deliberation, Legitimate Coercion Edited by Melissa S. Williams

Jane Mansbridge

Participation, Deliberation, Legitimate Coercion

Edited by Melissa S. Williams

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Melissa Williams and Jane Mansbridge The right of Melissa Williams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-05336-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16726-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Acknowledgements



Introduction: the political thought of Jane Mansbridge

Part I

vii 1

Participation and power

13

  1 The limits of friendship (1976)

15

  2 Feminism and democracy (1990)

37

  3  Using power/fighting power (1994)

50

Part II

Deliberation and representation

69

  4 Should Blacks represent Blacks and women represent women? A contingent “yes” (1999)

71

  5 Everyday talk in the deliberative system (1999)

101

  6 Rethinking representation (2003)

121

  7 The place of self-­interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy (2010)

148

with J ames  B ohman , S imone  C hambers , D avid  E stlund , A ndreas  F ø llesdal , A rchon  F un g , C ristina  L afont , B ernard  M anin , and J os é   L uis  M art í

vi   Contents   8 A systemic approach to deliberative democracy (2012)

175

with J ames  B ohman , S imone  C hambers , T homas  C hristiano , A rchon  F un g , J ohn  P ar k inson , D ennis  F .   T hompson , and M ar k   E .   W arren

Part III

Legitimate coercion

189

  9 On the importance of getting things done (2012)

191

10 “Deliberative negotiation” (2014)

208

co - ­author M ar k   W arren , with A ndr é   B ä chti g er , M axwell  A .   C ameron , S imone  C hambers , J ohn  F erejohn , A lan  J acobs , J ac k  Kni g ht , D aniel  N aurin , M elissa  S chwart z ber g , Y ael  T amir , D ennis  F .   T hompson , and M elissa  W illiams



An interview with Jane Mansbridge: questions from Melissa Williams Index

215 233

A

We acknowledge with deep appreciation the fine editorial and technical support of Terrell Carver, Samuel Chambers, Claire Maloney, Ting Baker, and Allie Hargreaves; and we thank Tobold Rollo for preparing the index for this volume. We are grateful to the following publishers and journals for permission to reprint the chapters in this collection: The Amer­ican Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and New York University Press for Chapter 1: “The Limits of Friendship” In Roland Pennock and John Chapman, eds., Participation in Politics: NOMOS XVI. New York: Lieber-­ Atherton, 1976 (pp. 246–275). The Amer­ican Prospect for Chapter 2: “Feminism and Democracy”, The Amer­ican Prospect 1: 126–139 (1990). Wiley Publishing and the editors of Constellations for Chapter 3: “Using Power/Fighting Power” Constellations 1(1): 53–73 (1994). Wiley Publishing and the Journal of Political Philosophy for Chapter 7: Mansbridge, Jane, with James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Føllesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin, and José Luis Martí, “The Place of Self-­ Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy 18(1): 64–100 (2010). University of Chicago Press for Chapter 4: “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes’ ”, Journal of Politics 61(3): 627–657 (1999). Oxford University Press for Chapter 5: “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System” in Stephen Macedo (ed.), Deliberative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999 (pp. 211–239). Cambridge University Press for Chapter 6: “Rethinking Representation”, Amer­ican Political Science Review 97(4): 515–528 (2003). Chapter 8: Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson, and Mark E. Warren, “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy”, in John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge, eds., Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012 (pp.  1–26). Chapter 9: “On the Importance of Getting Things Done”, PS: Political Science and ­Politics 45(1): 1–8 (2012).

viii   Acknowledgements The Amer­ican Political Science Association for Chapter 10: Warren, Mark and Mansbridge, Jane, with André Bächtiger, Maxwell A. Cameron, Simone Chambers, John Ferejohn, Alan Jacobs, Jack Knight, Daniel Naurin, Melissa Schwartzberg, Yael Tamir, Dennis F. Thompson, and Melissa Williams, “Deliberative Negotiation”, in Jane Mansbridge and C.J. Martin, eds., Negotiating Agreement in Politics. Washington, DC: Amer­ican Political Science Association (pp. 86–120). © Amer­ican Political Science Association 2014. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Introduction The political thought of Jane Mansbridge1

Jane Mansbridge’s intellectual career is marked by field-­shifting contributions to democratic theory, feminist scholarship, political science methodology, and the empirical study of social movements and direct democracy. Her work has fundamentally challenged existing paradigms in both normative political theory and empirical political science and launched new lines of scholarly inquiry on the most basic questions of our discipline: the sort of equality democracy needs, the goods of political participation, the nature of power, the purposes of deliberation, the forms of political representation, the obstacles to collective action, and the inescapable need for coercion. Mansbridge once said of her early work, “I wanted to make an ‘exploded diagram’ of participatory democracy, like the one I was using at the time to fix my car.” The “exploded diagram” – a device of pictorial representation that makes a whole more comprehensible by breaking out and analyzing its most important constituent elements – is a good metaphor for the coherence of Mansbridge’s contributions over the course of her career. The whole whose parts she has elucidated is nothing less than legitimate political order: how we can produce and execute collective decisions that serve our common interests while also doing justice to those whose interests do not prevail. The feminist idea that “the personal is political” plays on several registers throughout Mansbridge’s work. First, Mansbridge’s experiences as a political activist generated some of the defining topics of her own research. The “we” in her book Why We Lost the ERA2 (1986) included the feminist organizations in which she had played an active role since her days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was one of the founding members of the Women’s Center in 1971. Her interest in participatory democracy arose from the experiments in radical democracy that suffused the left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mansbridge was in the thick of these movements. The creative tension between scholarship and activism has intensified the challenges of Mansbridge’s research while also stimulating its deepest insights. When we study deeply contested political issues, she notes, “analysis … is a political act, and one must, as a political being as well as a scholar, take responsibility for it” (1986, p. xi). But the idea that “the personal is political” informs Mansbridge’s work in ways that go well beyond case selection. It is central to

2   Introduction her theoretical frameworks and methods of inquiry that the meaning of political ideas resides not only in canonical texts or the statements of political elites and activists, but also in their practical function in the discourse of ordinary citizens, what Mansbridge calls “everyday talk.” As she writes in Chapter 5 of this volume, In everyday talk and action [ordinary people] test new and old ideas against their daily realities, make small moves … that try to put some version of an idea into effect, and talk the ideas over with friends, sifting the usable from the unusable.… In their micronegotiations and private conversations, [they] influence the ideas and symbols available to the political process not only aggregatively, by favoring one side or another in a vote or in a public opinion survey, but also substantively, through their practice. (p. 103) By studying the ways in which ordinary people use ideas in practice, we gain empirical knowledge about the power and limits of ideas in politics. Understanding how ordinary people use political ideas is equally important for normative theory. Mansbridge’s interviews for her pioneering work, Beyond Adversary Democracy, revealed agents who “made heroic efforts to live up to their ideals, reformulating them as they discovered their limitations through painful experience” (1980, p. xii). By listening closely to citizens’ own accounts of the ideals they were trying to live up to and the challenges they confronted in doing so, Mansbridge uncovered deep gaps in democratic theory’s account of the importance of political equality (understood as equal power, or equal influence over outcomes) for democratic legitimacy. Close attention to the micro-­level intersection of the personal and the political also yields insights into key structural and institutional features of democratic politics. Mansbridge was among the first political scientists to highlight the fact that differences in rates of political participation across the lines of class, race and gender can be traced in part to the way in which participation is institutionalized. While other important studies, such as Verba, Nie and Kim’s influential Participation and Political Equality (1978), relied on survey data to demonstrate unequal participation rates, Mansbridge’s fine-­grained observation and interviews revealed patterns of inequality that would not have been evident otherwise. The costs and benefits of political participation weigh unequally on different groups of citizens, and this generates political inequality. Mansbridge’s detailed attention to the personal experience of political participation brought out clearly that these inequalities have psychological and sociocultural as well as material dimensions. Her insights into the impact of social differences on the dynamics and outcomes of political deliberation were the first contribution to what has since become a significant critical strand in theoretical debates over deliberative democracy (see, for example, Chapter 2). Mansbridge’s use of interview and participant observation techniques of research are constitutive of her larger views of theory-­building and theory-­testing

Introduction   3 in both empirical political science and normative political theory. For empirical political science, if the evidence from ground-­level actors contradicts key assumptions of our theoretical models, we must either provide a structural or system-­level explanation of the gap, or we must revise our theories. For normative political theory, a gap between idealized norms and the normative judgments of ordinary people often reveals theoretical problems that have yet to be worked out. “Theory is usually silent,” Mansbridge writes, “when theorists fail to see what does not fit. Observations from practice give us clues on how to fill in the silence.” Filling in theoretical gaps can, in turn, help to guide changes in practice through, inter alia, theoretically attentive institutional design (2002, p. 175).

Adversary and unitary democracy What sort of equality does democratic legitimacy require? This question lay at the heart of Mansbridge’s project in Beyond Adversary Democracy, and grew directly out of the dilemmas she witnessed in the women’s movement. While she shared these organizations’ commitment to equality, she found she could not agree with the view commonly expressed by their members that domination and inequality were avoidable products of the capitalist system and of individuals’ lust for power. Inequality, she believed, would emerge in any social system, whatever its ideology. The key questions were how people committed to equality could find ways to cope with the forms of inequality that exist, how they could manage those inequalities through thoughtful institutional design, and how they could avoid the internal conflicts that plagued so many organizations when inequalities that flowed from larger structural factors were blamed, sometimes unfairly, on the power lust of individuals (1980, pp. vi–vii). The Western tradition of modern political theory and its heirs in twentieth-­ century political science had developed a robust answer to the foundational question of what sort of equality political legitimacy requires, and how democratic institutions can be structured to secure it. The answer, which Mansbridge calls “adversary democracy,” has deep roots in the early modern period, particularly in Hobbes’s idea that rational egoism and asocial individualism form the core of human nature. Over the next two centuries, Hobbes’s grounding of legitimate political order in the self-­interest of equal individuals took on a democratic form both in political theory and in the development of political institutions. While Locke rejected Hobbes’s idea of an absolute sovereign, he accepted the premise that a “contrariety of interests” would inevitably produce conflict, and defended majority rule as the only justifiable way to produce decisions under conditions of conflict. With its theory of factions, Madisonian democracy accepted the inevitability of conflicting group interests and designed political institutions to yield effective decisions nonetheless. Beginning with Bentley (1908), and taken to new heights of theoretical sophistication by Schumpeter (1942), the emerging discipline of political science latched onto the idea that democratic politics is best understood as the mobilization of self-­interest in the

4   Introduction competition for political power. By the time Mansbridge began her work, it was the reigning paradigm of politics. In the normative theory of adversary democracy, the legitimacy-­conferring standard of equality is the equal protection of interests rooted in the equal value of each individual as a bearer of interests. Institutionally, democratic equality is secured by giving each individual an equally weighted vote, combined with an equal opportunity to organize with others to make demands on the political system. Politicians, whose self-­interest is in being re-­elected, respond to pressures by brokering policies that satisfy the greatest number of voters’ interests. Ideally, the system-­level outcome of this process is public policy that aggregates social interests in a balanced way (1980, p.  17). Although adversary democracy’s ideal of equality has never been realized in any actually existing national polity, it constitutes a coherent ideal of democratic legitimacy so long as one accepts the principle of self-­interest as the basis of political motivation. Adversary democracy’s hegemony as a paradigm of politics displaced a much older understanding of democracy, and with it an alternative account of political motivation. Mansbridge traces this alternative, which she calls “unitary democracy,” to classical Athens and its face-­to-face assemblies. There, decisions were reached, not primarily by adding up votes, but by citizens reasoning together about the common good. This model of democracy was much closer than the adversary model to the face-­to-face participatory democracy that Mansbridge had observed in the New England town meeting (“Selby”) and participatory workplace (“Helpline”) that she studied so closely in Beyond Adversary Democracy. The equality it embodied was not equal power in the form of equally weighted votes, but equal status grounded in respect for each member as a part of the community and a contributor to its common good. “Rereading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics two years into my study,” she notes, “I was arrested by the Greek maxim, ‘Friendship is equality’. The maxim captured perfectly the link between equality and solidarity that I had seen in these collectives” (1980, p. ix; see also Chapter 1). Because the term “unitary” imperfectly captures these ideals of friendship and has unwanted implications of homogeneity, Mansbridge says, she has never been wholly comfortable with it, but it was less unwieldy than the alternatives. The central insight of the book has lain at the core of Mansbridge’s work ever since: adversary democracy’s assumption that equal power is necessary to secure the equal protection of interests is not valid in circumstances of common interests. When interests are common, there is no gap between the interests of power-­holders and those of other citizens. Later Mansbridge would apply this insight to electoral representation, offering a “selection model” of representation with “gyroscopic” representatives who have more or less common interests with their constituents, in contrast to a “sanction model” in which representatives have conflicting interests with their constituents and so act in the constituents’ interests only in response to threatened sanctions (see Chapter 6, and Mansbridge, 2009a). The insight in the early work derived from a slow realization, after reading and rereading her interviews, that many of the participants in the participatory democracies she was

Introduction   5 studying had relatively common interests on many issues. In the context of common interest, she argued, equal political power is not necessary to secure legitimacy. Trust in power-­holders does require a background respect for the equal status of all members, and one of the virtues of formal political equality is that it signals this respect. But equal power is not a necessary condition of equal respect, and other ways of achieving equal respect, such as breaking down status hierarchies, may be more important than equal power. When interests do conflict, power needs to be distributed more equally among members in order to ensure the equal protection of their interests. In reality, there are no situations of perfectly common or perfectly conflicting interests; there is instead a spectrum. Small-­scale democracy is more favorable to common interests than large-­scale democracy, but each has both unitary and adversary features. Nor is one form of democracy normatively superior to the other; each has its own criterion of democratic equality, and each is prone to distinctive violations of egalitarian norms. The practices of unitary democracy, such as face-­to-face assembly and consensus decision making, can generate oppressive pressures to conformity. Speech-­centered forms of decision making can render less powerful those who, for structural reasons, are less comfortable speaking in public or less skilled in dominant forms of discourse. In adversary democracy, an equal vote can be mistaken for equal power in political decisions, falsely legitimizing a system that fails to protect interests equally. The challenge is to understand the characteristic practices of adversary and unitary democracy – equally weighted votes, majority rule; face-­to-face deliberation, consensus decision making – as means toward democratic legitimacy and other deeper goals like equal respect, not as ends in themselves. Institutional innovation should aim at developing individual and collective capacities to identify and act on common interests, while promoting the proportional protection of interests when they conflict. Beyond Adversary Democracy was decades ahead of its time. Before any political scientist had put the words “deliberation” and “democracy” together, it tracked the conflicts and complementarities of discourse and interest aggregation in democratic processes and set out the normative criteria for judging both. An undisputed classic, the work was pivotal in shifting from the traditional pluralist paradigm to the deliberative paradigm that now prevails in democratic theory. Its problem-­driven, empirically attentive and normatively rich argument was a vital influence in reinvigorating political theory within the larger discipline of political science. It also laid the groundwork for the productive combination of empirical and normative approaches that has been the hallmark of Mansbridge’s scholarship in the years since it was published.

The structural dimensions of egalitarian politics One of the distinctive virtues of Mansbridge’s work is her skill in crafting a compelling story while also generating new theoretical insights. Why We Lost the ERA is a tour de force of theoretically rich story-­telling, which is why, a

6   Introduction quarter-­century after its publication, it remains a core text in introductory political science courses as well as advanced seminars on gender and politics, social movements, and Amer­ican politics. It played a crucial role in bringing the study of gender into the mainstream of political science. It was also one of the first major works to pay serious attention to the rising voices of social and religious conservatives. The social forces that mobilized in the anti-­ERA movement have direct heirs in the contemporary Tea Party movement, and Mansbridge’s analysis has enduring relevance for our understanding of the politics of right and left in the United States. Movements oriented toward a public good, such as the ERA movement, face an inescapable dilemma in maintaining their momentum. On the one hand, they need to recruit and sustain the involvement of a committed core of activists. Because these activists are motivated by principles rather than material incentives, their participation is most effectively secured through a radical interpretation of the principles at stake. On the other hand, movements need to maintain a wide popular base in order to press change through the democratic system. The more radical the change they project, the narrower the base of popular support they can garner. Mansbridge calls this the “iron law of involution,” capturing the dynamics by which movements become increasingly ideological and insular by, among other things, shutting out their opponents’ arguments. In meeting their core members’ needs, they also estrange themselves from many of the ordinary citizens they need to attain their goals. Because of the strong ethos of inclusiveness that suffused the ERA movement, “if any movement could have escaped the iron law of involution, this would have been the one. That it did not fully escape means that no organization based on voluntary membership is likely to do so” (Mansbridge, 1986, p. 185). Another feature of the highly voluntary and decentralized structure of the ERA movement (as in many social movements) was the “decision by accretion,” in which major policy choices, such as the embrace of a strong egalitarian reading of the ERA’s implications for women in the military, resulted from unconscious and undebated pathways of argumentation (Mansbridge, 1986, ch. 8). Thus, one of Mansbridge’s most important practical lessons is that movements are more likely to succeed when they deploy institutional techniques to enhance deliberation and debate within the movement, both vertically and horizontally.

Self-­interest, common interests, and democratic deliberation Beyond Adversary Democracy’s analysis of the role of self-­interest in political life generated three major lines of critique of the adversary paradigm: that it was inadequate as an empirical explanation of political behavior; that it was conceptually and theoretically limited by its tendency to reduce human psychology to the motive of individual self-­interest; and that it was normatively flawed because it failed to shed light on the institutional devices through which common interests can be discovered or on the decision making practices that are most suited to

Introduction   7 circumstances of common interests. In 1990, just as rational choice methods became dominant in the discipline, Mansbridge engaged leading philosophers and social scientists in a deeper exploration of these themes, drawing out the potential and limits of theoretical models based on rational self-­interest (Mansbridge, 1990). Leading a wave of scholarship that sharply challenged rational choice theory in the following decade, Beyond Self-­Interest remains a key resource. While some of her criticisms of rational choice theory converged with those of other prominent critics, Mansbridge never dismissed the usefulness of rational choice methods for problem-­centered political science. In Beyond Self-­Interest, Mansbridge and her colleagues explored the possibilities for building on rational choice theory to encompass various forms of altruism: how altruism can be distinguished from long-­term self-­interest, and how each of these might be modeled alongside narrow individual self-­interest in mapping political motivation. As she emphasized, the primary aim of the volume was empirical, to enhance our understanding of human behavior. Again, underscoring the interconnection of empirical political science and normative political theory, however, she argued that a deeper understanding of the interaction between self-­interested and altruistic motives was vitally important for normative reasons, as well: The seemingly cautious strategy of designing institutions so that if there is little or no public spirit, the institutions will work anyway, will in some conditions erode whatever public spirit might otherwise exist. But the alternative strategy of assuming a high level of public spirit also entails serious risks, since public spirit may not survive when it is too strongly at odds with self-­interest. Observation and experimentation should make it clearer which conditions are likely to generate each of these patterns, when changing an institution actually affects motivation, and when making motivation more public-­spirited produces good rather than harmful results. (1990, pp. xii–xiii) The idea that an important function of democratic deliberation is to clarify conflicting as well as common interests poses a deeper challenge to prominent strands in democratic theory than might first appear. Building on the idea of public reason as articulated by Habermas and Rawls, leading theoretical accounts of deliberative democracy have sharply distinguished between processes of deliberation, the reasoned exchange of arguments aiming at consensus on a common good, and processes of aggregation such as voting, which resolve residual conflicts once deliberation’s capacity to yield agreement has been exhausted. Within these views, self-­interest has no legitimate role in deliberation; reasons must appeal solely to interests and commitments that others share. Mansbridge’s argument unsettles this view. “No decision putatively for the common good,” she holds, “is normatively legitimate if created by ignoring conflicting interests.” Because agents may not be fully aware, ex ante, whether their interests conflict with others’, deliberation “should be judged not only by how well [it helps] to

8   Introduction forge a common good but also by how well [it helps] to clarify conflicts” (Mansbridge, 2006, pp. 107–108). By disrupting the binary mapping of deliberation/common interests and aggregation/conflicting interests, Mansbridge’s inclusion of conflicting interests in deliberation opens up new conceptual space for modeling decision making procedures and designing institutions. In particular, it generates new ways of thinking about the relationship between deliberation, bargaining and negotiation. In standard deliberative theory, bargaining and negotiation are understood as non-­deliberative decision-­making processes, and are usually given a deeply negative valance. Mansbridge’s revision includes self-­interest (constrained by fairness) in deliberation, brings the study of legislative negotiation into empirical political science and normative thought, justifies some forms of non-­transparency, and makes possible more nuanced distinctions among different types of negotiation, some of which are fully deliberative, some partially deliberative, and some non-­deliberative (as discussed in Chapters 7 and 10). In these distinctions, the operative question is not whether interests conflict, as they invariably do in contexts where negotiation is appropriate. Rather, the crux of the difference between deliberative and non-­deliberative negotiation is whether the resolution of conflict is based on processes of mutual justification, respect, and reciprocal fairness. What is essential about deliberation, on this view, is not that it aims at consensus on a common good, but that, in the regulative ideal, it eschews the use of coercive power, relying exclusively on persuasion through mutual justification to transform agents’ positions (Mansbridge, 2009b, pp. 9–10). No political order will ever be perfectly legitimate, and even relatively consensual political orders require some degree of coercive power to achieve collective goals. Across her many works, Mansbridge’s sustained refinement of the relationship between key concepts – unitary and adversary democracy; common and conflicting interests; participation and representation; deliberation and negotiation – has been guided by the idea that we need a democratic economy of coercion in our political practices and institutional designs. Coercion can be relatively legitimate when it is democratic, treating citizens with equal respect and affording them equal power to protect their interests. The works collected in this volume develop these ideas over the entirety of Mansbridge’s career to date. Many of them were originally published as journal articles that, like her books, have become classics in political science and democratic theory. They are ordered more or less chronologically around three themes that have oriented Mansbridge’s thought from the beginning: participation and power; deliberation and representation; and legitimate coercion.

Part I  Participation and power The chapters in Part I of this volume reflect Mansbridge’s early focus on participatory democracy, which generated a key insight that has informed all of her subsequent work: the kind of equality we need to legitimate decisions under

Introduction   9 c­ ircumstances of common interests (equal respect of the sort we find in relations of friendship) is different from the kind of equality we need when interests conflict (equal power). Her study of deliberative practices in face-­to-face democracies yielded a further insight that challenged other early defenses of deliberative democracy but is now accepted wisdom, namely, that although the deliberative exchange of reasons among equals can serve to generate agreement, this is not its only function. As she articulates in Chapter 1 (“The Limits of Friendship”), egalitarian participation in shared decision making also generates the goods of equal worth and respect, individual self-­development, and the equal protection of interests. As we have seen, a central function of deliberation is to clarify for participants when they have interests in common and when their interests fundamentally conflict. One of the key contributions of feminist thinkers to democracy, she argues in Chapter 2 (“Feminism and Democracy”), has been a simultaneous attentiveness to the possibilities of “we” thinking oriented to discovering common interests and to the propensity of every mode of social practice (including consensus-­oriented talk) to reproduce existing power relations. We need to be clear-­eyed about the simultaneity of common and conflicting interests in our social relationships, and feminists are good at this balancing act. When interests do conflict, some non-­deliberative mechanism of egalitarian decision making, such as voting, is necessary to achieve a decision that participants can accept as fair. Other deliberative theorists’ negative evaluation of voting, bargaining, and other non-­deliberative modes of decision making is rooted in the judgment that these are forms of coercive power, and hence normatively suspect. Mansbridge does not flinch from acknowledging that these are, indeed, forms of coercive power. Yet in Chapter 3 (“Using Power/Fighting Power”) she argues that democracies cannot do without coercive power any more than they can do without strong traditions of resistance to the abuse of power. The challenge is to distinguish (relatively) legitimate coercion from its illegitimate forms.

Part II  Deliberation and representation Mansbridge’s work adds precision and nuance to the analytic categories of democratic theory by continually disrupting the normatively laden binaries through which we habitually understand democracy. In Beyond Adversary Democracy, she resisted the usual contrast between direct and representative democracy by acknowledging that even in face-­to-face participatory settings some participants serve representative functions by speaking for absent others. In contexts of common interests, this is unproblematic from a democratic point of view, but it can be problematic when interests conflict and disadvantaged interests are not adequately represented in deliberation. In the chapters in this section, Mansbridge adds to the nuance of deliberative democratic theory by disaggregating different modes of political representation and explicating the ways in which each can contribute to the deliberative, aggregative

10   Introduction and expressive functions of democratic institutions. In Chapter 4 (“Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes’ ”), she identifies three contexts in which descriptive representation can enhance the democratic quality of representative institutions, both by increasing the substantive representation of disadvantaged groups’ distinctive interests and by expressing the groups’ equal standing within the citizenry. Mansbridge introduces a systemic perspective on democratic processes in Chapter 5 (“Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System”). Bringing the now well-­ known concept into the field for the first time, Mansbridge here argues that we should consider both informal talk among ordinary citizens and the practices of formal reason-­giving in institutionalized settings when we assess the deliberative quality of a system of social communication as a whole. Practices that run afoul of deliberative criteria (e.g., civility or egalitarian inclusion) in one setting may interact with other processes so as to produce a better deliberative system; practices that look good from a deliberative standpoint in another specific setting can undermine systemic deliberation, perhaps by displacing healthy contestation. In Chapter 6 (“Rethinking Representation”), Mansbridge joins a systemic approach to the taxonomies of political representation that she introduced in “Should Blacks Represent Blacks …?” (Chapter 4). Here, she specifies different modes of political representation that depart from the standard “promissory” model of the principal-­agent relationship between representative and constituents. She introduces the “gyroscopic” representation characteristic of common interests with constituents, contrasting it with the more sanction-­oriented, conflicting interest-­based “anticipatory” representation, and expands on her concept of “surrogate” representation, in which elected representatives represent constituents outside their own districts, distinguishing it from Burke’s “virtual” representation (see also Chapter 4). Each alternative mode of representation carries distinct criteria for normatively evaluating the role of the representative. But the interplay of different representative roles also opens up new ways of evaluating the deliberative quality of the representative system as a whole, which is not reducible to the aggregate performance of individual representatives. Once again, we find that contingent contextual factors such as background social inequality should inform our assessment of representative functions. The two final chapters in this section exemplify Mansbridge’s innovation in deliberative theory-­building. Her novel practice of “deliberative co-­authorship” draws on the cumulative insight and experience of ad hoc intentional collectives of theorists to make two different kinds of contribution to theoretical understanding. Chapter 7 (“The Place of Self-­Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy”) insists on the normative importance of self-­interest. It looks backward, consolidating the theoretical gains of more than a decade of debate over the relationship between agreement and conflict in democratically legitimate processes, presenting a typology of the forms of “communicative agreement” that generate coercion-­minimizing democratic decisions. Chapter 8 (“A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy”) looks forward, taking the germ of the idea of a deliberative system, first launched in “Everyday Talk”

Introduction   11 (Chapter 5) to map out a research agenda for the next phase of deliberative theory-­building.

Part III  Legitimate coercion The chapters in the final section of the volume underscore and develop the central claim Mansbridge advanced in “Using Power/Fighting Power” (Chapter 3): democracies need coercive power in order to serve common interests. This point takes on particular urgency given the contemporary crisis of democratic stasis, in which both progressive emphases on resistance and mainstream polarized politics amplify older obstacles to democracy (inequality and an excessive number of veto points in an institutional order) so as to bring collective action to a virtual standstill. This problem is urgent because of the growing complexity of human problems, stemming from greater interdependence and rapid technological change, and the threats they pose to our societies and, indeed, to our planet. We need collective action as never before, but our capacity to muster it is weaker than ever. Democratic theory has contributed to this crisis, Mansbridge argues in Chapter 9 (“On the Importance of Getting Things Done”), because of its deep roots in what she calls the “resistance tradition,” the notion that institutions must be designed above all to prevent the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. This is an invaluable tradition, but it has led us to lose sight of the need for (relatively) legitimate coercion to solve collective action problems, from crumbling infrastructures to global warming. Solving “collective action” problems (or as she later called them, “free-­rider problems”) is the single most important function of government, and it very often requires coercion. In Chapter 10 (“Deliberative Negotiation”), another agenda-­setting exemplar of deliberative co-­authorship, Mansbridge collaborates with fellow political theorists and political scientists to clarify the forms of coercion-­free procedures that can legitimize enforceable collective decisions and provide normatively tenable grounds for practices, such as long incumbencies, non-­transparent spaces, and side-­payments, long considered undemocratic or antithetical to deliberation. The concept of “deliberative negotiation,” a middle way between pure deliberation and bargaining over conflicting interests, emerges as an innovative pathway by which we can forge agreements to solve urgent collective problems.

Conclusion The volume concludes with an original interview with the editor, in which Mansbridge traces the origins of her innovative ideas as a theorist in her experience as an activist. In both roles, her persistent motivation has been to remain conscious of the gap between our ideals and our actual practices without ever yielding in the commitment to make our institutions, our politics, and ourselves better. Democratic political orders are, to a significant degree, the accumulated achievement of human ingenuity. But as Mansbridge tells us, democracy remains “a

12   Introduction work in progress.” Returning to the metaphor of the “exploded diagram,” we learn from Mansbridge that in our role as scholars (not mechanics), one of our key tasks is to make accessible to human understanding the inner workings of our political orders – but we also carry a normative responsibility to shed light on how to make them work better. By putting ceaseless pressure on the systems of thought by which we make empirical and normative sense of the democratic project, Mansbridge has contributed immeasurably to this two-­sided, and common, task.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter are based on sections from Melissa S. Williams, “Beyond the Empirical–Normative Divide: The Democratic Theory of Jane Mansbridge,” (2012) PS: Political Science and Politics 45(4): 797–805. 2 The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, introduced in the U.S. Congress in 1923 and re-­introduced in 1971. The ERA was passed by both houses of Congress in 1972, but was not ratified by a sufficient number of states by an extended deadline of 1982. That deadline, it is now argued, may legally be extended.

References Bentley, Arthur. 1967 [1908]. The Process of Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1980. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Mansbridge, Jane. 1986. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mansbridge, Jane. ed. 1990. Beyond Self-­Interest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 2002. “Practice – Thought – Practice.” In Archon Fung and Eric Olin Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy. New York: Verso, 2002, 175–199. Mansbridge, Jane. 2006. “Conflict and Self-­Interest in Deliberation.” In Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents, ed. S. Besson and J. L. Martí, 107–32. London: Ashgate.  Mansbridge, Jane. 2009a. “A ‘Selection Model’ of Political Representation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (4): 369–398. Mansbridge, Jane. 2009b. “Deliberative and Non-­deliberative Negotiation.” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP09-010. http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/ wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP09-010. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1962 [1942]. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Verba, Sidney, Norman H. Nie, and Jae-­on Kim. 1978. Participation and Political Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I

Participation and power

1 The limits of friendship (1976)*

The term “participatory democracy,” apparently coined by Arnold Kaufman in I960,1 came into widespread use after 1962, when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gave it a central place in their founding Port Huron Statement. What the term meant then was unclear, and has become less clear since, as it has been applied to virtually any form of organization that brings more people than usual into the decision-­making process. In many of today’s radical organizations, however, “participatory democracy” has been more than a slogan. It has implied specific mechanisms for making decisions (1) in such a way that each member sees him- or herself as equal to others in the organization; (2) by unanimity and not by majority rule; (3) by direct democracy and not through representatives; (4) in face-­to-face assembly, not by referenda. These principles began as the principles of friendship. As Aristotle suggests, friendship is an equal relation, it does not grow or maintain itself well at a distance, and its expression is in unanimity.2 The participatory vision seeks to extend the mode of friendship to larger groups, and beyond voluntary associations to decision making on the job and in the neighborhood. It attempts to derive the formal, public procedures of government from the informal arrangements of friendship. Yet the participatory democracy of the New Left is more than a return to familistic, “ancient” or primitive social organization. It embodies ideals—like those of political equality and individual rights—that are the result of several centuries of rational-­bureaucratic thought. Participatory democrats demand that actions be taken, and decisions be made according to the universalistic criteria to which they are accustomed in a public polity. In constant tension between the informal intimacy of a friendship and the formal, public nature of a government, these small democracies must also face the related tension between their members’ conflicting desires for a life in common and for individual autonomy. They handle these tensions by making the same formulae—political equality, unanimity, direct democracy—carry two contradictory burdens. Each formula must, in one or another of its incarnations, both create a community in which an individual is one with others and protect the same individual against the others in that community. As participatory democracies grow from small groups of close acquaintances to larger associations of strangers, each formula changes its function. The ideal

16   Participation and power of equality, which a small group of friends experiences as mutual respect, becomes, as the group grows larger, an insistence on exact equality of power. The ideal of unanimity, which among friends reflects similarity in goals, becomes with growth an individual’s veto against actions of the majority. Face-­ to-face contact, which friends value for the pleasure of coming together, becomes in a larger group the insurance that no decision escapes each individual’s scrutiny. Distrust replaces trust, and the natural equality, unanimity, and directness of friendship are transformed into rules whose major purpose is the protection of the individual. Aristotle wrote that “friendship appears to hold city-­states together.”3 Friendship also appears to hold participatory democracies together—at least until they evolve into polities that only aggregate and protect individual interests. Changes in the functions of political equality, unanimity, and direct democracy accompany that evolution.

Political equality Members of a group may want an equal division of power4 for at least three reasons. They may want to shore up the group’s commitment to the equal worth of each member, insuring equality of respect. They may want each member to develop responsibility, feelings of control, and political skill. And they may want to protect members equally against the impositions of others. The first goal, equal worth and equal respect, is the most closely linked to the conditions of friendship. This is usually the initial reason that a small organization self-­ consciously pursues social, functional, and political equality. Equal worth Almost every small organization of the New Left has gone through the experience of trying to eliminate inequalities of status, interest, functional importance, and power among the jobs in the organization. In Vietnam Summer, a radical political group active in 1967, the political staff itself helped organize a “revolt of the secretaries,” because “some of the members of the political staff seemed embarrassed that, often for the first time in their Movement experience, they had others to do their ‘shit work’ for them.”5 As a result of this upheaval, the secretaries began to advise local organizing projects while the political staff did its own typing. Why? In the first place, as the Greeks said quite simply, “friendship is equality.”6 Children, who idolize their elders and enjoy dominating younger siblings, like best to play with others their own age. They want to be met and understood, challenged but not overwhelmed. Among adults, friendships form among those who feel in some way on a par, and any situation which puts people in clearly unequal roles is a threat to the friendship between them. Participatory democrats want the exhilaration, mutual trust, and reciprocity of working with equals. They want colleagues, not secretaries.

The limits of friendship   17 Second, their empathy prevents these young people from settling for an organization divided into a corps of equals and a maintenance crew. It makes them uneasy about asking others to play roles that they would not want to play themselves. They would be mistaken if they assumed that everyone else shared their own preferences in task, responsibility, or working conditions. But they are rarely mistaken in assuming that all members of an organization want at least to be regarded as equal to the others in worth, value, and dignity.7 Natural friendships are built on equality of respect. In would-­be friendships, like Vietnam Summer, members use political equality to strengthen their commitment to each others’ equal worth. They never succeed perfectly, for no one can respect all others equally. However, the constant attempt to make power more equal can keep the ideal of equal respect vividly present. Institutions devised to spread power equally guarantee some attention to each member. A goal of equal power encourages those who would otherwise concentrate only on their tasks to recognize the psychological effects of their actions on other members of the organization. Finally, the very fact that an organization cares for its individual members enough to worry about equality of power may also ­contribute to an individual’s self-­esteem. For self-­respect normally depends upon  the respect of others, and the ideal of equal power publicly affirms each member’s worth.8 By concentrating on this one means of fostering equal respect, participatory democracies sometimes neglect other means. One can encourage situations in which people see each other as competent in roles they all consider important. Equal respect can also arise from moments of emotional identification. In the first flush of discovering their common history, women in the radical women’s movement felt a tremendous sense of “sisterhood.” To feel that all women were your sisters meant that all other differences, or inequalities, faded into insignificance beside the overwhelming understanding that you had, so to speak, grown up together—shared the same fears, troubles, ways of coping, humiliations, and joys. In the era of sisterhood, institutional reminders of the distinctions and inequalities of the larger society became intolerable. We found too much in each woman to respect. To the extent that we feel we share experience with another, we feel alike, and hence in some sense equal. We think of this underlying experience when we say that although human beings may be unequal in “outward” qualities, they are equal “underneath.” Our common experience allows us to view others as somehow independent of their social roles and titles, which are clearly unequal.9 Blood brothers and sisters, unequal in skills, often feel these sentiments of identity and equality of respect. Workers, blacks, Jews, women, nationalists—all groups with a common past—can, in stressing that past, evoke feelings of identity and equality. “Fraternity” does not contradict the ideal of equality, as Lucas contends, but rests on a perception of underlying likeness.10 The shared experience that develops a perception of likeness may be deliberately and consciously created. War, working together under stress, a common “transcendent” experience, or self-­revelation in consciousness-­raising sessions

18   Participation and power and encounter groups can quickly create mutual identification, empathy, and respect.11 In young participatory democracies, a sense of experimentation, of difference from the outside world, and even of struggle against that world, reinforces the members’ points of common identity. The small size of the group allows an intense interaction that soon becomes meaningful common history. The experience of identification is a firm basis for equality of respect. When that emotional identification begins to weaken, however, participatory democracies, rather than trying to strengthen it directly, usually turn to a formal commitment to political equality. In most participatory democracies, the commitment to political equality means a good deal more than the conventional “one person, one vote.” In one women’s group in New York, each member took 12 disks as a meeting began, having to spend one each time she spoke. Most participatory groups, if they do not ask a different person to chair each meeting, use a “rotating chair,” by which each participant after speaking calls on the next, in order to prevent the domination of one chairperson. Large meetings break down into small groups to enable everyone to speak. Keniston reports that in Vietnam Summer, individuals who were not informed about the issues were sometimes included in policy-­making discussions; while the “natural” leaders with the greatest experience, the best ideas, and the surest grasp of the facts sometimes deliberately refrained from voicing their opinions lest they appear to dominate.12 Behind such drastic departures from traditional procedures lies the attempt not only to shore up with political institutions a crumbling equality of respect, but also to allow all members to develop their faculties through political participation and to protect their interests equally in the decision-­making process. Self-­development The argument from personal development through political participation appears constantly in the theoretical literature, although it is rarely considered by participatory democrats themselves. Philosophers from Aristotle through Hegel to T.H. Green have suggested that the social and political arrangements of the state should function to help citizens develop their faculties.13 J.S. Mill added an egalitarian twist by using this general principle as an argument for extending the suffrage. Arnold Kaufman drew on the tradition when he concluded that the main justification for participatory democracy “is and always has been … the contribution it can make to the development of human powers of thought, feeling and action.”14 The Port Huron Statement assumed that participatory democracy would “develop man’s unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love,” and foster his “unrealized potential for self-­cultivation, self-­direction, self-­understanding and creativity.”15 Yet widespread power, rather than equal power, suffices for this purpose. According to various versions of this argument, members of a polity ought to

The limits of friendship   19 acquire a sense of responsibility for others in the community. They ought to have the experience of control over some of the larger events that affect their lives. They ought to be able to acquire political skills through the experiences of debating, writing, finding a compromise, standing firm, trying to solve problems, thinking about public issues. None of these different forms of self-­development logically requires an equal distribution of power. Individual needs inevitably vary if “need” is defined by psychic or educational benefit. Reducing political inequality helps spread the opportunity for political development. But optimal individual growth depends on flexibility, variety, and the experience of taking as much responsibility as one wants or can stand. It does not depend on an exactly equal division of power. Equal protection of interests It is when significant conflicts of interest emerge that those affected begin to worry whether the division of power is precisely equal. Liberal tradition sees political equality primarily as a means to the equal protection of individual interests in situations of conflict. Locke argued that each person, giving up in civil society his natural right to defend his interests by force, acquired the right to have those interests protected by the government to the same extent as did other individuals. The right to a “fair and equal Representative”16 became in Locke’s civil society the individual’s guarantee of protection. The extension of a “right” to protect one’s interests equally to all sane, mature human beings in a polity has taken generations. The first conceptual step seems to have been extending the ancient idea of equal protection of the law, in which the relevant category entitled by right to equal protection was that of all human beings within a polity, to the right of all sane, mature members of that category to participate in making the law. The second step is from the right to participate to the right to equally weighted participation.17 The Supreme Court of the United States, without specific mandate in the Constitution and presumably following the logic implicit in the right to vote, itself began this last step when it decided that votes in state and federal elections must be votes of equal weight.18 Once competing interests have arisen, the liberal argument from equal protection of interests leads participatory democrats to seek mechanisms—such as direct democracy, speaking quotas, even the self-­censorship of influential members—that give each participant not just an equally weighted vote, but, as far as possible, equal power throughout the decision-­making process.19 A vote of equal weight will not suffice to protect an individual’s interests if that individual is deprived of power in spheres other than the ballot box. If the objective is to benefit the poor as much as the rich and the shy as much as the aggressive, provision must be made for the poor or shy to have as much power, electoral and nonelectoral, as the rich and the aggressive. A major problem with this argument from equal protection of interests is that the standard analogy with voting poses the issue as one of “rights.” This suggests an absolute ideal that is neither intuitively appealing nor, in most cases,

20   Participation and power practical. A democrat might prefer to conclude that if the exercise of power confers benefits, a just society would provide those benefits equally to everyone unless there were compelling reasons to do otherwise. This is not the same as saying that there is an absolute right to equal power, but it does imply that equal power is a goal of importance to be weighed against other competing goals. Weighing the costs Most people assume that the costs of a more equal distribution of power are prohibitively high, whatever the benefits of bolstered equal respect, increased political education, and the equal protection of interests. They fear that more equal participation in decision making will impair the quality of the final product and the efficiency of production. We do not have a great deal of empirical evidence about how equalizing power within organizations affects their level of efficiency. Warren Bennis and Philip Slater suggest that when creativity, innovation, adaptability, and responsiveness are at a premium, more equal influence in decision making produces a better product.20 The experiences of Israeli kibbutzim suggest that it is possible to have much more equality in economic and political structures than we now have in the United States without impairing either the quality or the quantity of the goods and services produced.21 Just as we can probably redistribute income quite a lot without reducing incentives to work,22 so we may be able to redistribute power far more than we usually imagine without having an adverse effect on the quality or quantity of the product. Beyond a certain point in any process, attempts to ensure absolutely equal power in every decision will reduce output. The higher the value one puts on the benefits of equal respect, political education and equal protection, the higher the price one will be willing to pay in output. Many participatory democrats are willing to reduce the quantity and perhaps also the quality of production quite dramatically in order to increase equality. Responding to Isaiah Berlin’s example of a symphony,23 some participatory democrats would certainly argue that if the roles of conductor and players could not be rotated or the prestige of the jobs made more equal, the musicians should consider playing music that does not require a conductor, such as chamber music or some forms of jazz. Yet even for those participatory democrats who are not especially concerned about output, the pursuit of absolute equality has high costs. By denying the existence of any inequality of power, participatory democrats lose accountability. Minimal inequalities in power do exist in all groups because all groups evolve norms and sanctions. As soon as two human beings come together, they set up rules that allow them to predict and control each other’s behavior. In various ways they punish disapproved behavior and reward the approved.24 Through this process any society or group, no matter how free of formal hierarchy,25 comes to have its most and least favored members, with corresponding inequalities in the sanctions these individuals can threaten and the rewards they

The limits of friendship   21 can bestow. One can alter the character and magnitudes of these distinctions, but pretending that none exist only obscures their effects. Inequalities in energy, in interest, in available time and expertise, or in any other quality valued by a group, always result in de facto inequalities in power. If this inequality is not acknowledged, and a group has grown so large that each member does not have an intimate acquaintance with all its operations, it becomes difficult to know who has had a major impact on a decision, to hold that person to account, and to replace him or her if necessary. Informal social connections and informal sources of information become more important in determining influence than do either the amount of time spent in the organization or the considered opinions of the membership. No one knows where to go for accurate information; those without inside knowledge feel manipulated. Eliminating formal leadership, and therefore accountability, does not eliminate inequality, but drives it underground. Every society or group also requires a division of labor, no matter how elementary. In a friendship group, in spite of some division of labor, each member is in one sense irreplaceable. The loss of that member makes a great hole in the group, changing its meaning for the others. As the group grows, different kinds of work usually become differentially important. Some members become less replaceable and therefore more “equal” than others. Participatory democracies consequently try to avoid the division of labor or rotate jobs to make such division temporary. When specialization becomes absolutely necessary, they try to ensure that all specialties have equal prestige. In practice, this often means that participatory groups unconsciously focus on areas in which none of the members has any special expertise. The radical women’s movement, for example, has a strong norm of referring whenever possible to personal experience. One function of this norm is to place all members on an equal footing by eliminating the advantage of those who have learned from books or from research. While such an emphasis promotes equal respect, it also makes less likely any enterprise that demands technical expertise and makes large long-­term projects almost impossible. Participatory groups’ eagerness to make space for the timid and inexperienced, letting them try their wings without the numbing comparison to others who can do it better, can also make those with skills reluctant to develop them. Members may begin to devalue their skills and therefore themselves. An extremely able and energetic woman in one participatory organization concluded dubiously of herself, “I don’t think that I think that I am more competent than people in any sense—well, in some sense I do, in terms of organizing things, I guess, …” and later reflected about competence that “It’s no longer something that you can go on feeling good about.”26 Any calculation of the costs and benefits of trying to achieve strict political equality has to take account of a group’s underlying reasons for wanting such equality. If the goal is primarily to promote equal respect among the members, equal political power in every decision will sometimes be less effective than shared experience and the opportunity for members to know each other on more

22   Participation and power than one functional level. If the goal is to promote the individual political growth of members of the group, a distribution according to need of the opportunity to exercise responsibility and control will almost always be more effective than a quantitatively equal apportionment of power. A plethora of small responsibilities, the rotation of office, specific training, and the general encouragement of competence give the experience of citizenship and control and teach political skills. The precisely equal distribution of power makes most sense as an ideal in a polity where decisions are made and are perceived as being made to the benefit or detriment of sets of individuals, under the assumption that the interests of those individuals ought to be protected equally. This conception of a polity is not that of a friendship.

Unanimity Just as the growth of a group and the divergence of its goals change the meaning of equality from natural mutual respect to a defensive insistence on equal power, so too growth and divergence change the procedure of unanimity or “consensus” from a device for knitting a friendship together into a public weapon against coercion. The institution of unanimity in decision making was not invented by modern participatory democrats. It is the traditional method for making decisions in communities that conceive of themselves as one body, without faction. Aristotle said of the Greek city-­states that “unanimity, which seems akin to friendship, is the principal aim of legislators. They will not tolerate faction at any cost.”27 Mike, one of William Foote Whyte’s “corner boys” in Boston’s North End in the 1930s, echoes: It is better not to have a constitution and vote on all these things. As soon as you begin deciding questions by taking a vote, you’ll see that some fellows are for you and some are against you, and in that way factions develop. It’s best to get everybody to agree first, and then you don’t have to vote.28 And an SDS article on draft resistance exhorts: You are a serious resistance: don’t vote on issues, discuss them until you can agree. All the pain of long meetings amounts to a group which knows itself well, [and] holds together with a serious, human spirit.…29 Rousseau saw majority vote as the hallmark of a polity where “in every heart the social bond is broken”: As long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will…. But when the social bond begins to be relaxed and the State to grow weak, … opinion is no longer unanimous …30 Those traditional societies that stress group cohesion—the Indian, Japanese, or Javan village councils, for example—make their decisions without a vote. Early

The limits of friendship   23 New England town meetings rarely tabulated their votes and did not enter the results in the minutes, preferring to maintain the fiction of unanimity. Committees, political caucuses, street gangs, and experimental small groups all tend to make their decisions by consensus.31 In traditional societies, insistence on consensus often works not so much to resolve conflicts as to prevent them from arising. Maintaining the unity of the group is more important than the benefits of open conflict resolution. Participatory groups value this unity. They assume that the group can be fundamentally of one mind and that differences can be worked out either by rational discussion32 or by emotional transcendence. One food coop member suggested as an answer to his group’s problems, “Just put an ounce of grass in each order,” and expected conflicts to be resolved in the emotional unity of the group. Moments of consensual unity do make a profound impression on the participants. One woman describes a crisis meeting in a radical newspaper as “the first political meeting I ever went to where I really understood consensus.” It was such an exciting meeting—almost everybody talked—there were about thirty women in the room—and it went from about a total split to finally someone saying, “Listen, if we can’t do that we don’t deserve the paper,” and then everybody saying, “Right on!” It was one of the few meetings where it goes around and then people just really come together and say “Far out!” You know it’s right. It was such a high … it was wonderful. It was such a high. In a small friendship group, unanimity expresses the desire of the group to act as one. As the group extends its boundaries but still remains a small and homogeneous community, it preserves the procedures of unanimous consensus in order to preserve its unity. This is the point at which Mike, of Boston’s North End, worried about the effect of a vote. It is the point at which Aristotle’s legislators tried to bring about unanimity. It is also, however, the point at which the procedure of unanimity comes to protect the rights of the less aggressive, less verbal, or the minority, by giving them a potential veto, making it more likely that others will listen to them and try to understand their points of view. One woman argued for consensus rather than majority rule within her organization on the grounds that: Minority groups get trashed† so easily…. One thing about consensus is that in order to reach it, you need to have discussion and really go over things so that people understand them. The trouble with majority rule is that it’s so easy just to make the decision, and nobody understands. Consensus protects the minority from being “trashed” by allowing it to command sufficient attention from the majority to make its position understood. Consensus guarantees respect and listening, by right.33 Finally, as the group becomes a public polity and important conflicts of interest develop, the liberum veto of consensus turns into a negative weapon,

24   Participation and power allowing every member of the association to carve out his or her own bill of rights, a minimum area of noninterference. In a debate on consensus as one radical constitution was hammered out, I heard most often as an argument for the procedure of unanimity, “I don’t trust anyone except myself!” This bitter, self-­protective refusal to be coerced by a majority has the most force when the potential harm to the minority is most immediately obvious, as it would be if the group were going to take illegal action.34 But within an organization, a specific subgroup like lesbians, who have had the experience of being in a permanent minority, may also fear the slow, subtle process of having their interests in that organization consistently weakened.35 They see themselves in the position of the South before 1860, and like Calhoun they want a constitution that gives them a veto. Given their generally left wing politics, most members of a participatory organization have had the experience of being in a permanent minority on national issues, and thus suspicion of majority rule is widespread. Yet consensus, while encouraging some minorities to talk, subdues others. One meeting that I considered a triumph of consensus broke into small groups for half a day at the beginning to give everyone a chance to speak, took an entire weekend to go over each issue carefully, and eventually brought potentially irreconcilable positions into harmony. The final decisions were made unanimously. Months afterwards, however, one of the participants could say, “I found myself agreeing with things at [that] meeting that if I’d been voting I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to. Consensus is often bullying unless it’s a clear consensus.” Voting by secret ballot rather than oral consensus protects the more insecure members of the community. As a participant in a town meeting reported, “If you vote by ballot you haven’t got to get up and voice your opinion, you haven’t got to—ah—you can vote yes or no and nobody’s going to know the difference.” When middle-­class students met with working- and lower-­class people in assemblies of more than 20 in Chicago’s JOIN, “voting was more democratic [than the process of reaching oral unanimity] … because the community people, intimidated by the verbalism of the student organizers, felt free to cast ballots as they wished.”36 When unanimity comes to be used in a public and formal manner to protect the individual rights of those participants who dare to use it as a veto, it also has the contradictory effects of creating deadlock and forcing other participants into positions contrary to their wishes. In this incarnation, it may not be the most effective protection against coercion.

Face-­to-face direct democracy Growth also brings changes in the meaning of direct, face-­to-face decision making. A small group gains much of its energy from the pleasure its members take in face-­to-face contact. Because face-to-­face relations are the cement of friendship,37 when a group grows or begins to diverge in its goals, its members institute face-­to-face meetings as a way to correct inaccuracies of perception, iron out differences, and create a spirit of community. They oppose referenda, for referenda do not allow the discussion that brings about a real consensus.

The limits of friendship   25 They oppose representation, for it deprives the membership of the experience of citizenship. Finally, when major conflicts of interest develop, members demand face-­to-face meetings as a protection against the potential coercion of an elite. They now perceive referenda as giving them control at only one stage of the process, when a question has been formulated, discussed, worded and placed, perhaps manipulatively, on the ballot. They now perceive representation as allowing a small group to make decisions in its own interest rather than in the interest of the members. At this last stage, the legacy of liberal consent theory provides a rationale for the requirements of both direct democracy and unanimity,38 for in Locke’s nature every man is presumptively free and thus bound in civil society only by laws to which he has given his consent. English consent theorists, in fact, never thought direct democracy practicable,39 but Rousseau pushed further in the logic of consent. “Sovereignty,” he wrote, “does not admit of representation…. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void…. The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free.”40 To young Amer­icans brought up on consent theory, who lived most of their lives with a war to which they in no way consented, such words could strike home. The authors of the Port Huron Statement believed that “the felt powerlessness of ordinary people” depended on “the actual structural separation of the people from power.”41 The Statement did not explicitly recommend direct democracy,42 but members of SDS, following its implicit logic, rejected representation in their internal governmental structure. Although leaders in the New Left were willing to mix direct democracy with representation,43 the continuation of the Vietnam War and other bitter disappointments in national politics intensified the distrust of representative institutions from below. As one young woman put it, “Everyone just has so much experience with representative democracy not working. The only way to influence anything is to be directly in on it.” The traditional Anglo-­Amer­ican fear of power, the suspicion that in elections a voter is only a means to an end he may not suspect,44 the homely knowledge that people who run for office are not like those they claim to represent,45 the proud conviction of individual uniqueness—all make representation suspect once the group grows beyond the bounds of mutual trust. Yet direct democracy is not the perfect instrument either for producing cohesion or for preventing coercion. Unless there is practically no conflict, face-­toface assemblies, designed to produce feelings of community, can backfire and intimidate the less self-reliant. Face-­to-face communication, despite its many advantages, usually increases the level of emotional tension.46 Where there are persistent conflicts, open hostility may develop. Because the fear of such hostility and disagreement is, at least in Amer­ican society, an important cause of nonparticipation in politics,47 some citizens will forgo their chance to participate in face-­to-face politics rather than expose themselves to what they feel is a frightening experience. Residents of a Vermont town say again and again of the town meeting that “all it is more or less a fight, a big argument,” observe that there are “too damn

26   Participation and power many arguments,” or sum it up by exclaiming, “I just don’t like disagreeable situations!”48 A woman in the radical women’s movement reports, “I don’t go to meetings anymore. They depress me.” The causes are the same. Face-­to-face participation in political decisions, rather than creating community may frighten away the very people it is supposed to bring into more active participation. When conflicts become extreme, direct democracy is used to guard against the domination of a few. However, replacing representative with direct democracy does not eliminate differences in power. Electing a representative may visibly deprive a voter of day-­to-day control, but the unregulated marketplace of time and energy in a direct democracy often creates an even greater distance between the active and the ordinary members. The Chicago high-­school student who wants a direct democracy because, “No one can represent me. I’m the only one who knows what I’m thinking and no one else can present my views,”49 fears for his individuality. Representation forces him into anonymity, identified only with an interest or set of interests. But for most people the practical effect of a mass meeting is worse—it results in complete invisibility. Small groups allow each person to communicate his or her views, either through speaking or through general demeanor. In large assemblies, however most people express themselves only by voting after the discussion has come to an end.50 They can contribute to the emotional tone of the discussion by murmuring, cracking jokes with their neighbors, shuffling their feet, or in other ways indicating their approbation or discontent, but as individuals they are not likely to make an impression on the assembled body. They might decide that their views have been expressed adequately by others, thus turning the mass meeting into another form of representative democracy. But because participants have no way of selecting speakers to represent them, their views may not be represented at all.

Coercion and community No one of the principles of participatory democracy inevitably requires the others. A polity may have political equality without unanimity, unanimity without equality, and face-­to-face direct democracy without either unanimity or equality. Yet in participatory democracies these three principles do serve many of the same ends, depending on where the organization lies on a spectrum from unity to diversity, informality to formality. In the small friendship group, equality, unanimity, and direct contact work to create a feeling of community, a sense of mutual claim. In the larger polity with diverse goals, the same procedures work to protect the individual members of the group against coercion. In most real participatory democracies (no longer friendships but not yet universalistic polities) equality, unanimity, and direct democracy must at the same time knit the group together and protect individuals against the group. This double function derives from the underlying hope of all participatory organizations, small and large, to create a society that is at once unitary and noncoercive. Like the otherwise dissimilar ideals of suburban “good government”

The limits of friendship   27 and the “withering away of the state,” the participatory ideal implies that some process, whether emotional or rational, can bring about solutions that are best for all and untainted by coercion. This ideal can never be fully realized. No two people have identical interests. Nor can an individual in contact with others fully escape the coercive effects of their expectations and the sanctions they may impose. Friends are able to compromise their interests and submit to group norms in a way they feel is free and spontaneous. They do not perceive costs in the relationship as costs; they do not perceive mutual sanctions held against each other as sanctions.51 “When the social bond is broken,” however, conflicts sometimes require that one party explicitly win or lose, rather than those conflicts being compromised, transfigured, or their implications ignored in the warmth of friendship. At the same time the “free rider” who takes no responsibility must be subjected to overt rather than covert coercion.52 As a group grows larger, it becomes necessary either to bear unresolved conflicts and the strain of greatly disparate contributions or to find a substitute for friendship’s “spontaneous,” “costless” compromise and compliance. The two possible substitutes are intensified social pressure or the institution of rational-­legal rules and sanctions. Most participatory groups, still modeling themselves on friendships, choose intensified social pressure. To recognize explicitly that the nature of their group had changed would lead them to consider more formal standards. Although the unitary polity is seductive to the imagination and at times immensely fulfilling to its members, such a system does not always meet everyone’s needs. Small size itself is often more coercive than large, for a small group can exert more intense pressure on its members, and in a large group the dissident can more easily find an ally.53 The small group is a powerful instrument of behavior change.54 In a nonparticipatory society, individuals, like those who join encounter or consciousness-­raising groups, may use a group’s pressure to change themselves in ways they have freely chosen. But if membership is no longer fully voluntary, the small group can become an instrument for inculcating the values of a particular political system, in the manner of Hitler’s Jugendbund or of a corporation that employs “participative” techniques. Even in the absence of conscious state or corporate direction, if every member of a society or workplace were expected to participate politically through such a group, individuals might no longer feel or be free to use participation for their own ends. They might easily be drawn into groups whose ends they did not share and find themselves manipulated in ways they did not intend. The assumption of one common interest is not, in fact, as appropriate to a neighborhood or workplace group as to a small voluntary association. In the 1970s in the United States most groups that operate on a participatory basis have a membership self-­selected from a small group of friends or potential friends, similar in age, life style, and aspiration. They are usually young, unencumbered by children or ties to a given geographical area. They are relatively free to leave the association if it does not fill their needs. Most actual neighborhoods and jobs, however, attract individuals who have no such prior attachment or common

28   Participation and power goals, who may not want to make the commitment to any group, or to a new group, and who are also, once established, less able to leave. A unitary community may not be what they want or need. At least in the United States labor unions that have preserved a fictional unanimity turn out to be more coercive than those few that have legitimated conflict and faction.55 Within a large workplace or neighborhood, small groups may be able to form on the basis of common values, aspirations, and personal liking. But since the small group is such a powerful force, the option of leaving and joining another group must always be open, and any organization composed of small groups will require a mechanism for helping people shift from group to group. For most people, getting together with new people, learning to trust them, committing oneself to them, and then leaving for either work or personal reasons is a traumatic process. A system of small groups, if it is to include mobility, almost demands the self-­reliant, autonomous personality it hopes to create.

Decentralization While members of large participatory democracies use participatory procedures to protect themselves from coercion, their more deeply held goal is a society in which coercion will seem nonexistent—a friendship. They are trying to create in their participatory democracies what Robert Redfield called a “folk society.” This is a society with little division of labor, direct and consensual in nature. It is a society so small that everybody knows everybody well, in which “all human beings admitted to the society are treated as persons; one does not deal impersonally (‘thing fashion’) with any other participant in the little world of that society.”56 A sound instinct for self-­preservation draws people to such associations, where they can find refuge from an intensely competitive society in mutual respect. It is not strange that when their associations grow beyond the bounds of a close-­knit friendship group, members should try to retain the equality of respect, the directness and the unanimity that marked their earlier experience. Yet when a participatory organization expands, and its members’ goals diverge, mechanisms that at one time served to maintain the sense of community come to be used by individuals against the group. The principles of equality, unanimity and direct, face- to-­face democracy, applied in a changed context may not always serve their new purpose of protection well, and may make it difficult for the less aggressive, or those without the right social contacts, to develop and grow within the organization. The principle of equal power can paralyze an organization, hide the real dynamics of decision making, drive competent people out, and promote a sense of lassitude and irresponsibility. The principle of unanimity can intimidate the nonverbal and the insecure, and produce immobility. The principle of direct, face-­to-face democracy can work to benefit those with the time for meetings, the social contacts that make those meetings enjoyable, and the self-­confidence to speak in them. If the goal of a more participatory society is to provide its members with a context of equal respect, direct control over events that affect them and the

The limits of friendship   29 opportunity for self-­development, it must be based on groups small enough to work as friendships. The small group, like a true friendship, can come to accept its members as they are and can give them support for growing in ways they choose. It can serve as a buffer against the pressures of a manipulative society, allowing its members to choose their own pace and direction of development. If, however, the goal of a participatory society is to protect individual interests equally, that society has already grown beyond the point of “selfless” friendship. New institutions are required in keeping with the new purpose. The most common response at this point is to establish a system in which the members periodically elect decision-­makers to represent their interests. This may be a good system for ensuring equal protection, but, aside from the obvious difficulties in guaranteeing accountability and equality of representation, it does not provide the psychological or developmental benefits of participatory democracy. Perhaps we need organizations that combine small participatory groups as primary units with a reformed representative democracy for making larger-­scale decisions. Such organizations could probably do more than traditional representative ones to ensure that all their members’ interests were protected equally, since they would bring more people into watchful, active participation.57 A mixture of small groups and representative democracy could also do more for individual psychological development, as small participatory groups would give their members, opportunities to work with others, take responsibility for others, and gain a prouder sense of themselves. Finally, the small groups in such a “mixed” organization could provide their members with a refuge of equal respect. The problems of arranging genuinely supportive small groups and designing representative institutions that can tie them together make the enterprise I suggest difficult. The real obstacle, however, is that no one now wants such organizations. Most reformers seek only to expand the right to representation, e.g., by having workers elect their managers or by having neighborhoods elect their school boards. Participatory activists, seduced by the experiences they have tasted on a smaller scale and perhaps by the power that accrues to activists in a large “unitary” group, envision the ideal large organization and even the ideal nation-­state as friendships. Yet both solutions remain flawed. Traditional representative structures seldom help people develop their faculties or reduce their sense of powerlessness. Participatory systems based on mass assemblies fail when they try to stretch the principles of direct, face-­to-face, consensual, egalitarian democracy beyond the bounds of friendship.

Notes   * This chapter is a lightly edited version of Jane Mansbridge, “The Limits of Friendship,” in Roland Pennock and John Chapman, eds., Participation in Politics: NOMOS XVI (New York: Lieber-­Atherton, 1976), pp. 246–275.   † “Trashing,” which originally meant looting and breaking windows in a riot, involves hurting a person in a way that treats him with disrespect, as a dominant majority within a group might ignore the interests and feelings of a minority.

30   Participation and power   1 Arnold Kaufman, “Human Nature and Participatory Democracy,” in Responsibility (Nomos III), ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), pp. 266–289.   2 See Aristotle, Ethics, trans. John Warrington (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1963). On equality, pp. 174, 179, 202 (1157b, 1159b, 1168b); on direct association, pp. 173, 211 (1157b, 1171b–1172a); on unanimity, pp. 167, 199–200 (1155a, 1167a–1167b).   3 Aristotle, Ethics, p. 167 (1155a). Later, he added that such a city could not feasibly hold more than 100,000 inhabitants, p. 208 (1170b).   4 The definition of power used throughout this essay combines Bachrach and Baratz’s “power” (a relationship that exists when there is a conflict of interest between two or more persons and groups, when B actually bows to A’s wishes, and when A can threaten to invoke sanctions), that “force” (when A achieves his goal in the face of B’s noncompliance) and their “manipulation” (a subcategory of “force”). It specifically excludes what they term “influence” (when one person causes the other to change his course of action without resorting to either a tacit or an overt threat of severe deprivation). See Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework,” Amer­ican Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 632–639. See also Roderick Bell, David Edwards, and Harrison Wagner, Political Power (New York: The Free Press, 1969).   5 Kenneth Keniston, The Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 160.   6 “Philotes isotes legetai,” Aristotle, Ethics, p. 174 (1157b).   7 See James C. Davies, Human Nature in Politics (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 45. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 178, 337, prefers “mutual” to “equal” respect. This formulation has the advantage of avoiding an implied requirement of absolute, mathematical equality while retaining the notions of a meaningful minimum level of respect and the recognition of self by other. I have kept the traditional “equality of respect” because when “mutual” implies “given and received in equal amount” or “the same feelings one for another” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1961, my emphasis), the notion of equality has slipped in again unannounced. When “mutual” implies mere reciprocity and allows great unevenness among the parties, it does not meet the needs I describe. When Robert Lane’s New Haven working men say, “The rich guy—because he’s got money he’s no better than I am,” or “I think I’m just as good as anybody else, I don’t think there’s any of them that I would say are better,” they want more than to be treated humanely, just because they are human beings (see per contra, J.R. Lucas, “Against Equality,” Philosophy, 40 [1965J, 298). They want more than the moral equality that Stoics extended to all men by virtue of man’s capacity to reason, and more than the spiritual equality the Christians extended to all men as children of God. They want respect, and on some level they want as much respect as anyone else. They want equal respect. Lane himself asserts that “it seems probable that when men assert their own equality in this vague sense … something other than moral or spiritual equality is at issue” (Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology [New York: The Free Press, 1962], p.  67.) The Quakers, who define their doctrine of equality as “equality of respect,” believe that it should result in the “absence of all words and behavior based on class, racial or social distinctions.” Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years (New York: Harper, 1952), pp. 131, 133. For an analysis of different derivations of the concept of equality of respect and a brief criticism of Kant’s derivation from man’s capacity to reason, see Bernard Williams, “The Idea of Equality,” Philosophy, Politics and Society, eds. Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), pp. 115–116. The concept is problematic. Williams, in the best philosophical discussion of the idea to date, “confesses” to “rather hazy notions” and to “vague and inconclusive conclusions” (Williams, “Idea,” pp. 44 and 42), while Runciman concludes that “no formulation of the idea, including Kant’s famous precept about treating men as ends but not means, has been

The limits of friendship   31 found to be satisfactory” (W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], p. 275).   8 Compare Rawls, Justice, p. 178.   9 See Williams, “Idea,” pp.  117–118, and Runciman, Deprivation, p.  275. Williams suggests that “each man is owed an effort at identification,” at seeing the world “from his point of view” (p. 117). To the extent that it is possible to conjure up empathy by an effort of the will, this would seem to be our natural obligation. However, the more common situation is that an unwilled, perhaps unwillable, empathy produces equality of respect. John Plamenatz and Stanley Benn also see the origins of equality of respect in identification. Plamenatz writes that equality of respect is at bottom an indifference to all social distinctions, an indifference born of sympathy and respect for what every human creature inevitably feels … I know that what I am to myself, they are to themselves, and there is therefore a sense in which all talk of superiorities and inferiorities between us is trivial and absurd (John P. Plamenatz, “Equality of Opportunity,” Aspects of Human Equality, ed. Lyman Bryson et al. [New York: Harper & Row, 1957], reprinted in William T. Blackstone, ed., The Concept of Equality [Minneapolis, MN: Burgess Publishing Co., 1969], p. 95)

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On the origins of equal respect for the interests of all men, Benn writes, “possibly … each of us sees in other men the image of himself. So he recognizes in them what he knows in his own experience….” (Stanley Benn, “Egalitarianism and the Equal Consideration of Interests,” in Equality [Nomos IX], eds. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman [New York: Atherton Press, 1967], p. 70.) However, Benn’s final conception of equality of respect is different from the one I suggest here, and Plamenatz concludes, in an argument that would not, I think, convince Lane’s working men, Brinton’s Quakers, or my participatory democrats, that equality of respect “perhaps ought not to be called equality.… We must not confuse a moral (perhaps even a religious) feeling with a social condition.” John Schaar agrees with Plamenatz that the sentiment of equality of respect lies in the “realm of relations among men where notions of equality have no relevance” (John H. Schaar, “Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond,” in Equality [Nomos IX], pp. 248–249). “Fraternity” does demand that we treat each person “as a person for him- or herself and not simply as the bearer of certain characteristics” (Lucas, “Against Equality,” pp. 306–307). However, the process of being recognized for oneself must begin with others’ empathy, their having had to some extent the same experiences themselves. The term “fraternity” belongs to a time when the only conceivable citizenry was male, and the public virtues (as the word “virtue” itself suggests) were thought to derive from the quality of being male. It has an implication of male bonding which I do not intend here. Unfortunately, the term “community,” with its implications of place, does not capture the depth of a one-­to-one relationship, and “sisterhood” has no history of meaning on which to call. See, for example, Muzafer Sherif, In Common Predicament (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp. 71–93. Shared experience is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for equality of respect. Participants in a shared experience can earn opprobrium as well as respect. Keniston, Young Radicals, p. 166. Although for the Greeks participation in the polity developed the true nature of man, Christianity tended to separate the spiritual and secular functions. Rousseau revived the pre-­Christian vision of a state that would make men moral, virtuous, and free, and in so doing touched off a nineteenth-­century fascination with the goal of the development of human faculties that attracted socialists and conservatives alike. St. Simon, Feuerbach, minor social writers like Mattaï (caricatured by Marx in The German

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Ideology), Marx himself, James Mill, J.S. Mill, T.H. Green, and in America John C. Calhoun all preached in different ways the “development of the faculties.” Kaufman, “Human Nature,” p.  272. See also Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p.  27: “the major function of participation is an educative one.” “The Port Huron Statement,” in The New Radicals, eds. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 154. The Statement’s full formulation suggests in its wording that the polity should function as a therapeutic community, following the standard of the full development of one’s creative powers set by psychologists and psychiatrists like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm and Gordon Allport. (See Marie Jahoda, Current Concepts of Mental Health [New York: Basic Books, 1956], pp. 24–35.) John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: New Amer­ ican Library), pp. 346, 419 (TI 54, 158). In a more modern formulation that does not deal explicitly with political equality, Stanley Benn argues that the principle of formal equality (treat equal cases equally) combines with that of universal humanity (respect for persons qua persons) to produce “a fundamental equality of claim,” resulting in the obligation to respect the interests of all persons equally (Benn, “Egalitarianism,” p. 67). On the distinction between “equal right to” and “right to equal,” see Richard Wollheim, “Equality and Equal Rights,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1955–1956), reprinted in Justice and Social Policy, ed. Frederick A. Olafson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1961), p. 111. Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 at 7 (1963). The Court based its newly created right to an equal vote neither on Locke nor on considerations of outcome, but on Article I, section 2 of the Constitution of the United States, which states simply that Representatives to Congress shall be chosen “by the People of the several States.” Throughout this chapter I have assumed that the institutions of participatory democracy were designed to achieve the equal distribution of power. Some participatory democrats speak and write as if this indeed were their goal (e.g., Pateman, Participation, pp. 43, 69; Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism [Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1967], p. 89), and 1 have adopted this assumption for the sake of simplicity. In fact, however, people do not usually want to exercise equal power in every decision that in any way affects them. They want potential power, or, as Robert Dahl once defined political equality, “the indefinitely enduring opportunity to exercise as much power as any other citizen” (Robert A. Dahl, “Power, Pluralism and Democracy: A Modest Proposal,” paper delivered at the Amer­ican Political Science Association meeting, Chicago, September 9–12, 1964, cited in Bachrach, Theory, pp. 83–92). This formulation, if applied seriously, would result in practice in most of the devices participatory democrats now use to curb the unequal accumulation of power. However, it opens the door, as does any wording involving “opportunity,” to controversy about the reasons for nonparticipation. Traditional notions of equal opportunity are closely bound up with notions about what people “deserve.” Under the auspices of desert, “equality of opportunity” can mask a simple acceptance of the marketplace of supply and demand at any given time. But even John Rawls, who in the economic realm looks for a “conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment” including “even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense” (Rawls, Justice, pp. 15, 74), calls only for “fair access to participation” in the political realm. His analysis is based in part on the incorrect assumption that if we were to eliminate only the financial obstacles to equal access, making access “fair” (p. 225), then the small fraction of persons who devote most of their time to politics would be “drawn more or less equally from all sectors in society” (p. 228). Bernard Williams’ suggestion that

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equal opportunity is not fair if any of the unsuccessful sections of society is “under a disadvantage which could be removed by further reform or social action” (Williams, “Idea,” p. 127) itself leaves open two problems. First, in a situation of relative reward, removing disadvantages entails removing advantages, and creates equal result. Second, it does not indicate why “sections of society” should be defined economically rather than psychologically or culturally. Transferring the debate between equal opportunity and equal result to the political realm, however, requires a detailed analysis which is not central to this chapter. Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). For discussion of the “participation hypothesis” that people will accept change more easily if they participate in the decision to make the change, see Sidney Verba, Small Groups and Political Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 206–243. For studies on the greater accuracy of group over individual decision making, see Dean C. Barnlund, “A Comparative Study of Individual, Majority and Group Judgement,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (January 1959), 55–60. For the “contingency theory” argument that democratic decision making is effective only on some tasks and among some individuals, see Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Organization and Environment (Boston, MA: Division of Research, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, 1967). Haim Barkai, “The Kibbutz as a Social Institution,” Dissent, 19 (Spring 1972), 354–370. George F. Break, “Income Taxes and Incentives to Work,” Amer­ican Economic Review, 47 (September 1957), 529–549. Isaiah Berlin, “Equality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–1956), in Blackstone, Concept, pp. 23–24. For this general point and a brief history of the debate on the “functional” theory of stratification, see Ralf Dahrendorf, “On the Origin of Social Inequality,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, eds. Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), pp. 97–108. Also, Dennis Wrong, “The Functional Theory of Stratification: Some Neglected Considerations,” and Wilbert E. Moore, “But Some Are More Equal Than Others,” both in The Logic of Social Hierarchies, ed. Edward O. Laumann et al. (Chicago, IL: Markham, 1970), pp. 132–142, 143–148. Walter B. Miller, “Two Concepts of Authority,” The Amer­ican Anthropologist (April 1955), reprinted in Comparative Studies in Administration, ed. James D. Thompson et al. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959), pp. 93–115, discusses tribes that operate without hierarchy. Women’s liberation interview, July 1972. Further quotations from interviews will not be footnoted. I conducted these interviews in participatory democracies of the New Left and in a Vermont town meeting between September 1971 and July 1972. Aristotle, Ethics, p. 167 [1155a]; see also pp. 199–200 [1167a–1167b]. William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1943), p. 96. Dee Jacobsen, “We’ve Got to Reach Our Own People” (1967), quoted in Staughton Lynd, “Prospects for the New Left,” Liberation 13 (January 1971), 22. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 102. Rousseau assumed that a city as large as Rome, at 400,000, could act as a single body (pp. 89–90). For India and Japan, see F.G. Bailey, “Decisions by Consensus in Councils and Committees,” Political Systems and the Distribution of Power, ed. Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, 1965), pp. 1–20, Yasumasa Kuroda, “Psychological Aspects of Community Power Structure: Leaders and Rank-­and-File Citizens in Reed Town, Japan” (Southwestern) Social Science Quarterly, 48 (December 1967), 434, n. 4, and Verba, Small Groups, p. 27.

34   Participation and power

32 33

34 35

36 37 38

For New England town meetings, see Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms (New York: Knopf, 1970). For committees, see James David Barber, Power in Committee (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1966). For political caucuses, see R.T. McKenzie, British Political Parties (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1955), pp.  52–54, and Verba, Small Groups, pp. 28–29. For street gangs, see Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 194. On consensus in small groups, see Verba, Small Groups, p.  27, Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 74–75, and Keniston, Young Radicals, p. 158. For a specifically religious form of consensus, see Brinton, Friends, pp.  100, 106, 109, and Benjamin Zablocki. The Joyful Community (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 155–157, 175, 315–317. Heinz Eulau, in “Logics of Rationality in Unanimous Decision-­Making,” (Rational Decision [Nomos VII] ed. Carl J. Friedrich [New York: Atherton Press, 1964]), advances a typology of the uses of unanimity roughly parallel to mine. This typology ranges from “spontaneous unanimity,” which “has the effect of making each participant equal in status and power to every other participant, and … assures him membership in the decisive group” (p.  48) to “injunctive unanimity,” in which “the individual participant … uses his dissent whenever collective action seems to threaten his interests” (p. 50). See Verba, Small Groups, p. 224 on the “no-­conflict assumption.” This care for the feelings of others in the group is a marked feature of participatory democracies. Jacobs and Landau, New Radicals (p. 30), write of the 1965 Cleveland SDS, “they exhibit great tolerance, and no speaker is silenced, no matter how irrelevant or repetitious.” Keniston, Young Radicals (p. 167), reports on the 1967 Vietnam Summer radicals that “everyone is to be completely honest, open, and direct with everyone else, and … all are to have a full say regardless of experience and competence.” A radical women’s newspaper exhorts its readers to “commit ourselves to respecting each other (really listening to a problem stated and hearing the person struggle with that problem).” Lore Hammond, “On Community,” It Ain’t Me Babe, 1 (September 4–17, 1970), 9. See the analysis of consensus in draft resistance groups in Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 158. Michael Walzer argues that by participating in the process of majority decision making, minorities agree to the legitimacy of the final decision, “hoping that one day they will not lose out and will be deferred to in turn.” Michael Walzer, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” Obligations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 47. This is the gamble participatory democrats refuse to take. Lynd, “Prospects,” p. 22. Aristotle, Ethics, pp. 173, 211 (1157b, 1171b–1172a). See also George Homans, The Human Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950), pp. 111–118. Robert Paul Wolff, in In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), argues for direct unanimous democracy on the Kantian grounds that since man has the capacity to choose and to reason about his choices, he is under a continuing moral obligation to take responsibility for those choices. Therefore, “the primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled” (p. 18). Even if one accepts the Kantian derivation of morality from reason upon which these linkages depend, Wolff ’s theory seems to reduce the concept of legitimacy to little more than personal self-­determination. Laws turn out to have no other source of authority than our own desires. And strangely, under Wolff ’s own terms, even direct unanimous democracy cannot produce a law that must be obeyed, for after the unanimous, direct decision takes place, people and circumstances change. To obey a law later simply because one has made it one self at an earlier time is still a form of being ruled—this time by a younger self. One of the appeals of direct democracy is, nevertheless, its perceived greater legitimacy. If laws are more or less legitimate as they compel obedience through one’s

The limits of friendship   35

39

40 41 42

43

44

45

46

sense of the justice of the procedure by which they were made, laws to which one gives one’s personal assent will in almost every circumstance be accepted as legitimate. In an era when most models of authority are considered illegitimate and laws are suspect, organizations must rely on the most obvious legitimating techniques. Direct unanimous democracy is one of these. In the Putney Debates, William Petty argued only for the right to “an equal voice in elections’’ (A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951], p.  53). He assumed that “men when they were in so great numbers that every man could not give his voice” (p. 62) chose representatives as a practical matter. Petty even saw the choosing of representatives as taking place at the moment of man’s entrance into the state of government: “Whereas before there was a government every man had such a voice, and afterwards … they did choose representatives, and put themselves into forms of government …” (Idem). John Locke also assumed no difference in kind between direct consent and consent through a representative. He wrote that political judgments “indeed are [man’s] own Judgments, they being made by himself, or his Representative” (Locke, Two Treatises, p. 368) and “it must be with his own Consent, i.e., the Consent of the Majority, giving it either by themselves, or their Representatives chosen by them” (p.  408). (Both emphases mine.) In the Debates it was Ireton, who, to further his case against extension of the suffrage, had phrased the question, “Whether a man can be bound by any law that he doth not consent to?” The more radical Wildman carefully used the phrasing, “Whether any person can justly be bound by law, who doth not give his consent that such persons should make laws for him?” (Woodhouse, Puritanism, p. 66). Rousseau, Social Contract, pp. 94, 96. Rousseau was referring to “sovereignty,” the framing of general laws, not day-­to-day “government.” See Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 19–20. “The Port Huron Statement,” in Jacobs and Landau, New Radicals, p. 159. The Statement says, “In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: [1] that decision-­making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings …” (p.  155). “Public groupings” may have meant not mass assemblies, but decision making by the public, as opposed to private enterprise. The rest of the Statement suggests improvements in a basic representative structure. See Lynd, “Prospects”; Richard Rothstein, “Representative Democracy in SDS,” Liberation, 16 (February 1972), 10; Norman Fruchter, “SDS: In and Out of Context,” Liberation, 16 (February 1972), 19; Edward Greer, “The New Amer­ican Movement,” The Nation, 214 (January 17, 1972), 83; see also Christopher Lasch, “Can the Left Rise Again?” New York Review of Books, 17 (October 21, 1971), 36; Michael Walzer, “Notes for Whoever’s Left,” Dissent, 19 (Spring 1972), 312–313; Arnold S. Kaufman, “Participatory Democracy: Ten Years Later,” La Table Ronde, No. 251–252 (December–January, 1968), 216, reprinted in The Bias of Pluralism, ed. William E. Connolly (New York: Atherton Press, 1971), Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17 (1972–73), 151–165. By its nature, the representative system encourages the representative to view his voters as means to his own advancement, and they to view him as a means. In a small­scale direct democracy each person must pay attention, if not to the others’ whole personalities, at least to a larger part of them than their votes. The experience of young participatory democrats with student government has convinced many that “student government types” are different in personality and interest from those they claim to represent. Evidence from my own case studies indicates that this is also true of activists in a direct democracy. Harold J. Leavitt, Managerial Psychology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 141–150.

36   Participation and power 47 Morris Rosenberg, “Some Determinants of Political Apathy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 18 (1954–55), 349, 351. 48 Almost a quarter of the townspeople interviewed mentioned their aversion to arguments, although the open-­ended interview was not designed to elicit this response. See Jane Mansbridge, “Town Meeting Democracy,” Working Papers, 1 (Summer 1973), 8–9. 49 Center for New Schools, “Strengthening Alternative High Schools,” Harvard Educational Review, 3 (1972), 319. 50 See Bertrand de Jouvenel, “The Chairman’s Problem,” Amer­ican Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 368, and Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), pp. 66–68. Dahl and Tufte’s book, published after this essay had been written, takes up several of the same issues. 51 In Street Corner Society, William Foote Whyte observes, Once Doc asked me to do something for him, and I said that he had done so much for me that I welcomed the chance to reciprocate. He objected: “I don’t want it that way. I want you to do this for me because you’re my friend. That’s all.”  (Whyte, Street Corner, p. 257)

52 53 54

55 56

57

George Homans uses this passage to illustrate “a norm that is one of the world’s commonest: if a man does a favor for you, you must do a roughly equivalent favor for him in return” (Homans, Human Group, p. 285). This “exchange theory” illuminates one aspect of human interaction. But for the purpose of describing friendship it is more important that Doc insisted on acting as if no exchange existed. We generally put our friendships as far as possible out of the realm of equivalence. We try not to treat them like commercial transactions. See Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Olson specifically excludes groups that I would term “friendships” from his analysis (p. 6, n. 6, p. 61, n. 17, pp. 160–162). Dahl and Tufte, Size, p. 90. See Verba, Small Groups, pp. 22–29; Kurt Lewin, “Group Decision and Social Change,” in Readings in Social Psychology, eds. Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), and Edith Bennett, “Discussion, Decision, Commitment and Consensus in ‘Group Decision’,” Human Relations, 8 (1955), 251–273. Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956). Robert Redfield, “The Folk Society,” The Amer­ican Journal of Sociology, 52 (1947), 301. It was from Redfield’s work that Kurt Vonnegut developed his First Law of Life, that “Human beings become increasingly contented as they approach the simpleminded, brotherly conditions of a folk society” (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Fiftieth Annual Address to The Amer­ican Academy of Arts and Letters and The National Institute of Arts and Letters,” reprinted in Vogue, 160 [August 15, 1972], 57.) See also Rawls, Justice, pp.  441, 442, and Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), pp. 285, 310, 317. The sociologists and anthropologists who in some way distinguish between these two forms of social organization include not only Redfield, but also Tönnies (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), Durkheim (organic and mechanical), Weber (communal and associative) and Cooley (primary and secondary groups). Even members of nonpolitical associations develop skills and interests within these associations that subsequently lead them to try to influence decisions in the larger polity. See Herbert Maccoby, “Differential Political Activity of Participants in a Voluntary Association,” Amer­ican Sociological Review, 23 (1958), 524, and Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 185.

2

Feminism and democracy (1990)1

For centuries, while men ran governments and wrote political philosophy, the experience of women had little influence on democratic practice or thought. Recently, however, feminist ideas have been at the center of an emerging debate about the nature of democratic politics. The dominant tradition in political science sees democracy primarily as a method of summing up individual desires rooted in self-­interest. The tradition’s critics emphasize that any workable democracy requires that its citizens and representatives think not only as “I,” but also as “we.” Democracy involves public discussion of common problems, not just a silent counting of individual hands. And when people talk together, the discussion can sometimes lead the participants to see their own stake in the broader interests of the community. Indeed, at its best, the democratic process resolves conflict not only by majority will, but by discovering answers that integrate the interests of minorities. Thus a “deliberative democracy” does not simply register preferences that individuals already have; it encourages citizens to think about their interests differently. Two strands of feminist writing illuminate the debate on deliberative democracy. One strand, which celebrates women’s greater nurturance, modifies and enriches the deliberative framework by providing images and models of practice from women’s experience. In this view, women’s socialization and role in childrearing, among other causes, makes them especially concerned to transform “I” into “we” and to seek solutions to conflict that accommodate diverse and often suppressed desires. In our society women are usually brought up to identify their own good with that of others, especially their children and husbands. More than men, women build their identities through relationships with friends. As Jennifer Nedelsky puts it, the female self has more “permeable” boundaries. Feminist writers propose this capacity for broader self-­definition as a model for democratic politics. Yet, as feminists are also well aware, the very capacity to identify with others can easily be manipulated to the disadvantage of women. A second strand of feminist thought, which focuses on male oppression, warns against deliberation serving as a mask for domination. Permeability, Andrea Dworkin demonstrates, is the avenue for invasion as well as intimacy. The transformation of “I” into “we” brought about through political deliberation can easily mask subtle forms

38   Participation and power of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others. Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover that they are not heard. Feminists who focus on the inequality of power between men and women point to the ways women are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say “yes” when they mean “no.” These same insights help us to grasp other forms of domination, such as those based on wealth, that can also infect the deliberative process. So, as political theorists turn to thinking about democracy as deliberation, feminist thought lends both encouragement and caution. Feminists bring to the new stress on deliberation experiences of a self accustomed to encompassing others’ welfare in its own and achieving that common welfare more by persuasion than by power. Yet, feminists also bring a vivid recognition of the capacity of a dominant group to silence or ignore voices it does not wish to hear.

Democracy as deliberation Democracy originally meant deliberative democracy. Aristotle, while not a democrat, still concluded that the people in their deliberative capacity could come to better decisions on many matters than could an expert – “just as a feast to which many contribute is better than one provided by a single person.” The great writers on democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw democracy as primarily a way of reasoning together to promote the common good. James Madison thought that factions pitted against one another could cancel each other out, allowing men of public virtue the space to deliberate and make wise decisions. John Stuart Mill argued that the most important business of a representative assembly was “talk,” bringing to bear different perspectives on the public’s interests. Before World War II, Ernest Barker, the great translator of Aristotle’s Politics, defined democracy not, in its essence, as a matter of voting, but rather as “a method of government by laying heads together, in a common debate in which all share, to attain a result which as many as possible are agreed in accepting.” The political thought that emerged from World War II reversed this emphasis on deliberation and the common good, demanding the recognition of power and conflict. Schools of thought as disparate and mutually contradictory as those of Marx, Freud, Arthur Bentley (founder of the group conflict view of politics), and neoclassical economics all assumed a political world based on self-­interest, power, and competing interests. In 1942 the economist Joseph Schumpeter formalized a deeply influential theory that recast democracy as a marketplace. In democracy, as Schumpeter understood it, there is no common good or public interest. Voters pursue their individual interests by making demands on the political system in proportion to the intensity of their feelings. Politicians, also pursuing their own interests, adopt policies that buy them votes, thus ensuring accountability. To stay in office,

Feminism and democracy   39 p­ oliticians act like entrepreneurs and brokers, looking for formulas that satisfy as many interests as possible. The decisions that emerge from the interchange between self-­interested voters and self-­interested brokers come as close as possible to a balanced sum of individual interests. In politics as marketplace, candidates are commodities, selling themselves or being sold. For a generation in Amer­ican political science, Schumpeter’s formulation underlay the dominant understanding of democratic practice. It also seemed to many to represent a democratic ideal. The study of pluralism, interest groups, and who gets what, where, when, and how, typically assumed that citizens (and their representatives) were self-­interested and that interests would conflict. Most of those who criticized the Amer­ican polity, whether from the right, the mainstream, or the left, also agreed with these underlying assumptions about politics as power. Ten years ago, the tide began to turn again. A few political scientists began to point out that some legislative actions were inexplicable unless representatives cared about good public policy as well as reelection. Legislators in the House and Senate, for example, voted in the late 1970s and early 1980s to deregulate the airline and trucking industries, a move they thought would benefit the public. They did so against strong lobbying by both the unions and the industries, which had close relations with the regulatory commissions. Political scientists now also noticed that citizens took stands on issues like Vietnam and busing less because the policy they favored would benefit them than because they thought that policy was right. In small towns the concern of citizens for the common good was, if anything, even stronger. My own study of a small New England town and a collectively-­ run workplace convinced me that the implicit theory of democracy in these small polities differed sharply from Schumpeter’s marketplace model. Schumpeter handled conflict, in theory, by counting and weighing preferences. The members of the communities I came to know assumed that on many issues there was a common good and that reasoning together – deliberation – could let them discover or create that good. When recent democratic theorists reject the conception of democracy as only a mechanism for aggregating conflicting and self-­interested preferences, they draw on several independent philosophical traditions. J.G.A. Pocock and Garry Wills have demonstrated that the framers of the Amer­ican Constitution, far from reflecting only Lockean individualism, wanted to promote both public spirit and benevolence. Pocock traces the concern for public spirit to Machiavelli’s writing on the corruption of republican virtue in Florence; Wills traces the concern for benevolence to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cass Sunstein argues that the United States Supreme Court has never countenanced a theory of democracy based purely on aggregating preferences. Although the Court will generally not look beneath the rationale that legislators present, it has always insisted in principle that legislation be guided by a public interest. Jürgen Habermas, writing on public spaces and the characteristics of an ideal “speech situation,” has inspired many to ask what institutions and structures of power are most hospitable to public deliberation.

40   Participation and power The new deliberative theorists have suggested various institutional changes to renew the democratic process. •

•

•

Infusions of direct democracy. Decentralizing some decisions to neighborhood assemblies and relying more on city, state, and national referenda might help promote deliberation. Benjamin Barber suggests that the first stage of a referendum be multiple choice, phrased to allow voter to express their intensity of support and to endorse a principle but not the specific proposal. That stage might be tied to attendance at a deliberative neighborhood assembly. The second stage, after a deliberative period of several months, would be the more traditional yes/no ballot. Election reforms. The framework of campaign debates is a proper subject for legislation. The League of Women Voters’ format for debates should be reinstated and expanded to cover candidates on the state and city levels. Public funds should finance large blocks of television time for discussing the issues. And by closing schools and stores and prohibiting sports events on election day as well as the last day of campaigns, the nation could explicitly set aside time for discussion and voter registration. The purpose would be symbolic as well as practical: to signal the value and importance of public discussion. Policy juries. Governments could empanel a representative sample of an affected population to review evidence, deliberate on specific policy issues, and advise the appropriate legislature. Minnesota’s experiments with policy juries give legislators a better grasp of considered public opinion than do surveys; and the juries’ deliberations give participants and their friends a chance to exert creative influence over policy.

The quality of deliberation makes or breaks a democracy. Good deliberation produces, along with good solutions, the emotional and intellectual resources to accept hard decisions. Active participation in decisions makes it easier to bear – and understand the reasons for – the losses some decisions entail. The manipulation of participation generates cynicism both in the factory and the polity. Deliberation that accords respect to all participants and rests outcomes on reasons and points of view that stand up under questioning generates outcomes that even opponents can respect. Theorists who promote deliberation, however, sometimes conflate deliberation and the common good. The language not only of Mill and Barker but also of more recent theorists like Benjamin Barber and Joshua Cohen suggests that deliberation must be deliberation on the common good. Deliberation, in this view, must be framed in terms of “we”; claims of self-interest are invalid. Yet ruling self-­interest out of order makes it harder for any participant to sort out what is going on. In particular, the less powerful may not find ways to discover that the prevailing sense of “we” does not adequately include them. Deliberation, and the political process more broadly speaking, ought to make participants more aware of their real interests, even when those interests turn out to conflict.

Feminism and democracy   41 Deliberative theorists also sometimes forget power. When, as often happens, no policy will benefit everyone, democracies require some way of legitimating a process by which one group of people makes another do something that it does not want to do. To avoid giving too much weight to the status quo, democracies must facilitate some exercise of power. They can legitimate the coercion by, in theory, giving each citizen equal power in the process. The system succeeds where each loses on some issues but wins on others. Feminism, in both its nurturant and anti-­oppression strands, can correct the vision of both the unrealistically “hard-­nosed” political scientists who insist that politics is nothing but power and the deliberative theorists who either reject power altogether or overlook the ways the powerful often use to their advantage the openness of deliberation, its procedures, and the orientation of many participants toward the common good.

Nurturance: a politics without power? Politics without domination is an ideal with a long ancestry on both its paternal and maternal sides. Claude Henri de Saint-­Simon, an early prophet of socialism, and Edward Bellamy, the nineteenth-­century Amer­ican utopian, both wanted to replace the government of men by the administration of things. Karl Marx envisioned the withering away of “political power properly so called,” that is, class domination. John Stuart Mill and Ernest Barker replaced crude power not with administration but with deliberation. Yet when women arrived at their own understanding of politics without domination, their language often carried overtones of their experiences as others. The outcome was not quite the same. Nurturance – a particular form of making the other’s good your own – invaded the political sphere. In 1818, Hannah Mather Crocker, an early feminist, argued in almost the same breath that God had “endowed the female mind with equal powers and faculties” to those of men and that “it must be the appropriate duty and privilege of females, to convince by reason and persuasion.” One hundred years later the suffragists used the same formula of equality with difference. Strategically, the suffragists relied on persuasion because they had little political power. Yet many also believed that women would bring virtue into politics by extending the stance of motherhood to the public sphere, substituting persuasion for power, and replacing party politics with Progressive good government. In Herland, a feminist utopian novel published six years before women won the suffrage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman painted a society peopled only by women, where domination had no place. Of the three men who stumble on this utopia, the most aggressive aches to fight, tries to “master” the women, and glorifies competition. The women return patient understanding, meting out no punishments and experiencing no competitive feeling stronger than “a mild triumph as of winning some simple game.” Without Gilman’s explicit concern for nurturance, Mary Parker Follett, an organizational theorist writing a generation later, also argued against “domination”

42   Participation and power (“a victory of one side over the other”). She even opposed “compromise” (“each side gives up a little in order to have peace”), in favor of “integration,” which allows neither side “to sacrifice anything.” Follett often gave as an example of integration how one day sitting in a library she had wanted a window shut, while another reader had wanted it open. Instead, they opened the window in an unoccupied adjacent room. “There was no compromise,” she wrote, “because we both got all we really wanted.” What we would now call “win/win” solutions, like those Follett proposed, pose a necessary corrective to politics as a battle of wills. Yet it is easy in some feminist visions to mistake the corrective for the whole story, or to mistake the stress on nurturance or empathy for the conclusion that all of human relations can be encompassed in nurturance. It is also easy to confuse the normative claim that nurturant or attentive approaches to relationships are good in themselves (or promote other values good in themselves) with the empirical claim that women are more likely than men to adopt these approaches. Whether or not women differ from men in nurturance or attentiveness, the moral claims should stand on their own. We should be able to find the language to make a persuasive case for any claim without appeal to gender. Yet because persuasion rests on experience and some experiences are more socially salient to women (whether or not they have actually had the experience of, say, motherhood itself ), the persuasive images that come most easily to women will not always strike a responsive chord in men. Some claims will have to take shape within a community that shares the relevant experiences and later be “translated” for other audiences. As early as 1968 and 1969, for example, in almost the same moment as discovering themselves as a “class,” with separate and sometimes conflicting interests to those of men, women discovered they had a distinct and in some ways superior “culture.” For non-­separatist strands in feminist thought, the problem became how to integrate the nurturance, listening, and emotional sensitivity of this culture into the politics that women had inherited from men. This project now finds allies among political theorists promoting deliberative democracy.

Feminist theories of power Consider the “femaleness” of nurturance. Some feminists have reacted to the prevailing definition of politics as only power, and power as only domination, by elaborating what Nancy Hartsock calls “the feminist theory of power.” Adopting Mary Parker Follett’s distinction between “power over” and “power with,” they have portrayed power not only as dominance but also as “energy, capacity, and effectiveness.” In 1980 Sara Ruddick became the first academic theorist to bring maternal ideals into politics. Arguing against the conjunction of power and powerlessness in the received understanding of motherhood, Ruddick stated as her project “the construction of an image of maternal power which is benign, accurate, sturdy and sane,” suggesting that women bring to the public world a culture and tradition embodied in the ideal of “maternal thinking,” with its

Feminism and democracy   43 c­ haracteristics of “humility, resilient good humor, realism, respect for persons, and responsiveness to growth.” Kathy Ferguson soon urged that in creating new forms of organization, women draw upon values “structured into women’s experience – caretaking, nurturance, empathy, connectedness.” Virginia Held pointed out that the relation between “mothering parent” and child provides an understanding of power that does not involve bending another to one’s will: “The mothering person seeks to empower the child to act responsibly. She wants neither to wield power nor to defend herself against the power wielded by the child.” When they are physically weakest, as in infancy and illness, children can “command” the greatest amount of attention and care – because then their needs are so serious. Neither Ruddick, nor Ferguson, nor Held, nor any of the many theorists now writing in this vein are trying to replace a political vocabulary based on power with one based on care or intimacy. Their aim is to integrate into political thought a rich but neglected vocabulary and set of experiences – neglected because usually allocated to the domestic realm and defined as private, non-­ political, or even anti-­political. This project of integration requires some subtlety. It requires maintaining useful distinctions between the governmental and non-­governmental, and between the particularism of one-­to-one empathy and the universalism of solidarity with all humankind. The project does not require merging the public with the private. But it does require seeing relations formed in the private, domestic, and particular realm as reasonable models for, or the first steps toward, some forms of public spirit. The step the ancient Greeks took in using “philia,” or friendship, as “civic friendship,” the basis of the state, does not differ in form from the suffragists’ step, in “social motherhood,” of applying the maternal relation to the larger polity. Taking motherhood seriously, for example, reveals the radical limitations of political theories based on a misplaced analogy to the marketplace. When Robert Nozick suggests that individuals have a primordial right to own and sell what they produce, Susan Okin replies that in that case mothers own and have a right to sell their children. Mothers’ relations with their children usefully undermine neoclassical models of independent individuals, rights, contracts, or owning and selling.

Listening and democratic deliberation Attentiveness to relationships is not the same as “nurturance.” Nancy Chodorow has proposed that boy children may be required, in a society where women give the most care in early childhood, to separate themselves more firmly and oppositionally than girls from their mothers. Thus in later relationships men may feel less intrinsically connected with others. Whether for this reason or for reasons derived from a history of subordination, girls and women in the United States do seem to value relationships more than do boys and men. Girls’ games, at least in white middle-­class communities, take place in small, relatively homogeneous groups and deemphasize the rules and competition that characterize boys’

44   Participation and power games. Girls and women are better than men at interpreting facial expressions and other interpersonal cues. Women speak less in public than men do, and listen more. As Marlene Dixon put it in 1970, Women are trained to nuances, to listening for the subtle cues which carry the message hidden under the words. It is part of that special skill called “intuition” or “empathy” which all female children must learn if they are to be successful in manipulating others to get what they want and to be successful in providing sympathy and understanding to their husbands and lovers. While the “all” in her sentence undoubtedly exaggerates, it is true that generations upon generations of women have been taught to be good listeners. As early as the fifth century bc, Sophocles said, “Silence is a woman’s crown.” The skills of listening – though not of silence – do seem to produce better decisions. The laboratory experiments of social psychologists suggest that the best group decisions (those most likely to produce a “correct” answer or a creative solution) come when members solicit the opinions of individuals who are initially in a minority. When an experimenter instructs a group to consult every member, the group makes more correct decisions than without these instructions. When leaders facilitate the emergence of minority opinion, their groups perform better than leaderless groups. Organizational consultants have learned from the psychologists the useful though rather jarring phrase, “I hear you saying …” To say those words, you need to have listened, and others have a chance to correct what you think you’ve heard. Without this jargon, feminists teach the same lesson – listening. Along with promoting an ethic of care and skill in listening, feminist thinkers have also suggested a critical role for the emotions in deliberation. Emotions help tell us who we want to be. Good deliberation is not fostered by “keeping emotion out of it.” Rather, “integrative” or “win/win” solutions often require the emotional capacity to guess what others want, or at least to ask in a genuinely curious and unthreatening way. It takes emotional ability to elicit from people in conflict the sometimes subconscious sentiments and unobserved facts that can help create an integrative solution. Union members sometimes strike in support of another union’s demands; some childless property-­owners vote for higher taxes to improve the schools. Such actions are based not only on a rational commitment to maxims that one would will to be universal or on a belief in achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, but also on a process that has evoked empathy, solidarity, or the commitment of one’s identity and actions to a principle. The presence of others with interests different from one’s own makes it hard, rightly or wrongly, to insist on claims based on pure self-­interest. When people with competing claims come face-to-face, the conflict not only creates selfish competitiveness; it also often becomes emotionally clearer how self-­interested behavior can harm others. When individuals are capable of principled commitment or solidarity,

Feminism and democracy   45 engaging the emotions helps create the self-­transformations necessary to think “we” instead of “I.”

Overcoming the subtle forms of power But who is the “we” in a deliberation? “We” can easily represent a false universality, as “mankind” used to do. Even if spoken and believed by the subordinate, “we” may mask a relationship that works against the subordinate’s interests. Women’s experience of silence, of unexplored wants, of words that do not mean (and are not heard to mean) what they say, and of subtle forms of domination generalize beyond gender to alert both theorists and practitioners to the pitfalls of unequal power in deliberation. Silence, on its positive side, permits listening. On the negative side, a history of relative silence makes women political actors more likely to understand that when deliberation turns into theater, it leaves out many who are not, by nature or training, actors. When deliberation turns into a demonstration of logic, it leaves out many who cannot work their emotionally felt needs into a neat equation. When many voices compete for the deliberative floor, the sample that gets heard is not representative. Many shy men are quiet, but the equivalent percentage of shy women is increased by learning silence as appropriate to their gender. So, too, it is the human condition, not just a gendered condition, not to know what one wants. But over and above the human condition, women were taught – at least as I was growing up – not to have too strongly defined wants. Boys wondered, as early as “soldier, sailor, Indian chief,” which kinds of work they were suited for. Middle-­ class boys wondered what careers they would choose. Girls like myself wondered, instead, what kind of man they would marry. My mother, always practical, increased my range of options in the best way she knew how. She brought me up with an array of skills, she told me more than once, so that I might marry either “a prince or a pauper.” Training to be chosen rather than to choose includes not allowing one’s wants to become too definite. Keeping one’s wants indefinite makes it even harder than usual for one’s intellect to learn the signs the self emits of wanting one thing rather than another. Knowing how easy it is to keep one’s wants indefinite makes women realize that deliberative assemblies must work actively at helping participants discover and create what they truly want. Preferences themselves, let alone interests, are not given. They must be tentatively voiced, tested, examined against the causes that produced them, explored, and finally made one’s own. Good deliberation must rest on institutions that foster dissent and on images of appropriate behavior that allow for fumbling and changing one’s mind, that respect the tentativeness of this process. Only such safeguards can help participants find where they themselves want to go. Words are the very stuff of deliberation. But women traditionally have been trained not to say what they mean. Carole Pateman directs us to the last chapter of Rousseau’s Émile, the first handbook of progressive education, designed to

46   Participation and power produce a virtuous and naturally healthy man and woman. After all the brave first chapters, where Emile is raised to emotional honesty and to despise the hypocrisy of the city and the court, it comes as a shock, when Rousseau turns to Sophie, to have him teach her to say “no” when she means “yes,” and teach Émile, in response, to act as if she had said “yes,” not no. In the very paragraph where Rousseau puts forth the radical doctrine that all sexual intercourse, even in marriage, must be based on mutual desire, he states that men must disregard verbal signs of non-­consent to read consent in women’s looks. As rapes increase across the United States, but it becomes gradually illegal, state by state, to have intercourse with one’s wife against her will, women have particular reason to want their “nos” taken to mean “no” and not “yes,” and to want women taught, like men, to say “no” when they mean “no.” It is not hard to see how deliberation is distorted when subordinates say “Yes” (“Yes, boss”) when they mean “no.” The convolutions of mismeaning embedded in men’s and women’s dance of domination and subordination reveal other layers, and other types of distortion, of which both parties may be unaware, and in which the larger culture is complicit. It has been the decade of deconstruction, semiotics, and Foucault. As deconstruction picks apart a piece of literature to see what lies behind, as semiotics sees every pause, word, or nonword as a signifier, as Foucault uncovers power in the interstices of every social act, these currents have served as allies, often consciously unwanted, in the feminist enterprise of unmasking, and guarding against, subtle forms of domination. An important example of this enterprise, on the theoretical plane, is Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s analysis of the domination implicit in the act of intercourse. Dworkin and MacKinnon suggest that in the average act of sexual intercourse the fact that one person penetrates and the other is penetrated, one thrusts and the other receives, encodes a pattern of domination and subordination, reinforced in some cases by top versus bottom position, initiator versus initiate, and other reflections or coy reversals of external structures of power. Feminists have brought out the power imbalances inherent in many subtle acts – the clothing the two genders use, hairstyle, makeup, laughter, and attitudes toward food or one’s own body. Women, more than most oppressed groups, have come to learn the covert as well as the overt faces of power. Many women, no matter how active as feminists, have loved their fathers, sons, sometimes their male lovers or husbands. And many men have loved women, sometimes (at least in the modern era) with a strong conscious commitment to creating in the social world, or at least their intimate relations, the equality they perceive “underneath.” Because this love and commitment to equality are also bound up tightly with conscious and unconscious forms of domination, women have had to begin learning to parse out the confused grammars of love and power. Sensitivity to subtle forms of power pervaded the egalitarianism and commitment to consensus of the early radical women’s movement. It continues today to inspire the National Women’s Studies Association’s experiments with equalizing

Feminism and democracy   47 power, like its caucuses for constituencies who feel they have a less than equal voice. Mainstream women’s organizations share the same concerns. The League of Women Voters from its beginning has made decisions by what the organization calls “consensus,” namely “agreement among a substantial number of members, representative of the membership as a whole, reached after sustained study and group discussion.” The aim is deliberation, and decision through persuasion. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s state and local branches of the National Organization for Women fought inequalities in power among their members, suggesting in Massachusetts in 1972, for example, a rotating president because “they didn’t want to have a star system.” Used indiscriminately, practices aimed at ensuring equality and consensus can undermine deliberation, not advance it. We need laboratories, which feminist practice abundantly provides, to assess which forms work and which do not.

Difference as a political strategy To say that feminists can add something new to political theory through their understanding of women’s experience does not require believing that women are “essentially” different. It requires only that certain experiences be distributed unequally between men and women. A fairly small difference in experience can become a large difference in self-­image and social perception. If one group is dominant, as men are, they typically take pains to avoid the language and images attributed to the subordinates. The subordinate group, on the other hand, is torn between pride in its own language and images and a desire to emulate the dominant group. Empathy – the quality of being able to put oneself emotionally in another’s place – may serve as an example. Women are typically seen, and see themselves, as more empathetic than men. Research on empathy, however, shows gender difference to vary dramatically depending on how empathy is measured. In experimental studies simulating emotional situations, few differences between men and women show up in physiological reactions or reports of feelings of sympathy or concern. But when asked on questionnaires to respond to items such as “I tend to get emotionally involved with a friend’s problems,” girls and women score much higher on empathy than do boys and men. The social reputation for difference is as important as any difference in behavior. For it suggests an alternative model – an ideal type of behavior valued by the subordinate group. In some parts of their lives, women and men do have dramatically different experiences. Women give birth, nurse, and are socialized for childrearing. They are far more likely to be raped, battered, and the victims of incest, or to have to plan their lives around the fear of rape. They are more likely to become secretaries, nurses, or elementary school teachers, to have interrupted careers, and to experience poverty. But not every woman has given birth or been raped. Some manage to avoid the pervasive fear of rape. A few arrange job trajectories much like those of men.

48   Participation and power In many other respects, men’s and women’s experiences overlap greatly. Since on many psychological, social, and political measures the means between the two sexes are so close, almost half the men in any group have had a certain “female” experience or trait more often than half the women. The same is true of women in regard to “masculine” traits and experiences. Because socialization to gender is not merely a passive response to punishment and reward but rather the result of an active, engaged building of the personality, and because healthy people tend to like and want to be who they are, children probably value being a boy or a girl long before they know what that means. As children create themselves, they learn that gender is a salient identifying characteristic and adopt the traits their social milieus associate with women or men. Even in the future, when I expect the significance of gender to diminish greatly, biological sex will continue to be sexy. Whenever we learn, as adults or children, that certain features of human personality or action are socially salient, we become more conscious of those features, perhaps even exaggerating them in our minds, as we absorb them into our self-­image. Social images grow in much the same way. When a distinction makes a difference in a culture, we build those distinctions into schemas, or stories, that explain the world. The mirror of society magnifies emotions and behavior already enlarged in the mirror of the self. These magnified distinctions influence our ways of knowing. Ways of knowing associated with women can be scorned as “soft,” ways of knowing associated with men praised as “hard.” The nature of inquiry itself can become part of an overall pattern of domination. When the subordinate classes fight back, they can expose the power relations inherent in the dominant paradigm. Fighting as women for women’s ways of knowing binds women closer in sisterhood, reinforcing common experience. It also shoots adrenaline into the collective intellectual system, helping to see the world differently, and sometimes more clearly. Out of this process can come critical intellectual tools. Take Carol Gilligan’s distinction between the “male” emphasis on rights versus the “female” emphasis on relationships. Differences between men and women do appear both on Kohlberg’s scales of moral development (in which women often appear at a “lower” stage of development) and on Carol Gilligan’s and her colleagues’ more recent measures of orientation to rights and relationships. These differences are often so small that they do not show up in every study or reach statistical significance when the cases are few in number. But even if there were no differences between men and women on these dimensions in actual behavior, if the differences persisted in social image they would help us understand how one way of looking at moral questions – a “different voice” that stresses relationships rather than rights – could have been passed over in the development of moral theory. That different voice is by no means unanimously female. Gilligan herself points out that many men also speak with a different voice. But by signaling that the previously overlooked and discredited perspective is typically, if only by a small margin, a woman’s perspective and can easily be perceived, through the

Feminism and democracy   49 lens of self and social image, as a woman’s perspective, she not only explains its previous subordination. She also mobilizes to fight for it as a legitimate perspective in its own right. Reading Gilligan’s In a Different Voice angers women. It helps explain why whole disciplines have devalued what “women” do, and it gives women the energy to fight back, with their sisters, the next time it happens. As they fight back, the men who also adopt a “different voice” benefit, too. And so, with luck, does the larger human analytic enterprise. A focus on women’s differences from men goes a long way toward building feminist solidarity. However, for the purpose of changing mainstream – that is, male – practices and ideas, the strategy is double-­edged. Any idea should be persuasive in its own right. Harnessing that idea to women’s differences from men assures it the automatic attention given anything related to sex. At the same time, yoking the idea to the age-­old “war between the sexes” will work for or against it, depending on the audience. There are costs to such a strategy – in possibly neglecting non-­gendered arguments for the idea, in seeming to diminish its scope, in seeming to suggest that the differences between men and women are large, innate, or ineradicable, in eliminating potential audiences, in discounting the experiences of the many, both men and women, whose feelings are not congruent with gendered social expectations, and in tapping emotional sources of intellectual activity that can blind as well as clarify. There are also benefits – in generating the idea in the first place, getting people to think about it, explaining previous denigration, and providing through the connection with gender the language and additional perspectives that help the idea make sense. In the next decades, feminism is bound to be a fertile source of insight not only into its main subject of gender relations, but also into most other human relations that involve inequalities of power or making another’s good one’s own. Regardless of the strategy chosen, feminists need allies when their goal is improving mainstream political practice and thought. In the near future feminists can find allies in the political theorists and empirical political scientists who are newly concerned with the quality of deliberation. And when democratic theorists are in search of provocative and useful new ideas, they can find them in the constantly growing corpus of feminist theory.

Note 1 This chapter was originally published as Jane Mansbridge, “Feminism and Democracy,” The Amer­ican Prospect 1: 126–39 (1990). A longer version of the article was published as “Feminism and Democratic Community,” in Democratic Community: NOMOS XXXV, eds. John W. Chapman and Ian Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 339–395.

3 Using power/fighting power (1994)*†

The argument in brief In democracies we must use power to get things done. By power I mean coercion – getting other people to do what they would not otherwise do by threat of sanction or the use of force. Whenever democracies are in a situation in which the interests of their members conflict in such a way that they cannot agree, action often requires coercion. Some group, usually a majority, must coerce the rest, forcing them in a direction they do not want to go and threatening them with sanctions if they do not go in that direction. If democracies cannot act in such situations, they can no longer be said to have weighed the interests of all citizens equally. If conflict leads to inaction, those who support the status quo are given more weight than those who favor change. Yet in order to act, those who favor change must often use coercion. The coercion a democracy uses, however, can never meet an uncontestable standard of procedural fairness, to be fully and unquestionably legitimate in the normative sense. In practice, the procedures that produce a decision to coerce will usually be far from fair. Procedurally, democracies will always have to accept some level of unfair coercion in order to produce outcomes that approximate the democratic criterion of treating each individual’s interests equally. Substantively, democracies will usually have to accept some level of unjust practice or policy in order to produce outcomes that approximate substantive justice. Because coercion is always contestable, and often highly unfair and substantively unjust, communities using this power must also constantly fight the very power they use. Democracies must surround that power with institutional safeguards – of individual rights, other features of the “rule of law,” and perhaps constitutional requirements that every policy have at least a nominal “public purpose.” In addition, however, democracies need to foster and value enclaves of resistance in which those who lose in each coercive move can rework their ideas and their strategies, gathering their forces and deciding in a more protected space in what way or whether to continue the battle. From a simple cost-­benefit perspective, it might often be efficient, after making a less than optimal decision, to act on the decision and at the same time set up some small portion of the enterprise, or some corner of the mind, to

Using power/fighting power   51 rethink that decision to find future ways of losing less and gaining more. When that decision not only does not maximize all goods but also perpetrates an arguable injustice, the case for enclaves of opposition and rethinking becomes far stronger. Compromises with “ordinary” bads, such as pains, differ from compromises with injustice. With ordinary compromises between pleasure and pain, resulting in some mixture that roughly approximates whatever seems best at the time, the healthy institution should usually not obsess about the residual bads that are necessarily mixed with the goods, but should carry on in a straightforward way, trying to maximize the good, minimize the bad, and comfortably “satisfice” rather than trying constantly to “optimize.” This relatively comfortable approach should not prevail with matters of justice and injustice. Justice is, almost by definition, something we are not supposed to compromise or bargain away. So although in matters of pleasure and pain when we take an action that is not quite perfect it is often best to forget that it is not perfect and go forward, in matters of justice and injustice we should not just forget that our act is, in part, unjust, and simply go forward. We must find ways of going forward while keeping that recognition of injustice present. Ordinary participatory mechanisms, even the expanded participatory mechanisms that many democrats have advocated, cannot give enough resources to those who most need to fight the residual injustice inherent in the democratic exercise of coercion. Democracies need, in addition, institutions that help us to remember the injustices we commit, to continue seeing those injustices as injustices, and to rework our understandings of those injustices creatively so that they may play some restitutional or inventive role in the future. Our normative theories of democracy should make maintaining and reworking the remembrance of injustice an integral part of normatively acceptable deliberative and institutional democratic processes. The tension between using power and fighting power is mirrored in ourselves. We are created in part through the coercion of others – the individuals and communities that brought us up. Coercion, in part, has made us who we are. Just as levees on a river force the water into one channel rather than another, make it flow in a single direction rather than dissipating itself across the land, and in constraining it give it the strength to push a turbine, say, or turn a wheel, so the ways we have been constrained and coerced make us the acting beings that we are. As we grow up and shape ourselves, we deal in various ways with the past coercion that has shaped us. Some of the strands of coercion that created us produce some present pain. We try to root out whatever produces the most pain, but we live with a lot that would simply cost too much to change. Healthy people do not obsess over most of this. We change what we easily can, and we do not think too much about the rest. But when the coercions that have created us involve not just pleasure and pain but justice and injustice, simply forgetting is no longer appropriate. I, as a woman, can root out some of the remnants of the unjust coercions that have

52   Participation and power made me who I am. But I cannot change them all. I am not even aware of them all. So I act, manifesting some of those injustices, passing them on to others, reinforcing them in others and in my own life. I must act, as with the other choices in my life, and not be frozen into inaction by the injustices I perpetuate. But unlike my best stance towards the pleasures and pains deriving from the coercions that have created me, I should not simply make my peace with unjust coercions and move on. I should keep a consciousness of those injustices with me – keep with me, in a tension that does not induce inaction, some space in which a live residual consciousness of the injustices with which I have comprised can reside. None of us can accomplish this alone. We need communities of discourse, oppositional communities, to keep alive, nourish, analyze, and rework our understandings of the injustices that went into making up the very people that we are now, at the same time that the people we are now go about acting in the world as it is. We go forward, but instead of putting our compromises with justice behind us, we keep them with us, in nagging tension, not disabling us but reminding us that all is not as it should be. Because it would disable us to accomplish this task alone, maintaining the reminder of injustice needs to be a collective act. So it is with democracy as well. The injustices we commit as we act collectively – for not to act would be a greater injustice than to act and coerce some unjustly – should not be forgotten and put behind us. Our collective deliberations should recognize, store, rethink our understandings of these injustices, so that someday we may make, perhaps, some reparation, or someday understand how to make the coercion we must use a shade more just. Our democratic deliberations have many uses. One of these must be to serve as our collective conscience, not just as an inert storehouse of the skeletons of past injustice, but as a creative, thinking, puzzling, active space that serves us by letting us act, collectively and individually, but not letting us forget.

Why democracies need to use coercion By “power” in this essay, as noted, I mean coercion. In other contexts I would define power broadly as “the actual or potential causal relation between the interests of an actor or set of actors and the outcome itself.” This broad definition focusses on cause; it includes anticipated reactions; and, in contradistinction to the narrower meaning of power I will adopt here, it covers what Mary Parker Follett, William Connolly, and many feminists like to call “power to” or “power with” as well as “power over.”1 Instead of this broad definition, I want to adopt here a narrower subset of meanings for “power.” Here I will use the word “power” interchangeably with “coercion” to mean causing others to do what they would not otherwise do through the use of force or the threat of sanction.2 In a large, interdependent and continuing polity, democracy requires coercion – getting people to do what they would otherwise not do through the use of force or threat of sanction. Probably it requires a significant degree of coercion. Democracies need coercion primarily to take action without overly privileging the status

Using power/fighting power   53 quo. When individual interests come in what gives every indication of being irreconcilable conflict, a democratic polity must either reinforce the status quo by taking no action, or, by taking action, it must force or threaten (coerce) some of its citizens into situations or actions not in their interests. Majority rule is one standard mechanism for achieving a relatively fair form of democratic coercion. Democracies can undoubtedly settle a good number of their conflicts through deliberation. Deliberation can help transform interests and reveal previously unrealized areas of agreement. It can also sharpen participants’ understandings of their conflicts. In a good democracy, large or small, the deliberative arena should ideally be equally open to all, and power – in the sense of the threat of sanction or the use of force – should not interfere with the impact of the better argument. At some point and on some issues, however, deliberation will not lead to agreement. Good deliberation will have opened areas of agreement and will have clarified the remaining areas of conflict. The participants will have come to understand their interests, including their conflicting interests, better than before deliberation. At this point, when conflict remains after good deliberation, a democracy has two choices – to remain at the status quo or to act, by coercing some to go along with others. Both courses, I will argue, always incorporate some arguable unfairness in procedure and usually some major unfairness in putting the procedure into practice, as well as, usually, some considerable substantive injustice in the outcome. Modern democracies have come to accept some irreconcilable conflict as a relatively unalterable fact of politics. Irreconcilable conflict combined with the necessity for action leads ineluctably to the requirement of coercion. A strong welfare state requires coercion to collect taxes from those who are unalterably opposed to extensive social welfare policies, both in principle and as a result of pursuing their own material interests. Even regulations that work primarily because of citizens’ public-­spirited motivations usually need some coercion around the edges to keep the occasional defector from turning the majority of cooperators into suckers.4 Democracies need to use coercion not just for the reasons of security that Thomas Hobbes recognized and that finally even Robert Nozick, after the most extraordinary twists and turns, recognized as well, but also for the hundreds of thousands of occasions, in a complex, interdependent society, in which collective action requires some degree of coercion to attain even unanimously approved collective ends. And because in a large society with a number of conflicting interests the requirement of unanimity will give almost total power to those who benefit from the status quo, democracies committed to some rough approximation to equal power will require some forms of non-­ unanimously approved coercion to attain collective ends. Many of the best contemporary political philosophers have not squarely faced the role of conflicting interests, and consequently of coercion, in any democratic polity. Philosophers as different as Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer and Jürgen Habermas have conceived of democracy in ways that extol the role of democratic deliberation in discovering, creating, and maintaining commonality, while 3

54   Participation and power implicitly or explicitly denigrating the role of democratic coercion when interests conflict. Hannah Arendt linked her condemnation of coercion with her exclusion of private and material interests from the public realm. First, she denounced as illegitimate, entitled “violence,” the kind of coercion I argue is an important part of democracy, though not the whole and never an uncontestedly legitimate part. Arendt distinguished between this “violence,” which she disapproved, and “power,” which she approved and defined to mean only the power of the people united, moving to achieve common ends.5 Arendt further joined her denunciation of coercion as violence with her insistence that “private and material interests” should not “invade the public domain.”6 In her analysis, therefore, a voter who uses public coercion “out of concern with his private life and well-­being” acts as a blackmailer, not a member of the public.7 Michael Walzer also described the democratic ideal as primarily deliberative. In democracy, he urged, What counts is argument among the citizens. Democracy puts a premium on speech, persuasion, rhetorical skill. Ideally, the citizen who makes the most persuasive argument – that is the argument that actually persuades the largest number of citizens – gets his way. But he can’t use force….8 Walzer’s emphasis on talk, reasons and arguments led him here to legitimate unequal influence (p. 304) achieved through genuine persuasion. That emphasis also made him ill at ease with the power embodied in a vote. Asking rhetorically, “But isn’t the vote itself a kind of power?” Walzer answered, “A kind of power perhaps…. But choices … still depend not on single votes but on the accumulation of votes – hence on influence, persuasion, pressure, bargaining, organization, and so on” (pp.  305–306). “Power,” he concluded definitively, “ ‘belongs to’ persuasiveness.”9 Jürgen Habermas addressed some of these issues almost two decades ago in his critique and appreciation of Arendt, “Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power.”10 In this essay Habermas first welcomed Arendt’s break with Max Weber and others who defined power only in terms of the “purposefully rational agent, who is exclusively interested in the success of his action” (p. 73), that is, an agent who operates in the spheres of “strategic” rather than “communicative” action. He then criticized Arendt for not giving strategic action any role in the “realm of the political.”11 Yet he deliberately never accorded the word “legitimate” to strategic action, with its concern for acquiring and exercising political power. Rather, “legitimate power arises among those who form common convictions in communication free from coercion” (p.  183).12 Common convictions formed in coercion-­free communication create the legitimate power for which strategic actors then compete. That competition can be “normalized” (p.  182) and “institutionalized” (p. 183). But, it seems, the specific justificatory apparatus that I argue helps legitimate the exercise of political power in the strategic realm has no value in itself. Habermas finds the acquisition, maintenance, and exercise

Using power/fighting power   55 of the means of coercion rationally acceptable, but does not give this process a normatively valued place in democracy.13 In contrast to these writers and others who draw from a primarily deliberative tradition,14 I argue that some approximation to procedurally fair coercion plays an important and valuable role in bringing about democratic change. Coercion alone, of course, cannot produce democratic results. In a world of raw coercion, those with more money or guns will simply win. They will win in a world they do not want – a world deprived of the willing cooperation that makes any society, filled with collective action problems, run. Democracy provides a framework that both facilitates deliberation (ending in agreement and/or the recognition of conflict) and adds one-­person/one-­vote to a coercive equation that already includes one-­dollar/one-­vote and one-­gun/one-­vote. Within this framework those who are relatively powerless have not only their original power to threaten the framework of willing cooperation but also the capacity to draw on one aspect of the ideal of democracy for a relatively fair form of coercion. This aspect of democracy allows a numerical majority, including a majority of the otherwise relatively powerless, to use democratic coercion to impose change on the rest. It also allows a numerical minority to mix power and persuasion to secure the assent of a majority, and then democratically coerce the rest. I am not saying that the deliberative element of democracy is unimportant, but only that in addition democracies almost always also need coercion. Persuasion, through new information, cognitive and emotional insights, and logical insights aimed at furthering the other’s goals, plays and should play a central role in democratic practice.15

Why the coercion democracies need will always involve unfairness In contrast to the more deliberative democratic theorists discussed above, many democratic theorists have approached the question of democracy as if it were only, or primarily, a matter of procedurally fair versions of coercion. Some democratic theorists even define democracy as “equal power,”16 or more cautiously, “the equal opportunity to exercise power.” Theorists as different as Carole Pateman and Robert Dahl have considered equal power an important ingredient of the ideal of democracy.17 Those who think of democracy primarily in terms of power do not usually give the role of genuine persuasion in democracy sufficient weight. They do, however, have the advantage of taking coercion seriously. It is to these theorists, then, that I now turn for an analysis of when coercion can be relatively legitimate. The most common legitimating device is to consider coercion legitimate if it is exercised equally and in the context of certain limiting conditions, such as the protection of individual rights, the “rule of law,” and perhaps the constitutional requirement of some formal “public purpose” for the decision.18 Thus limiting conditions are important and should figure prominently in the ways democracies must fight the coercion that they use. Yet they only mitigate, rather than

56   Participation and power e­ radicating, the necessary and valuable imposition of democratic coercion. The coercion that takes place within these limits is usually justified by some version of the formula, one person/one vote. When conflicting interests erode the basis for any standard other than equality, and when respect for equal moral worth provides a positive standard, procedural fairness seems to require settling conflicts by mechanisms that give participants something like equal power over the outcome. Yet even if we were to agree that equal power, as suggested by “one person/one vote,” legitimated the exercise of power, no democratic decision-­rule could guarantee that equal power. No formula – majority rule or otherwise – can produce a system in which, even in theory, each could equally coerce and be coerced in turn. We hold at least three opposed, but equally valid, conceptions of what it means to have equal power. One definition is that one’s resources for coercion be equal to those of any other individual (as in the example of one person/one vote). Another is that, as a member of a group, one succeeds in getting the outcome one prefers in proportion to the number of allies one has on the issue (proportional outcomes). A third is that one succeeds in getting the outcome one prefers as often as any other individual (equal satisfaction). Absent perfectly equal cross-­cutting cleavages, these goals are not compatible. When issues do not arise such that each individual wins exactly as often as every other, equally weighted votes will lead to those with more allies coercing others more often than those with fewer allies.19 Duncan Black and others have, moreover, demonstrated that when preferences are not single-­peaked, majority rule can produce several equally legitimate but competing outcomes.20 For these reasons among others, the democratic theorists who have studied the issue in some depth have concluded that democratic coercion can be legitimated only by what Charles Beitz calls “complex proceduralism,” deriving from “the irreducible plurality of substantive interests associated with the idea of political fairness.”21 Equal resources with majority rule produces the best contender for a procedurally fair decision rule, but, as Robert Dahl puts it, “theoretical reasoning evidently cannot be made to yield a firm conclusion that majority rule is necessarily superior or inferior to some alternatives to it….”22 The same is true for any other attempt to count individuals equally in a decision. More important than these theoretical considerations is the raw fact that no large democracy has, in fact, ever produced a political system in which every member had anything even approximating equal coercive resources, the equal opportunity to exercise coercion, or the experience of exercising coercion equally with all other members of the polity. Indeed, all existing nation-­states are so far from actual political equality as to dwarf the technical problems of capturing in any decision-­rule all the conflicting implicit mandates of democratic theory. Many readers will agree that the inequalities in present democratic systems result in considerable substantive injustice as well as procedural unfairness. Neither large-­scale nation-­states nor even the most internally democratic small collectives can actually achieve equality of power in their decisions.23 No

Using power/fighting power   57 real democracy, then, and especially no real large-­scale democracy, can ever fully justify the coercion it exercises. At best, it can achieve a “rough” or “good enough” legitimacy, based on its members’ generalizable interests in creating conditions of relatively willing cooperation. At best, it can create institutions “that are reasonably just in view of the circumstances,” or that do not “exceed the limits of tolerable injustice,”24 determinations that will always depend in part on relatively local judgments about the mitigating character of different circumstances and the limits of the tolerable. People’s willingness to accept some coercion as “legitimate enough” or “reasonably just under the circumstances” seldom derives from an explicit or reflectively achieved consensus formed by unconstrained discussion. It derives largely from a conventional and unreflective consensus rooted in the internationalization of social and cultural traditions.25 The discursive base from which people make their decisions on the reasonableness of deviations from justice is permeated with power. Let us assume, however, that most acts of democratic coercion in modern Western democracies are sufficiently useful to make large-­scale civil disobedience counterproductive, sufficiently just not to justify individual civil disobedience, and even sufficiently just not to justify minor breaches of the law and public spirit, such as small-­scale cheating on income tax. The grounds of political obligation are much contested, but I would argue that this level of justice can obtain even when most laws are still arguably made by and principally for those with highly unequal political resources, and produce in the aggregate outcomes that many would agree are substantively unjust. This conclusion ought not end the story. Short of civil disobedience and the breakdown of normatively based mutual cooperation, democracies need ways to preserve the recognition of injustice and fight against it.

How citizens might fight the very coercion that they need If the coercion a democracy produces seems reasonably just under the circumstances, citizens should, by and large, accept it in practice, but also find ways of not accepting it fully psychologically or socially. Delegitimation should walk hand in hand with legitimation, so long as, when the coercion is reasonably just, sufficient legitimation remains to let that coercion do its good work. Each individual in each society must feel out this delicate balance for herself. The trick is to keep two balls in the air at once: recognizing the importance, particularly to the most disadvantaged, of having a huge number of relatively democratic decisions made (and democratic coercion imposed) on a daily, monthly and yearly basis as a matter of routine, and recognizing the importance, particularly to the most disadvantaged, of maintaining, in the institutions and culture of the society and in the minds of its citizens, some ongoing recognition and critique of the ways those decisions (and that coercion) are unjust. Most democracies are capitalist, as a rule, and capitalism (like many other economic systems) creates the very inequalities that make decisions in those

58   Participation and power democracies far from procedurally fair. All democracies except small voluntary women’s communities are patriarchal, and patriarchy also creates inequalities that make decisions in those democracies far from procedurally fair. Most democracies are also racist, and classist without reference to capitalism, with similar results. All real democracies, including the most utopian intentional communities, incorporate inequalities that produce coercive decisions that are procedurally unequal and consequently democratically unfair. But workers, women, subordinated races, lower classes and other disadvantaged groups fare better in those democracies than they would in most cases if the democracies began to fall apart. Raw power, unmitigated by democratic values, usually hurts the disadvantaged far more than democratic power. The disadvantaged need the coercion that democracies produce. Because there are no deliberative spaces into which power does not enter, democracies cannot rely on the standard public deliberative arenas to produce the ongoing critique of power that they need. Expanding opportunities for democratic participation both by traditional efforts like voter registration and even in the untraditional venues of workplaces, neighborhood town meetings, and deliberative referenda,26 helps citizens fight coercion only if that participation does not cloud their understanding. For participation to help people understand their interests better, participants need, among other things, to oscillate between protected enclaves, in which they can explore their ideas in an environment of mutual encouragement, and more hostile but also broader surroundings in which they can test those ideas against the reigning reality. The Black colleges that began the sit-­ins of the Southern civil rights movement in the United States, the early women’s consciousness-­raising groups and Women’s Centers, the bookstores and cafes that now support enclaves of “identity politics,”27 all harbored and still harbor relatively safe spaces in which the likeminded can make sense to themselves of what they see. Even the most just societies need these enclaves of protected discourse and action, because each institution of new forms of power and participation unsettles past patterns of power in ways that are not simply just. When town meetings in America’s New England are held, traditionally, during the working day so that farmers and retired people are most likely to attend, or when the topics discussed require some knowledge of the town’s traditions, newcomers to a town who work during the day are deeply disadvantaged.28 But when the meetings are rescheduled for the evening when the farmers and older people are too tired to come out, or when new agenda items, like a town’s taking a stand on nuclear weapons, require the kinds of education and facility with words that newcomers are more likely to have, the old timers feel outclassed and fall silent. Similarly, the second wave of the women’s movement in the United States saw its main gainers simply as “women,” whose interests conflicted in many ways with those of “men.” But at least in the short run, and in spite of some feminist groups’ determined but ambivalent efforts to the contrary, some of the losers were traditional women, whose homemaking and childrearing skills were publicly devalued.29 Once the power situation had shifted in certain segments of

Using power/fighting power   59 the state, traditional women had a hard time finding a voice in deliberation and having access to the means of coercion, just as feminists did in the areas the traditionalists controlled. Each balance of power creates a new underdog, each settlement a new group who would benefit from unsettling. Each settlement accordingly creates not only the necessary capacity for action but also the need to protect and facilitate in some way those who have lost.30 Because no democracy ever reaches the point at which justice is simply done, democracies need to recognize and foster enclaves of resistance. We should ask of suggestions to improve democracy, such as those for democratic neocorporatism,31 how well the institutions they suggest facilitate or impede enclaves of oppositional discourse. This “enclave” model of democratic deliberation and action generates at least two problems. First come the dangers endemic to members of any group speaking only to one another. When white supremacists speak mostly to white supremacists, Serbs to Serbs, feminists to feminists and political philosophers to political philosophers, they encourage one another not to hear anyone else. They do not learn how to put what they want to say in words that others can hear and understand. The enclaves produce insights that less protected spaces would have prevented, but also protect those insights from reasonable criticism. Most people, but particularly those disadvantaged in the larger society, need some of this protection in order to think more critically and carefully. Spending time both in an oppositional enclave and outside it allows us collectively to weigh the lessons of each venue against the other. A division of labor also helps, in which some immerse themselves in enclave life and thought while others span the spectrum between the enclave and the outside world. More importantly, facilitating opposition is not the only democratic value. When the Ku Klux Klan loses influence in the deliberative arena and is outvoted in the coercive one, we may hope that the racism it espouses will eventually disappear entirely from the array of conceptual possibilities to which citizens have access. The case must be much like the case for free speech, which also must be balanced against other rights and goods. Just as a democracy should affirmatively promote diversity in speech by subsidizing the postage of magazines and newspapers regardless of their content, so too it should, all thing being equal, affirmatively promote organizational and deliberative enclaves where oppositional thought can grow. Facilitating opposition in general may even be a luxury open only to relatively settled democracies whose populations find most decisions sufficiently just to let the necessary degree of democratic coercion do its work. These values need constant balancing for neither to be sacrificed. My argument is only that both reasonably just coercion and opposition to the injustice within that coercion be recognized as democratic values.

Why we need to use and fight coercion inside ourselves Having argued that in the democratic polity we must use and fight coercion at the same time, I now want to argue that parallel processes are at work within the

60   Participation and power self. Our selves are built in part through the use of force and threat of sanction by the individuals who raise us and the communities we live in. Some of those constraints help us promote what is good for us in the broadest sense; others keep us from understanding what is good for us. We also use the tools the community has given us to coerce ourselves. Every choice curtails what might have been, forcing us into an often irrevocable path of future choices. Every self-­congratulation for a job well done and every self-­ chastisement for a bad decision helps us create, through our own sanctions, the person we become. As in the external world, we must find the spaces, the experiences, and the analytic tools to sort out the coercion we want to use from the coercion that oppresses us. Michel Foucault, who so masterfully portrayed the ubiquity of power, avoided this normative question. The non-­accidental occlusion of “coercion” and “ability” in the French “pouvoir” (as well as the German “Macht” and English “power”), allowed Foucault not to distinguish “power to” from “power over,” or persuasion from power, or common from conflicting interests, or more versus less legitimate sanctions.32 In our own struggles with domination we must always, in a rough way, try to distinguish not only which of the constraints that have created us we want to change and which to cherish or simply endure, but also which forms of coercion that have created us are just and which are unjust, and which of the unjust forms of coercion we must fight and which we must, in a compromise with reality, leave alone. One might approach this problem by saying, correctly, that all conceptions of justice are essentially contested. There is no constraint, no threat of sanction, no use of force that can simply be incontrovertibly just. Yet that approach, while correct, does not fully respond to our intuitions, which I believe are also correct, that different forms of coercion are more and less fair and produce outcomes that are more and less just. Just as in democracies we sometimes characterize procedurally fair coercion as coercion which reflects the equal power of each participant in a framework that protects minority rights, so we might judge the forms of coercion practiced on the self as just or unjust to the degree that the equal participation of true representatives of those affected is systematically included or excluded. Domination involves such a thorough penetration of the social order by certain forms of unjust inequality that subordinated groups cannot easily find a conceptual foothold from which even to argue that the inequalities are unjust. Intimations, analogies, penetrations from one sphere into another, internal contradictions within the dominant system, incompatible roles, and other chaos elements always create some spaces in any system through which new understandings can grow. But in a system characterized by domination, unjust forms of coercion prevail, and new understandings of justice cannot easily take root and flourish. In a system characterized by domination, therefore, the internal and external struggles against coercion are deeply intertwined. And what you need to fight in yourself may be something you must use in fighting other battles.

Using power/fighting power   61 Patricia Williams knew that her great-­great-grandmother, Sophie, a slave, was impregnated by her owner, a white lawyer named Miller. When Williams went to law school, her mother told her encouragingly, “The Millers were lawyers, so you have it in your blood.” Williams wrote later: She wanted me to reclaim that part of my heritage … [and] use it as a source of strength and confidence. At the same time she was asking me to claim a part of myself that was the dispossessor of another part of myself; she was asking me to deny that disenfranchised little black girl of myself that felt powerless, vulnerable, and, moreover, rightly felt so.33 Williams recognized both selves and used them, while not forgetting the injustices that constituted that multifaceted identity. Anyone with, in Sally Kempton’s words, “an enemy who has outposts in your head”34 cannot afford to destroy in herself all the vestiges of coercion, because the coercion that has created us is also the coercion that allows us to act. Our selves are set up to do a job – getting us through life. Changing parts of that self has costs, especially when the life out there it has been created to deal with is not changing as fast as we would like in a direction that would help us. Growing up for everyone consists in part of sorting out in what has shaped them the elements they want to keep, those they want to discard, and those they would like to discard (or it might be better for them to discard) but realize would cost too much in other goods (such as energy) to do so. This process can have nothing to do with oppression, nothing to do with systematic injustice in the coercive forces of creation. My mother, for example, suffered from depression. Presuming counterfactually for the moment that the depression was purely genetic and had nothing to do with being a woman, I can deal with the negative legacy of the force and sanctions she exercised in helping create me by paying the costs of changing some parts of me that emerged from this process but leaving others in place as not worth the possibly great effort of change. But deciding, on simple cost-­benefit grounds, that struggling to change some part of oneself would simply cost more than it was worth is different from deciding to live with parts of oneself that one has concluded were created by and remain infused with injustice. Compromises between pain and pleasure can be made and then forgotten. Compromises between pain and justice must be made but should not be forgotten. The first task comes in recognizing as unjust some of the coercions that have created us. Foucault gave no blueprint with his command, “Resist.” And although sometimes the sense of injustice is so direct that it feels instinctual, we cannot guess well that what we feel is injustice without consulting the friends who care for us and a larger discourse that names what we are feeling, denounces it, and tells a story about how it came to be. Even when we have identified some internal force as unjustly derived, or embodying present injustices, that does not mean we should fight it. Sometimes the costs are far too high. Foucault’s concept of “resistance,” while useful, is too

62   Participation and power unyielding, too strictly reactive, too “macho” in some larger sense, to capture what I, and many women, do. We do sometimes resist, simply digging in our heels and refusing to move. But more often we yield a bit, trees before the wind, then tentatively try a new action or a new, small piece of self. Often the consequences of change are too uncertain or too threatening. When we think it will cost too much to fight the ways we already are, it is sometimes best to forget it, put it back on the shelf somewhere, and just go on. When we fight, we must use the self we have, often the self that is itself made out of many injustices – injustices recognized and fought, injustices noticed but put back on the shelf, and injustices never seen. We use power to fight power, and none of it is pure.

Reworking the remembrance of injustice In democratic theory as in the theory of the self, it is crucial to distinguish between relatively just and relatively unjust forms of coercion. In democratic practice as in the practice of the self, it is necessary, in order to act, to use knowingly coercion that is in part unjust or selves that are empowered in part by legacies of in just coercion. In democratic theory and practice, as in the theory and practice of the self, it is therefore necessary to fight, at the very moment of acting, the unjust coercion that makes it possible to act. In language, for example, the dominant connotations of a word always exclude or disadvantage the others. Any word, like “table” or “chair,” has connotations that disadvantage less usual referents of the word. But sometimes these dominant connotations derive from a history of injustice. “Men” as a generic excludes women; “women” in the United States has connotations of whiteness that exclude “African-­Amer­ican women”; “African-­Amer­ican women” connotes “heterosexual African-­Amer­ican women”; “lesbian African-­Amer­ican women” connotes “able-­bodied lesbian women.”35 Although we must use words, and cannot maintain in consciousness an infinite regress of the potentially excluded, we should pay particular attention to the words that reproduce unjust inequalities. With these words, we must try actively to maintain the tension between remaining intelligible and fighting their embedded connotations. In sum, compromises between the good and the best, or between the bad-­butlivable and the best, come in two varieties. Those that are, roughly speaking, utility-­driven pose no special problem. In our compromises with justice, however, we must design our lives and our institutions so that the justice that is compromised remains nagging, in the margin somewhere, in a bracket that does not go away, to pique and bother us in the future. We can best preserve these irritants by encouraging “affirmative pluralism” in democratic talk. In our formal democracies and in the realm of ourselves, we need to find ways of removing power (as force and the threat of sanction) as much as possible from the arenas in which we struggle to understand what is just and unjust. This means a public discourse not completely overwhelmed with the massive resources of existing forms of domination.

Using power/fighting power   63 To encourage the nagging reminder of injustice also means affirmatively encouraging oppositional discourses and oppositional cultures. Those discourses and cultures have evolved in part for the purpose of reminding their participants and others of the injustice that pervades both any existing democracy and any existing construction of self. They have, as well, a positive value, like the value of endangered species, because different discourses and cultures investigate different ends and different means to similar ends. The different ways they work, the different avenues they explore, perhaps should at some point replace or supplement the ways that reign at present. These institutional and discursive reminders of injustice should not keep us from acting. But they should keep us humble and a little uneasy, and they should serve as the repository of memory and the creative source from which someday to attempt coming a bit closer to justice.

Notes   * I would like to thank Joshua Cohen and Thomas McCarthy for their comments at the conference on “Democracy and Difference” at Yale University, at which this paper was first presented, as well as Nancy Fraser for reading an early draft, and participants in a seminar at the London School of Economics for their insightful criticisms.   † This chapter is a somewhat edited version of Jane Mansbridge, “Using Power/ Fighting Power,” Constellations 1(1): 53–73 (1994). An expanded version of the original article was published as “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 46–66.   1 I have adapted to systemic power the definition devised by Jack H. Nagel, The Descriptive Analysis of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 29, by substituting “interests” for his “preferences” and adding “a set of actors.” For the relatively benign “power to,” “power with,” “power as energy,” and “power-­from within,” in contrast to “power over,” see Mary Parker Follett, “Power” [1975] in Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, Henry C. Metcalf, ed. (New York: Harper, 1942); William E. Connolly, “Power and Responsibility,” in The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974); Nancy Hartsock, “Political Change: Two Perspectives on Power,” Quest 1 (1974): 10–25, reprinted in Charlotte Bunch, ed., Building Feminist Theory: Essays from Quest (New York: Longman, 1981); and, among more recent feminist theorists, Starhawk, Truth or Dare [1987] (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 8–19. In “The Maximization of Democracy,” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) and elsewhere, C.B. Macpherson defined “powers” to mean the potential for using and developing the uniquely human capacities.   2 In this definition of “power over” I draw on distinctions in Peter Bachrach and Morton Bachrach, “Decisions and Non-­decisions: An Analytic Framework,” Amer­ican Political Science Review 57 (1963): 632–644 and Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical Review (London: Macmillan, 1974). “Force” as I use it here does not involve the will of the other. (If I carry you out of the room, my action involves force; if I tell you I will shoot you unless you leave, it involves the threat of sanction.) Force therefore can be implicated in a large number of systemic attributes, such as the language the other speaks. To keep the argument relatively simple, the definition of coercion in this paper does not encompass positive inducement, although if asymmetries are great enough positive inducements may count as forms of coercion. See Brian Barry “Power: An

64   Participation and power Economic Analysis” [1975], in Democracy and Power: Essays in Political Theory I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).   3 I use the word “interest” here to mean a deliberatively considered conclusion on one’s policy preference, one always open to contest on the possibility of reaching different conclusions after further thought, action and political struggle. The word “interest” connotes objective, static or eternal states discoverable through revolutionary action or through reason, and “revealed” by removing the sources of oppression or repression. I want to discard these connotations, while retaining some distinction between surface preferences or prereflective understandings and understandings that are more considered, emotionally and rationally, and more thoroughly tested in action. One test of a “considered” understanding in this sense might be its formation in as close an approximation as possible to free, equal and unconstrained communication. Another test, which I suggest throughout, might be the vitality of the contest for adopting alternatives within which a given understanding developed, including the divergence of opposing ideas in that contest and the degree of life preserved in the excluded alternatives.   4 Jane Mansbridge, “Public Spirit in Political Systems,” in Henry J. Aaron, Thomas E. Mann and Timothy Taylor, eds., Values and Public Policy (Washington: Brookings, 1994); Ian Ayers and John Braithwaite, Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).   5 In On Revolution (New York: Viking, [1963] 1965), Arendt wrote: “… power comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another” (p. 174); “… power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-­ between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and the keeping of promises” (p. 175). As opposed to “pre-­ political natural violence,” “power came into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges; only such power, which rested on reciprocity and mutuality, was real power and legitimate …” (pp.  181–182). See also pp.  145, 148–149, 150–152, 155, 162, 163–167, 170, 179, 181. In her subsequent On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Harvest, 1970) Arendt defined violence as a matter of means to an end (p. 4, also pp. 46, 51, 79), and placed it squarely in the context of the battlefield, the sword, war, guns, shooting, extermination camps, genocide, torture, and nuclear doomsday (pp. 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 17). The second section, introducing what Arendt calls “the question of violence in the political realm” (p. 35), immediately identifies violence with coercion (p.  36). Arendt then associates violence, rule and command with the psychological feelings that come from imposing oneself and making others the instruments of one’s will, asserting one’s own will against the resistance of others, and desiring to exercise power over others. “Power,” on the other hand, she derives from an entirely different tradition, in which the “rule of law” rests on the “living power of the people” (pp. 40–41). Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. (p. 44, emphasis in original) Her third and final section returns to linking violence with the imagery of aggressiveness, rage and the battlefield (pp. 59–61, 63, 67). By eliding violence and coercion, Arendt attributed to all forms of instrumental coercion the psychology and substantive outcomes of physical violence, thus exploiting in her English writing the double meaning of violence and coercive power inherent in the German Gewalt, which Max Weber and others had used to express the power of the state.

Using power/fighting power   65   6 Arendt, On Revolution, 255. Arendt distinguished sharply between the “political” realm of “opinions” and public power and the “social and economic” realms of mere material interest (p. 278).   7 The context of this statement is worth quoting in full: Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate…. The same is not true for questions of interest and welfare, which can be ascertained objectively, and where the need for action and decision arises out of the various conflicts among interest groups. Through pressure groups, lobbies and other devices, the voters can indeed influence the actions of their representatives with respect to interest, that is, they can force their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of the wishes and interests of other groups of voters. In all these instances the voter acts out of concern with his private life and well-­being, and the residue of power he still holds in his hands resembles rather the reckless coercion with which a blackmailer forces his victim into obedience than the power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation. (Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 272–273)

 8  9

10 11 12

13

14

I am arguing, against Arendt, that in order to avoid the dominance of the status quo, democracies need precisely this “coercion” by which voters force their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of other voters. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 304. Walzer defined “force” not as I do here, but as those forms of power that society has “blocked,” or ruled illegitimate (p. 282). Ibid. 306. Using the word power here to mean influence by genuine persuasion, Walzer also argues that democracy does not require “equal power” (p. 309). Because he wants to make “power” belong only to persuasiveness, Walzer refuses to call a television referendum an “exercise of power.” He is “inclined to say, instead, that it is only another example of the erosion of value …” (p. 307). Originally published in 1976. Reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-­Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1985). Habermas, “Hannah Arendt,” 182. As Habermas carefully puts it, strategic action “has taken place also within the city walls” (p.  182). He concludes, “we cannot exclude the element of strategic action from the concept of the political” (p. 183). The ideal of coercion-­free deliberation presumably resembles many important and useful democratic ideals in being impossible to achieve fully, although possible to approach. Achieving this ideal would require eliminating “illusionary … convictions” (p. 186) by eliminating what Habermas calls “violence” (defined as “the capacity to keep other individuals or groups from perceiving their interests” p. 183) and “structural violence,” (defined as that violence that is built into social and political institutions and “blocks in an unnoticed fashion those communications in which are shaped and propagated the convictions effective for legitimation” p.  186). In Habermas’s terms, therefore, fully legitimate political power would be a practical impossibility, although polities could and do differ in the degree to which their political power approaches full legitimacy. See below pp.  60 and 62 on the problems with societal conclusions that political arrangements are “relatively just under the circumstances.” See also Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80 on Habermas not admitting private interests to the public sphere (p.  59), and restricting discourse in public spheres to deliberation about the common good (pp. 62, 70ff.). Claus Offe, for example, defines politics as having to do not with negotiations among interests but with “the working out of visions about the just order of social life, and the conflict among visions of that order,” in Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 173. See also Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 72–74.

66   Participation and power 15 See my Beyond Adversary Democracy [1980] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Why We Lost the ERA (1986), Beyond Self-­Interest (1990), “Feminism and Democracy,” The Amer­ican Prospect 1 (1990): 27; “A Deliberative Theory of Interest Representation” in Mark P. Petracca, Interests (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), “A Deliberative Approach to Neo-­Corporatism,” Politics and Society (1993), “Feminism and Democratic Community” in John Chapman and Ian Shapiro, eds., Democratic Community: NOMOS XXXV (New York: New York University Press, 1993), and “Politics as Persuasion,” in Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of Amer­ican Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). 16 E.g., Jack Lively, Democracy [1975] (New York: Putnam, 1977), 8 and passim. 17 For theorists who make some version of equal power or the equal opportunity to exercise power a central element in democracy or, more broadly, in political fairness, see Bertrand Russell, Power [1938] (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 108; E.F. Carritt, “Liberty and Equality, Law Quarterly Review 56 (1940): 61–74, reprinted in Anthony Quinton, ed., Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 61; Austin Ranney and Wilmorre Kendall, “Democracy: Confusion and Agreement,” Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 430–439, p. 439; Elias Berg, Democracy and the Majority Principle (Stockholm: Ivar Haeggstroms Tryckeri AB, 1965), 157; Jack H. Nagel, The Descriptive Analysis of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 5; David Miller, “Democracy and Social Justice,” British Journal of Political Science 8 (1978): 1–19, p.  3; Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 178; Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 43, 67–71; and Robert Dahl, “The Analysis of Influence in Local Communities,” [1960] in Bernard J. Frieden and Robert Morris, eds., Urban Planning and Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 225, 227. Robert Dahl’s more recent work, e.g., Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), prefers the formulation, “At the decisive stage of collective decisions, each citizen must be ensured an equal opportunity to express a choice that will be counted as equal in weight to the choice expressed by other citizens” (p. 109). Although some of these authors write of “control” or “influence” rather than “power,” and many do not define what they mean by these terms, they all mean by control, influence or power something far closer to Max Weber’s “probability that one actor … will be able to carry out his own will despite resistance” [Economy and Society ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p. 53] or to my narrower “use of force or threat of sanction” than to Arendt’s “human ability … to act in concert.” 18 Exactly what these limiting conditions should be will always be a matter of contention. For English understandings of the rule of law, see A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution [1885] ed. E.C.S. Wade (London: Macmillan, 1939); Geoffrey Marshall, “Rule of Law,” in David Miller, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); and Don Herzog, Happy Slaves (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Ch.  4. For the ways the Constitution of the United States prohibits the majoritarian imposition of the “naked preferences” of one group on another without at least nominal deference to a public purpose, see Cass R. Sunstein, “Nominal Preferences and the Constitution,” Columbia Law Review 84 (1984): 1689–1732. 19 See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary, pp. 266–268 and accompanying notes, and Charles R. Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 8–11 and notes. 20 Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958/1963), expanding on the work of Condorcet and C.L. Dodgson; also Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1963). 21 Beitz, Political Equality, xiii.

Using power/fighting power   67 22 Dahl, Democracy and its Critics, p.  156. Dahl himself generates five criteria for “political equality” or, more generally, “a democratic process.” For an excellent account of these problems, see Brian Barry, “Is Democracy Special?” [1979] in Democracy and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 23 See Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy on systematic unequal power even in a highly egalitarian, highly democratic, and ideologically committed forty-­one person collective. 24 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p.  112, regarding obligations to do one’s part to maintain just cooperative arrangements in which others are cooperating and from which one benefits. Also “as just as it is reasonable to expect in the circumstances” (p. 115), regarding the natural duty to support and comply with just institutions. 25 I take this formulation from Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 120. 26 See the suggestions for participatory innovation in Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 27 On identity politics in enclaves, see Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” Amer­ican Sociological Review 54 (1989): 761–775, and Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities,” in Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On social movements politicizing culture, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 86–88. 28 The dynamics of such a town meeting appear in detail in Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy. 29 Although the long-­run entry of women into the paid labor force and the positive reaction of middle-­class and upper-­middle-class women to their more satisfactory experiences in that labor force had more effect than feminist political activity on this devaluation, feminist political action had some independent effect. Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1986). 30 I am indebted to conversations with Bonnie Honig for this part of my thought. 31 Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, “Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance,” Politics and Society 20 (1992): 393–472; Philippe Schmitter, “The Irony of Modern Democracy and Efforts to Improve Its Practice,” Politics and Society 20 (1992): 507–512. On group representation see also Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. 32 Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Conclusions,” in Unruly Practices; Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 437–469; Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991). 33 Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” [1988] in Micheline R. Malson et al., eds., Black Women in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 20. 34 “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head,” attributed to “Sally Kempton, writer (1943–)” on a 1989 feminist greeting card issued by the Rape Crisis Network of Eugene, Oregon. I have been unable to contact Kempton herself for further attribution. 35 Katharine T. Bartlett, “Feminist Legal Methods,” Harvard Law Review 18 (1990): 829–888, p. 848.

Part II

Deliberation and representation

4 Should Blacks represent Blacks and women represent women? A contingent “yes”* (1999)†

Disadvantaged groups gain advantages from descriptive representation in at least four contexts. In contexts of group mistrust and uncrystallized interests, the better communication and experiential knowledge of descriptive representatives enhances their substantive representation of the group’s interests by improving the quality of deliberation. In contexts of historical political subordination and low de facto legitimacy, descriptive representation helps create a social meaning of “ability to rule” and increases the attachment to the polity of members of the group. When the implementation of descriptive representation involves some costs in other values, paying those costs makes most sense in these specific historical contexts. In at least four contexts, for four different functions, disadvantaged groups may want to be represented by “descriptive representatives,” that is, individuals who in their own backgrounds mirror some of the more frequent experiences and outward manifestations of belonging to the group. For two of these functions—(1) adequate communication in contexts of mistrust, and (2) innovative thinking in contexts of uncrystallized, not fully articulated, interests— descriptive representation enhances the substantive representation of interests by improving the quality of deliberation. For the other two functions—(1) creating a social meaning of “ability to rule” for members of a group in historical contexts where that ability has been seriously questioned, and (2) increasing the polity’s de facto legitimacy in contexts of past discrimination—descriptive representation promotes goods unrelated to substantive representation. Thus in the contexts of group mistrust, uncrystallized interests, a social history connoting inability to rule, and low de facto legitimacy, constitutional designers and individual voters have reason to institute policies that promote descriptive representation, even when such implementation involves some losses in the implementation of other valued ideals. The deliberative function of democracy requires descriptive representation far more than does the aggregative function. It is primarily when we ask how to improve deliberation—both vertically, between constituent and representative, and horizontally, among the representatives—that we discover the virtue of shared experience, which lies at the core of descriptive representation.

72   Deliberation and representation

What is “descriptive” representation? In “descriptive” representation, representatives are in their own persons and lives in some sense typical of the larger class of persons whom they represent.1 Black legislators represent Black constituents, women legislators represent women constituents, and so on. Few commentators have noticed that the word “descriptive,” modifying representation, can denote not only visible characteristics, such as color of skin or gender, but also shared experiences, so that a representative with a background in farming is to that degree a descriptive representative of his or her farmer constituents. This criterion of shared experience, which one might reasonably expect to promote a representative’s accurate representation of and commitment to constituent interests, has a long history in folkways and even in law. Long-­term residents in a town often argue for electing to office someone born in the town on the implicit grounds that lifetime experience increases the representative’s common experiences with and attachment to the interests of the constituents. Similar arguments appear against “carpetbaggers” in state legislatures. The United States Constitution even requires that a president of the nation be born in the United States. “Being one of us” is assumed to promote loyalty to “our” interests.

Arguments against descriptive representation Descriptive representation is not popular among normative theorists. Indeed, most normative democratic theorists have rejected descriptive representation relatively summarily, often with some version of Pennock’s trenchant comment, “No one would argue that morons should be represented by morons” (Pennock 1979, 314, based on Griffiths and Wollheim 1960, 190; see also Grofman 1982, 98; Pitkin [1967] 1972, ch. 4). Even among explicit advocates of group representation the ideal of descriptive representation finds little support. Will Kymlicka writes, “[T]he general idea of mirror [descriptive] representation is untenable” (1995, 139) and Iris Marion Young concurs: “Having such a relation of identity or similarity with constituents says nothing about what the representative does” (1997, 354). Empirical political scientists studying women and Black legislators have had similar negative assessments. Irene Diamond, the first empirical political scientist to investigate in depth the actions of women legislators, reported, for example, that in New Hampshire, the state with the highest percentage (and also the highest absolute number) of women legislators, most women legislators did not see themselves as “acting for” women, in Pitkin’s phrase. Rather, New Hampshire’s low salary ($200 a year in 1972) and high representative/constituent ratio (with its consequent low competitiveness) brought to the legislature a high proportion of older homemakers. With little self-­confidence or desire for a career in politics, they did not see themselves as representing women’s interests (Diamond 1977). On the basis of this kind of evidence, women political scientists

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   73 often concluded that descriptive female gender had no predictable relation to support for women’s substantive interests (e.g., Schlozman and Mansbridge 1979).2 The first empirical political scientist to investigate in depth the actions of Black members of Congress, Carol Swain, similarly concluded that in the U.S. Congress, “[m]ore black faces in political office (that is, more descriptive representation for African Amer­icans) will not necessarily lead to more representation of the tangible interests of blacks” (1993, 5). These normative theorists and empirical researchers make an important, incontrovertible point. The primary function of representative democracy is to represent the substantive interests of the represented through both deliberation and aggregation. Descriptive representation should be judged primarily on this criterion. When nondescriptive representatives have, for various reasons, greater ability to represent the substantive interests of their constituents, this is a major argument against descriptive representation. The costs of a lottery: lesser talent The most frequent criticism of descriptive representation charges that descriptive representatives will be less able than others to perform the task of the substantive representation of interests. This criticism rests primarily on confusing two forms of descriptive representation, the “microcosmic” and the “selective” forms.3 In “microcosmic” representation, the entire assembly is designed to form a microcosm, or representative sample, of the electorate. Microcosmic representation was the ideal of John Adams, James Wilson, Mirabeau, and certain other eighteenth-­century theorists (Pitkin [1967] 1972), including particularly the Amer­ican Anti-­Federalists (Manin [1995] 1997, 109–14). Almost all of Hanna Pitkin’s argument against descriptive representation, which has often been taken as dispositive, is explicitly or implicitly directed against this form (Pitkin [1967] 1972, ch. 4). If microcosmic representation, achievable only by lottery or another form of random selection, were to replace elected representative assemblies, one cost would indeed lie in the strong likelihood that choosing the members of a ruling assembly at random from the population would produce legislators with less ability, expertise, and possibly commitment to the public good than would choosing those legislators through election. In current electoral systems, many of those who run for election have chosen lawmaking as their vocation. They have spent much of their adult lives acquiring the skills needed for the job. The voters then select among these individuals, guided in part by the ability and training of the candidates in their chosen field. Representatives so selected arguably have greater abilities and training in this field than individuals selected through a representative sample.4 Representatives who have chosen politics as a calling and who have been selected in competitive elections may also have a greater commitment to the public good than individuals chosen through a representative sample (see Madison [1788] 1987), although some election and re-­election incentives work in the opposite direction.

74   Deliberation and representation My own experience with town meeting democracy (Mansbridge [1980] 1983) leads me to conclude that the ability, expertise, and commitment to the public good of ordinary members of the public are sufficient to make a relatively random sample of citizens a plausible, although by no means ideal, representative assembly. In contrast to Pitkin, who argued that there is simply “no room” in a descriptive concept of representation for “leadership, initiative or creative action” ([1967] 1972, 90), I do not find it hard to envision a representative sample of the U.S. population producing the kind of leadership, initiative, and creative action of which the average New England town meeting is capable. The capacities of such leaders, initiators, and creators would undoubtedly not reach the level of those who now guide the United States, but I am not sure that they would be incapacitatingly worse. Nevertheless, because lawmaking in large states and at the national level usually requires considerable talent and acquired skill, the costs of replacing current elected assemblies with assemblies chosen simply by random selection from the population overwhelm the current benefits. Very few democratic theorists advocate substituting microcosmic representation for electoral representation. Even the Australian John Burnheim, who advocates microcosmic representation based on a modified lot, does not expect his suggestion to be put into practice within our lifetimes in any of the world’s current democracies. The suggestions with a greater likelihood of being adopted add some component of microcosmic representation to existing electoral systems.5 In the far more frequent “selective” form of descriptive representation, institutional design gives selected groups greater descriptive representation than they would achieve in existing electoral systems in order to bring the proportions of those groups in the legislature closer to their percentages in the population. Selective forms of descriptive representation are necessary, if at all, only when some form of adverse selection operates within an existing system to reduce the proportions of certain groups below what they would achieve by chance. Otherwise, one would expect all the characteristics of the population to be duplicated, more or less, in the legislature in proportion to their occurrence in the population. Selective representation should thus be conceived as compensating for the effects of some other process that interferes with an expected proportionality. One version of the selective form of representation draws geographical district lines to encourage the election of representatives from proportionally underrepresented groups. In other versions of selective representation, parliaments and parties set aside a number of seats for members of specific descriptive groups, such as French speakers, Catholics, scheduled castes, or women. Other versions could seek to identify, and mitigate or remove on a more universalist basis, particular obstacles that now account for some of the underrepresentation of certain groups. Representatives with selective descriptive characteristics need not be significantly less skilled or dedicated to the public good than representatives chosen for reasons that do not include descriptive characteristics. It is true that adding any criterion (e.g., that a representative has lived in a constituency five or more

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   75 years, or be of a given gender or ethnicity) to a mix of criteria for selection will always dilute to some degree the impact of the other criteria for selection. The key question is, however, whether the reasons for the currently lower proportion of a given characteristic are functionally related to ability to perform the task of representation. Such lowered ability could be the reason that in the existing system those characteristics have been selected against. But if the reasons for lower proportions of the characteristic are not functionally related to the task, and if the descriptive characteristic on which one is selecting is widely shared, one would expect any decrement in talent from adding a descriptive criterion to the mix of criteria for selection to be almost infinitesimally small.6 The institutional tools that have recently been used to promote relevant descriptive representation (e.g., redrawing district lines in the United States or changing the composition of party lists in Europe) do not seem to have resulted in representatives with noticeably lesser skills or commitment to the public good. Although in microcosmic representation the costs in talent might be considerable, in selective representation those costs seem to be negligible. The costs of selection: which groups, why, and how many from each? If microcosmic representation has the cost of some likelihood of lesser talent, at least it has no costs derived from having to choose some groups rather than others for descriptive representation. Selective representation presents exactly the opposite pattern. The cost in lesser talent is relatively low, but costs do arise in the process of group selection. Even here, however, the costs are far lower than is usually assumed. In 1981, James Morone and Theodore Marmor criticized congressional legislation that required citizens on advisory boards to be “broadly representative of the social economic, linguistic and racial populations of the area”7 by asking rhetorically what demographic characteristics ought to be represented: Common sense rebels against representing left-­handers or redheads. What of Lithuanians? Italians? Jews? The uneducated? Mirror views provide few guidelines for selecting which social characteristics merit representation. (1981, 437) Other commentators have similarly assumed that no principled guidelines could be enunciated to suggest what groups ought to be represented or when.8 This criticism has so often been thought to be simply unanswerable that its mere statement has been taken as dispositive. We can answer it fairly easily, however, by examining both the deliberative and the aggregative functions of democracy. The deliberative function of representative democracy aims at understanding which policies are good for the polity as a whole, which policies are good for a representative’s constituents, and when the interests of various groups within the polity and constituency conflict. It also aims at transforming interests and creating commonality when that commonality can be genuinely good for all. In its

76   Deliberation and representation deliberative function, a representative body should ideally include at least one representative who can speak for every group that might provide new information, perspectives, or ongoing insights relevant to the understanding that leads to a decision. It should not, however, simply reproduce all views in the polity. The process of choosing representatives should select to some degree against those views that are useless or harmful to the polity as a whole (Mansbridge 1998). The aggregative function of democracy aims at producing some form of relatively legitimate decision in the context of fundamentally conflicting interests. In its aggregative function, the representative assembly should, in moments of conflict, ideally represent the interests of every group whose interests conflict with those of others, in proportion to the numbers of that group in the population. Proportionality with equally weighted votes in the legislature is the representative equivalent of the aggregative ideal of “one person, one vote” in direct democracy. The proportional representation of interests alone cannot create democratic legitimacy, but in combination with either cross-­cutting interests or power sharing, and with strong protections for minority rights, it comes sufficiently close.9 This analysis allows us to conclude that the perspectives and interests of left-­ handers should be represented in deliberation when their perspectives are relevant to a decision (e.g., in decisions regarding the design of surgical instruments) and in aggregation when their interests conflict with those of others. Similarly with redheads, Lithuanians, Italians, Jews, the uneducated, and all other groups. In aggregation, interests are relatively easily represented by nondescriptive representatives. If a right-­handed representative will suffer sufficiently in the next election from not voting for left-­handers’ interests, that incentive is by definition enough to make the representative cast the normatively appropriate vote. It is true that being a left-­hander oneself helps produce internal commitment to the struggle, so that when the issue requires more than just casting a vote (e.g., when it requires preparing, proposing, and gathering support for legislation), left-­handed representatives will usually be more likely to throw themselves into the fray. But on matters of pure aggregation, re-­election incentives and other forms of accountability can make descriptive representation unnecessary. For aggregation alone, normative democratic theory demands only that power be exercised on behalf of particular interest bearers in proportion to their numbers in the population, not that this power be exercised by any particular mechanism. In deliberation, perspectives are less easily represented by nondescriptive representatives. Through reading, conversation, and living with left-­handers, right-­ handers can learn many of the perspectives of this group that would be relevant to a deliberation. As we will see, however, in the contexts of communicative mistrust and uncrystallized interests this vicarious portrayal of the experience of others by those who have not themselves had those experiences is often not enough to promote effective deliberation—either vertically between constituents and their representatives or horizontally among the representatives. Although a

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   77 representative need not have shared personally the experiences of the represented to facilitate communication and bring subtlety to a deliberation, the open-­ ended quality of deliberation gives communicative and informational advantages to representatives who are existentially close to the issues.10 Do deliberations require the participation of representatives of relevant perspectives in proportion to the incidence of those perspectives in the population? In theory, deliberation seems to require only a single representative, or a “threshold” presence, in the deliberation to contribute to the larger understanding (Kymlicka 1993, 77–78, 1995, 146–47; Mansbridge 1981; Phillips 1995, 47, 67ff.; Pitkin [1967] 1972, 84). Getting the relevant facts, insights, and perspectives into the deliberation should be what counts, not how many people advance these facts, insights, and perspectives. In practice, however, disadvantaged groups often need the full representation that proportionality allows in order to achieve several goals: deliberative synergy, critical mass, dispersion of influence, and a range of views within the group. First, deliberation is often synergistic. More representatives usually produce more, and sometimes better, information and insight, particularly when they may need to explore among themselves new ideas that counter the prevailing wisdom. Groups whose members will be affected by a decision might therefore legitimately demand, even under deliberative criteria, as many representatives as reflect their numbers in the population. Second, representatives of disadvantaged groups may need a critical mass for their own members to become willing to enunciate minority positions. They may also need a critical mass to convince others—particularly members of dominant groups—that the perspectives or insights they are advancing are widely shared, genuinely felt, and deeply held within their own group. Third, governing bodies usually include a variety of committees and subcommittees in whose deliberative spaces the most important features of policy are often hammered out. Having sufficient numbers of representatives to disperse into the relevant policy areas allows members of the disadvantaged group to influence decisions wherever those decisions would become better decisions by including these members’ perspectives. Finally, and most importantly, because the content and range of any deliberation is often unpredictable, a variety of representatives is usually needed to represent the heterogeneous, varied inflections and internal oppositions that together constitute the complex and internally contested perspectives, opinions, and interests characteristic of any group. This range of views is not easily represented by only a few individuals. This analysis suggests that African Amer­icans in the United States are far more richly represented deliberatively by a Congress that includes William Gray III (a Black member of Congress who did not support the Congressional Black Caucus’s alternative budget because he was chairman of the Budget Committee in the House) and George Crockett (a Black member of Congress who condemned the State Department for refusing to grant Yasir Arafat an entry visa) than by a Congress that included only one of these two.11 No matter how purely

78   Deliberation and representation deliberative the assembly, reasons of synergy, critical mass, helpful dispersion and internal diversity insure that in practice each group will usually want to claim as many representatives on that body as is justified by proportionality. The demand for proportionality is accentuated by the fact that in practice almost all democratic assemblies are aggregative as well as deliberative, and achieving the full normative legitimacy of the aggregative function requires that the members of the representative body cast votes for each affected conflicting interest in proportion to the numbers of such interest bearers in the population (see Mansbridge 1981, 1996, 1998 for a fuller exposition of these ideas). “Essentialism” as a cost of selection The greatest cost in selective descriptive representation is that of strengthening tendencies toward “essentialism,” that is, the assumption that members of certain groups have an essential identity that all members of that group share and of which no others can partake. Insisting that women represent women or Blacks represent Blacks, for example, implies an essential quality of womanness or Blackness that all members of that group share. Insisting that others cannot adequately represent the members of a descriptive group also implies that members of that group cannot adequately represent others (Kymlicka 1993, 1995; Phillips 1992, 1995; Swain 1993; Young 1997). This problem of essentialism haunts every group that hopes to organize politically around a facet of identity, including descriptive characteristics such as place of birth, gender, and race. Essentialism involves assuming a single or essential trait, or nature, that binds every member of a descriptive group together, giving them common interests that, in the most extreme versions of the idea, transcend the interests that divide them. Such an assumption leads not only to refusing to recognize major lines of cleavage in a group, but also to assimilating minority or subordinate interests in those of the dominant group without even recognizing their existence (Fuss 1989; Spelman 1988; see Young 1994, 1997 for ways of conceiving of group existence with a minimum of essentialist thinking). The problem is exacerbated when the facets of identity assumed to bind the group together have biological markers, such as sexual organs or skin color, because such markers encourage seeing whatever commonalities are assumed central to the group as biological, not historical. At its most basic, of course, the process of thought itself encodes a form of essentializing. Most of us cannot think “table” without unconsciously conjuring up a four-­legged brown piece of furniture, thereby marginalizing in our considerations the many tables with more or fewer legs and different colors. The problem of simple categorization becomes much worse when, as is often the case in human affairs, one group is socially dominant and becomes the norm, setting expectations and structuring institutions so that those who do not conform to that norm are perceived as deviant or lesser beings, perceive themselves as deviant, and cannot function as well in the structures designed for the members of the dominant group.

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   79 Even political groups based on descriptive identity that challenge the hegemony of the dominant group cannot escape this internal dynamic. Feminist organizations that appeal to “sisterhood” have portrayed that sisterhood primarily in terms that reflected the concerns of the dominant (White middle-­class) groups in the movement (cf., e.g., Harris 1990; Spelman 1988). Black feminist writers who have challenged that dominance within feminism have themselves portrayed Black women as having a singular “Afrocentric standpoint” (e.g., Collins 1990). Although human cognitive processes prevent our eliminating this tendency to assume homogeneity within a group, we can fight that tendency by cultivating avenues of dissent, opposition, and difference within our organizations, struggling to appreciate contradictions within a larger perceptual standpoint, and using plurals rather than singulars in our writing. The essentializing features of descriptive representation can be mitigated by stressing the nonessentialist and contingent reasons for selecting certain groups for descriptive representation. The entire argument in this article is an argument from contingency. Building on a more general argument for the proportional representation of interests, it highlights the historical contexts in which descriptive representation is likely to advance the substantive representation of interests. That descriptive representation most closely approaches normative ideals when it reflects the inner diversity of any descriptively denominated group. One might also approach contingency from another angle, by asking first what features of the existing electoral process have resulted in lower proportions of certain descriptive groups in the legislature than in the population—a result that one would not expect by chance and that suggests the possibility that “certain voices are being silenced or suppressed” (Phillips 1992, 88; also 1995, 53, 63). The next screening question should be whether the members of that group consider themselves able adequately to represent themselves. If the answer is yes, the third question, bearing on normative responsibility, might be whether there is any evidence that dominant groups in the society have ever intentionally made it difficult or illegal for members of that group to represent themselves. A history of strong prejudice would provide such evidence. If the answer to this third question is also yes, the group appears to be a good candidate for affirmative selective representation. If a group has been in the past excluded by law from the vote, to take an extreme example, it seems likely that the social, political, and economic processes that allowed one group in the past legally to forbid the political participation of another may well have their sequelae in the present, working through informal social, political, and economic structures rather than through the law.12 A formulation like this points backward to contingent historical processes rather than inward to an essential nature. It also implies that when the systemic barriers to participation have been eliminated through reform and social evolution, the need for affirmative steps to insure descriptive representation will disappear. The institution of descriptive representation itself becomes contingent.

80   Deliberation and representation Other costs of descriptive representation Another potential cost of selective descriptive representation, related to that of essentialism, involves the way developing institutions that encourage citizens to see themselves as members of a subgroup may erode the ties of unity across a nation, a political party, or a political movement (see, e.g., Phillips 1995, 22ff.). This serious cost has greater or lesser weight depending on the precise institutional arrangements. In some contexts, institutions that encourage subgroups tear deeply at the connected fabric of the whole. In other contexts, subgroups become the experiential anchors for participation that links the individual to the whole.13 As work on “civil society” progresses, scholars may distinguish better than they have to date the characteristics and contexts that incline some institutions to the disintegrative, others to the integrative, function. Yet another cost of selective descriptive representation applies specifically to a particular method for achieving this result—drawing electoral boundaries to create relatively homogeneous districts. This cost is the potential loss of influence in other districts. If, for example, White Democrats represent many substantive interests of Black voters much better than White Republicans, and if concentrating Black voters in Black districts produces a few more Black representatives at the cost of many more Republicans elected from other districts, then in some historical circumstances, such as when the percentages in a majority-­rule legislature are almost tied between Republicans and Democrats, the substantive impact of losing those Democratic legislators will be high and the cost probably not worth paying (see, e.g., Swain 1993, 7–19; Lublin 1997). A final cost of selective descriptive representation lies in the possibility of reduced accountability. The descriptive characteristics of a representative can lull voters into thinking their substantive interests are being represented even when this is not the case. As one Black representative to the U.S. Congress told Carol Swain, “One of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty to their incumbents. You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance” (1993, 73).14 One would expect this danger of blind loyalty to be eased as more descriptive representatives competed for and entered the representative assembly, allowing constituents to compare more easily the virtues of one descriptive representative against another. Against these costs, one must weigh the benefits for substantive representation of enhanced deliberation through descriptive representation. These benefits, I argue, are greatest in contexts of communicative distrust and uncrystallized interests. Contexts of distrust: the benefits of enhanced communication The quality of the mutual communication between representative and constituent varies from group to group and era to era. Historical circumstances can interfere with adequate communication between members of one group and members of

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   81 another, particularly if one group is historically dominant and the other historically subordinate. A history of dominance and subordination typically breeds inattention, even arrogance, on the part of the dominant group and distrust on the part of the subordinate group. In conditions of impaired communication, including impairment caused by inattention and distrust, the shared experience imperfectly captured by descriptive representation facilitates vertical communication between representatives and constituents. Representatives and voters who share some version of a set of common experiences and the outward signs of having lived through those experiences can often read one another’s signals relatively easily and engage in relatively accurate forms of shorthand communication. Representatives and voters who share membership in a subordinate group can also forge bonds of trust based specifically on the shared experience of subordination. Claudine Gay’s data, for example, indicate that African Amer­ican constituents in districts represented by an African Amer­ican legislator are more likely to contact their representative than African Amer­ican constituents in districts represented by a White legislator (Gay 1996). As Representative Donald Payne, a Black member of Congress, commented to Carol Swain, “Black constituents feel comfortable with me, and see that I feel comfortable with them” (Swain 1993, 219). Groups that are disadvantaged in the electoral process differ, however, on this dimension. Replicating Gay’s study but looking at women representatives, Elizabeth Haynes has shown that women in districts represented by a woman are not more likely to contact their representative than women in districts represented by a man (Haynes 1997). Problems in communication between men and women certainly exist, but the size of the male-­female gaps in communication may well be smaller than the size of gaps in communication created by race, ethnicity, nationality, or class.15 In the United States, voters have many of their most vital interests represented through the “surrogate” representation of legislators elected from other districts. Advocates of particular political views who lose in one district, for example, can hope to be represented by advocates of those views elected in another district.16 Surrogate representatives do not have to be descriptive representatives. But it is in this surrogate process that descriptive representation often plays its most useful role, allowing representatives who are themselves members of a subordinate group to circumvent the strong barriers to communication between dominant and subordinate groups. Black representatives, for example, are likely to be contacted by Blacks “throughout the region” and not just in their own districts. The district administrator for the late Mickey Leland, a Black Texas Democrat, told Carol Swain: “What people don’t understand is that Mickey Leland must be the [Black] Congressman for the entire Southwest” (Swain 1993, 218). One example will illustrate the communicative advantages of descriptive representation, even for women, whose barriers to communication with men are probably not as high as the barriers between Blacks and Whites. In 1970, before the current slight increase in the number of women representatives in the U.S.

82   Deliberation and representation Senate, Birch Bayh was arguably the progressive senator most sympathetic to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). One of his roles was, therefore, to act as a surrogate representative for the women proponents of the ERA. Bayh served the ERA activists who consulted him both as mentor, through his commitments to progressive causes, and as gatekeeper, through his role as chair of the Judiciary Committee. Early in the constitutional amendment process, Senator Bayh suggested to the proponents an alternate wording for the ERA, based on the words of the existing Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution, which guaranteed equal rights based on race. The ERA proponents rejected Bayh’s proposed wording as “weakening” the force of the Equal Rights Amendment. It is not clear in retrospect, however, that the alternate wording would have weakened the amendment. And the wording Bayh suggested would undoubtedly have greatly clarified the uncertainty that eventually became one main cause for the ERA’s failure to be ratified in the states. The history of the interaction between Birch Bayh and the ERA proponents reveals considerable distrust of Bayh among the proponents—a distrust greatly increased by the young male Ivy League staffer assigned to the project, who reportedly described the ERA proponents as “hysterical” women. Had the Senate at that time included a powerful progressive female legislator, the ERA proponents would undoubtedly have chosen her as their mentor. The female legislator in turn would almost certainly not have assigned such an insensitive staff member to the project. A female legislative mentor might even have convinced the ERA supporters to adopt a wording parallel to the Fourteenth Amendment, which in turn would very probably have resulted in the ERA’s being ratified in the states. Alternatively, the female legislator and the activists together might have decided, in a more thorough deliberative process, to retain the original wording even at the risk of failure in ratification. The failure of Birch Bayh to communicate with the ERA proponents in an atmosphere of mutual trust suggests the following rule: the deeper the communicative chasm between a dominant and a subordinate group, the more descriptive representation is needed to bridge that chasm. Contexts of uncrystallized interests: the benefits of experiential deliberation In certain historical moments, citizen interests on a given set of issues are relatively uncrystallized. The issues have not been on the political agenda long, candidates have not taken public positions on them, and political parties are not organized around them. In Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of communism, for example, many political interests were relatively uncrystallized, as hundreds of new political parties struggled to define themselves on the issue map. (One Polish party called itself “Party X,” using a consciously contentless signifier; another defined itself, with almost as little content, as “slightly West of center.”)

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   83 When interests are uncrystallized, the best way to have one’s most important substantive interests represented is often to choose a representative whose descriptive characteristics match one’s own on the issues one expects to emerge. One might want to elect a representative from one’s own geographical territory, class, or ethnicity. Then, as issues arise unpredictably, a voter can expect the representative to react more or less the way the voter would have done, on the basis of descriptive similarity. The original geographic representation of voters in the United States was undoubtedly intended in part to capture this form of descriptive representation. In political systems where many issues, such as those involving economic class, are relatively crystallized, other issues, such as those involving gender, are surfacing and evolving rapidly on the political agenda. When this is the case, individuals for whom these relatively uncrystallized interests are extremely important may get their best substantive representation from a descriptive representative.17 Here, the important communication is not vertical, between representative and constituent, but horizontal, among deliberating legislators. In this horizontal communication, a descriptive representative can draw on elements of experiences shared with constituents to explore the uncharted ramifications of newly presented issues and also to speak on those issues with a voice carrying the authority of experience. In the United States, where party discipline is weak and representatives consequently have considerable autonomy, legislators often vote by “introspective representation” [later termed “gyroscopic” representation (Mansbridge 2003, this vol. Chapter 6) in a “selection model” (Mansbridge 2009)], acting on the basis of what they themselves have concluded is the right policy for their constituents and the nation. When this is the case, voters exercise power not through changing the behavior of the representatives, as suggested in traditional mechanisms of accountability, but through electoral selection.18 In this process, the voters often use descriptive characteristics, as well as party identification and indicators of character, as cues by which to predict whether a particular candidate, if elected, will represent their interests, both crystallized and uncrystallized. In 1981, for example, when the Illinois legislature was about to vote on the Equal Rights Amendment, I asked several legislators how they determined what their constituents thought about the amendment. One rural legislator explained that he knew what his constituents felt because they felt the way he did: “I come from my district, and they were brought up the same way that I am, or was, and worked the same way I always have” (Mansbridge 1986, 152).19 As a descriptive representative of his constituents, he believed he could know their reactions to the ERA without the ERA having been on the political agenda when he was elected and without consulting his constituents subsequently. He took himself to be “one of them,” and was presumably so taken by most of his constituents, by virtue of a cluster of descriptive characteristics, not one. In the United States Congress, one Midwest Republican made a similar descriptive argument, assuming a similar homogeneity within another member’s district:

84   Deliberation and representation I could take you down the hall and introduce you to a member who just drips his district, from his shoes to his straw hat. You don’t have to go to his district to know what it’s like, you just have to look at him…. Congress represents its districts because each member comes from his district much more so than because he tries to adapt his personal philosophy [to what his constituents want]. (Bianco 1994, 39) Focusing on what at first seems more like a single descriptive characteristic, a Black legislator told Richard Fenno, “When I vote my conscience as a black man, I necessarily represent the black community. I don’t have any trouble knowing what the black community thinks or wants” (Fenno 1978, 115). Yet this legislator’s stance of introspective representation derived from far more than the color of his skin. “His own identification with the black community,” Fenno commented, “is obvious and total. Every expression he gives or gives off conveys the idea, ‘I am one of you’ ” (ibid.). The representative assumed that he and his constituents shared a set of experiences that generated specific perspectives and interests requiring representation in the legislature. His constituents in turn used not only the visible characteristic of skin color but also his body language, choice of words, accent, and other external signals to predict the likelihood of a large body of experience shared with them and other African Amer­icans.20 When unable to select a representative with reliable descriptive characteristics, voters often select for what I call “pseudo-­description,” mimicking descriptive behavior. Samuel Popkin recounts President Gerald Ford’s adventures campaigning in Texas, as Ford tried unsuccessfully to eat a tamale in order to show Mexican Amer­ican voters that he was “like them” to the extent of appreciating their food. Popkin comments that familiarity with a culture’s food is “an obvious and easy test of ability to relate to the problems and sensibilities of the ethnic group and to understand and care about them” (1994, 3). Later he confirms that [d]emographic facts provide a low-­information shortcut to estimating a candidate’s policy preferences…. Characteristics such as a candidate’s race, ethnicity, religion, gender and local ties … are important cues because the voter observes the relationship between these traits and real-­life behavior as part of his daily experience. When these characteristics are closely aligned with the interests of the voter, they provide a basis for reasonable, accessible, and economical estimates of candidate behavior. (1994, 63–65) The accuracy of these cues, and the degree to which they predict “identification” (Fenno 1978, 58–59) or “common interests” (Bianco 1994), depends on the degree to which the descriptive characteristics are, in fact, aligned with the interests of the majority of voters in their districts, so that representatives

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   85 engaged in introspective representation will reflect the policies their constituents would choose if they had greater knowledge and time for reflection. When legislators are engaged primarily in introspective representation, descriptive representation will enhance that representation most when interests are relatively uncrystallized—that is, when party identification and campaign statements provide poor clues to a representative’s future actions. On the many issues relating to gender, for example, where views are changing and policies developing in a relatively ad hoc way to meet a rapidly evolving situation, descriptive representatives are, other things equal, more likely than nondescriptive representatives to act as their descriptive constituents would like them to act. Issues of race, which are somewhat more crystallized in the United States than issues of gender, also produce moments when a descriptive representative acts in a context of relatively uncrystallized interests. In 1993, when Carol Moseley-­Braun was the only Black member of the U.S. Senate, only she was galvanized into action when Senator Jesse Helms attached to one piece of legislation an unrelated amendment renewing the design patent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—a design that featured the confederate flag. Moseley-­Braun argued vehemently against the Senate’s legitimating the flag by granting this patent, and succeeded in persuading enough senators to reverse themselves to kill the measure.21 As an African Amer­ican, Moseley-­Braun was undoubtedly more likely than even the most progressive White representative to notice and feel it important to condemn the use of the Confederate flag on the design patent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The flag issue had not previously appeared on the active political agenda of either the nation or the state of Illinois, Moseley-­ Braun’s constituency. Moseley-­Braun undoubtedly had never mentioned the issue in her election campaign. Nor could Moseley-­Braun have feared re-­election sanctions on this point, since without her intervention the amendment would have passed unnoticed. She did, it turns out, use the issue to consolidate her position with her Democratic constituency in the next election, but one can imagine a less dramatic issue in which this would not be the case. The most important reason for her action seems to have been the particular sensibility, created by experience, that led her to notice the Confederate flag and be offended by it. Her descriptive characteristics—going beyond skin color to her use of language and ties to her church—had earlier signaled that sensibility to her Black constituents. The visible characteristics were the outward signs of the shared experience that allowed her, as a representative, to react as most of her descriptive constituents would have liked.22 With respect to gender, many issues relating to sexual harassment and violence against women are politically salient but have not become sufficiently crystallized that the two main parties in the United States have developed distinctive and opposing positions in regard to them, or that candidates usually mention their positions on these issues in their campaigns. It is not surprising, then, that women legislators have usually been the ones to bring these issues to the

86   Deliberation and representation l­egislative table. In Illinois, for example, the Commission on the Status of Women, a bipartisan legislative group including a few nonlegislators such as the antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, suggested to the legislature a bill that, among other things, instituted the crime of rape in marriage. This pattern of distinctive attention has been repeated in legislature after legislature. Having more women in office unquestionably makes government policies more responsive to the interests of most women.23 Proportional descriptive representation would undoubtedly reflect an even wider range of views among women, producing a more nuanced sensitivity to differences within that group. Reflecting internal group differences is a particularly important feature in deliberation when issues are uncrystallized and may be taking their first, and possibly defining, shape. Disadvantaged groups also may need descriptive representation in order to get uncrystallized substantive interests represented with sufficient vigor (see Phillips 1995, 69 and passim, on the “degree of vigorous advocacy that people bring to their own concerns”). As Pamela Conover observed in a different context, [t]he way we think about social groups depends enormously on whether we are part of that group. Try as we might, the political sympathy that we feel for other groups is never quite the same as that which these groups feel for themselves or that which we feel for ourselves. (Conover 1988, 75) In the case of Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas, for example, an issue involving sexual harassment (which was not on the agenda of any of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives when they ran for election) emerged in the Senate hearings on the nomination of Thomas for the Supreme Court. It was the women in the House of Representatives, where the number of women had reached a critical mass, who took decisive action. The famous photograph of five women legislators from the House of Representatives charging up the Senate steps to demand a delay in the Thomas nomination captured for many women voters the need to have representatives of their own gender in the legislative body. Particularly on issues that are uncrystallized or that many legislators have not fully thought through, the personal quality of being oneself a member of an affected group also gives a legislator a certain moral force in making an argument or asking for a favorable vote on an issue important to the group.24 Beyond substantive representation Two other benefits of descriptive representation do not enhance substantive representation, but nevertheless deserve consideration in any discussion of the costs and benefits of descriptive representation. These benefits arise from the representative assembly’s role in constructing social meaning and de facto legitimacy.

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   87

The construction of social meaning In certain historical conditions, what it means to be a member of a particular social group includes some form of “second-­class citizenship.” Operationally, this is almost always the case when at some point in the polity’s history the group has been legally excluded from the vote. In these conditions, the ascriptive character of one’s membership in that group carries the historically embedded meaning, “Persons with these characteristics do not rule,” with the possible implication, “Persons with these characteristics are not able to (fit to) rule.”25 Whenever this is the case, the presence or absence in the ruling assembly (and other ruling bodies, such as the executive and judiciary) of a proportional number of individuals carrying the group’s ascriptive characteristics shapes the social meaning of those characteristics in a way that affects most bearers of those characteristics in the polity. A parallel outside the polity may clarify the process of meaning construction. Before the Second Wave of the women’s movement in the United States and the revolution in women’s sports that it brought about, it was part of the definition of “female” to be nonathletic. The definition was not all encompassing: some women found ways of being female and athletic. But most women were expected, and expected themselves, to be poor athletes. Today, girls’ and women’s sports in schools and universities have begun to be funded, although not usually at levels comparable to those of boys’ and men’s sports. Women athletes are in the news—although again, not to the same degree as men. These social facts change the definition of being female in regard to athletics in a way that affects every female regardless of her own orientation and actions. Similarly, when descriptive characteristics signal major status differences connected with citizenship, then a low percentage of a given descriptive group in the representational body creates social meanings attached to those characteristics that affect all holders of the characteristics. Low percentages of Black and women representatives, for example, create the meaning that Blacks and women cannot rule, or are not suitable for rule. In 1981, Virginia Sapiro argued that increased descriptive representation of women in the legislatures would undermine the perception that politics is a “male domain” (1981, 712; see also Phillips 1995, 39, 79ff.). In 1976, Mack Jones reported that the growing number of Black elected officials in the South had changed that region’s political culture: “The idea of Blacks as political participants rather than subjects is becoming the norm” (1976, 406). In 1989, a Black member of the Arkansas House of Representatives said he worked to help Blacks get elected in local races because he wanted to dispel “the myth that some white kids might have that blacks can’t serve or shouldn’t be serving at the courthouse” (cited in Guinier 1994, 54; see also 34, 36). If the women representatives are almost all White and the Black representatives are almost all men, however, the implicit message may be that Black women do not or should not rule. A similar message holds for gay men and lesbian women.

88   Deliberation and representation This is a historically specific and contextual dynamic. Normatively, making a claim for descriptive representation on these grounds requires historical grounding for the factual contention that the social meaning of membership in a given descriptive group incorporates a legacy of second-­class citizenship. Such a claim could point, for confirmation, to a history of being legally deprived of the vote. A major cost to this claim, in addition to the problem of essentialism discussed earlier, involves the way the very process of making a claim of historical disability to some degree undermines claims on other political tracks that members of the group have currently achieved the status of first-­class citizens. As in any claim for justice based on disadvantage, signaling that disadvantage in public erodes the public presentation of the group as fully equal. This cost must be balanced against the benefit of creating new social meanings that include members of the group as truly “able to rule.” Claims like this one, based partly on the concept of reparations, do not in theory entail the cost of painting a group as disadvantaged, because—as in the restitution of property in the countries of the former Soviet bloc—claims for reparation can be and are made by political, economic, and social equals (or superiors). But claims for reparation do require both establishing a history of intentional injustice and arguing convincingly that a particular form of reparation (in this case establishing some form of selective descriptive representation) is the best way of redressing that injustice.26 The argument here for the creation of social meaning is an argument not for a right but for a social good. The argument is simply that if the costs are not too great, any measure is good that increases the degree to which the society as a whole sees all (or almost all) descriptive groups as equally capable of ruling.

De facto legitimacy A second benefit to descriptive representation comes in the increased empirical (or sociological, or de facto) legitimacy of the polity. Seeing proportional numbers of members of their group exercising the responsibility of ruling with full status in the legislature can enhance de facto legitimacy by making citizens, and particularly members of historically underrepresented groups, feel as if they themselves were present in the deliberations (Gosnell 1948, 131, cited in Pitkin [1967] 1972, 78; also Guinier 1994, 35, 39; Kymlicka 1993, 83; Minow 1991, 286 n.  69, 291; Phillips 1995). Seeing women from the U.S. House of Representatives storming the steps of the Senate, for example, made some women feel actively represented in ways that a photograph of male legislators could never have done. To a great degree this benefit is a consequence of previous ones. Easier communication with one’s representative, awareness that one’s interests are being represented with sensitivity, and knowledge that certain features of one’s identity do not mark one as less able to govern all contribute to making one feel more included in the polity. This feeling of inclusion in turn makes the

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   89 polity democratically more legitimate in one’s eyes. Having had a voice in the making of a particular policy, even if that voice is through one’s representative and even when one’s views did not prevail, also makes that policy seem more legitimate.27 These feelings are deeply intertwined with what has often been seen as the “psychological” benefits of descriptive surrogate representation for those voters who, because of selective bias against their characteristics, are less than proportionately represented in the legislature. The need for role models, for identification, and for what Charles Taylor (1992) has called “equal dignity” and “the politics of recognition” can be assimilated under this rubric. In many historical moments, these factors may be of great importance to a particular constituency. I stress the creation of social meaning and de facto legitimacy rather than, say, the need for role models on the part of individuals in the descriptively underrepresented group precisely because points like these have often been presented as questions of individual psychology.28 Instead, I want to point out that the social meaning exists outside the heads of the members of the descriptive group, and that de facto legitimacy has substantive consequences. I agree that social relations among and between groups can have major effects on individual identity. It is important that members of a disadvantaged group not be given, in Taylor’s words, “a demeaning picture of themselves” (1992, 65). From this perspective, if the costs are not too great, we should promote diversity in all positions of authority and excellence. Young people, in particular, need these kinds of role models. I have no quarrel with this point. Yet I consider of even greater importance the effects of social meaning on the perceptions and actions of members of the more advantaged groups. There are sometimes more of them, and they are more powerful. My aim, in short, is changing the psychology of the “haves” far more than the psychology of the “have-­nots.” For similar reasons I do not contrast “symbolic” and “substantive” representation. In political contexts the word “symbol” often bears the unspoken modifier “mere.” Moreover, symbols are often perceived as being “only” in people’s heads rather than “real.” Psychological needs are intangible, and it is easy incorrectly to contrast the “intangible” with the “real” (as Swain 1993, 211, points out). In most writing on this subject, the structural consequences of descriptive representation have been deemphasized in favor of psychological ones in ways that I believe do not reflect their actual relative influence in contemporary political life. Institutionalizing fluid forms of descriptive representation Because there are always costs to privileging any one characteristic that enhances accurate substantive representation over others, voters and institutional designers alike must balance those benefits against the costs. And because I have argued that the benefits of descriptive representation vary greatly by context, it would be wise, in building descriptive representation into any given democratic institutional design, to make its role fluid, dynamic, and easily subject to change.

90   Deliberation and representation This analysis suggests that voters and the designers of representative institutions should accept some of the costs of descriptive representation in historical circumstances when (1) communication is impaired, often by distrust, (2) interests are relatively uncrystallized, (3) a group has once been considered unfit to rule, (4) de facto legitimacy is low within the group. The contextual character of this analysis suggests strongly that any institutionalization of descriptive representation is best kept fluid. Microcosmic forms of descriptive representation are best kept advisory and experimental for a good while, as they currently are. Selective forms are also best kept experimental. Permanent quotas are relatively undesirable because they are both static and highly essentializing. They assume, for example, that any woman can stand for all women, any Black for all Blacks. They do not respond well to constituents’ many-­sided and cross-­cutting interests. Drawing political boundaries to produce majority-­minority districts is also both relatively static and essentializing. Cumulative voting in at-­large districts (Guinier 1994) is far more fluid, as it allows individuals to choose whether they want to cast all their votes for a descriptive representative or divide their votes among different representatives, each of whom can represent one or another facet of the voters’ interests. Such systems, however, have their own costs in party collusion to produce noncompeting candidates and the consequent voter demobilization.29 Systems of proportional representation with party lists have well-­known costs, but are still a relatively flexible way to introduce selective descriptive representation, as those lists can change easily in each election.30 Similarly, experimental decisions by political parties to make a certain percentage of candidates descriptively representative of an underrepresented group are preferable to quotas imbedded in law or constitutions. Such ad hoc arrangements can be flexible over time. Less obtrusive, although also undoubtedly less immediately successful, are other “enabling devices,” such as schools for potential candidates (Phillips 1995, 57), and reforms aimed at reducing the barriers to representation, such as those studied by the Canadian Royal Commission on Electoral Reform: “caps on nomination campaign expenses; public funding of nomination campaign expenses …; the establishing of formal search committees within each party to help identify and nominate potential candidates from disadvantages groups; and so on” (Kymlicka 1993, 62). Vouchers for day care or high-­quality day care at the workplace of elected officials would reduce the barriers to political entry for parents of young children. Scholarships to law schools for members of historically disadvantaged and proportionally underrepresented groups would reduce another major barrier to entry.31 This approach more generally aims at identifying and then reducing the specific structural barriers to formal political activity that serve to reduce the percentages in office of particular disadvantaged groups (see Box 4.1).

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   91 Box 4.1  Institutionalizing fluid forms of descriptive representation LEAST FLUID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Quotas in constitutions Quotas in law Quotas in party constitutions Majority–minority districts Quotas as party decisions Proportional representation and/or cumulative voting “Enabling devices” a schools and funding for potential candidates b caps on nomination campaign expenses c public funding of nomination campaign expenses d establishing formal search committees within each party to help identify and nominate potential candidates from disadvantaged groups e high-­quality public day care for elected officials f scholarships to law schools and public policy schools for members of historically disadvantaged and proportionally underrepresented groups

MOST FLUID

This paper represents a plea for moving beyond a dichotomous approach to descriptive representation. It argues that descriptive representation is not always necessary, but rather that the best approach to descriptive representation is contextual, asking when the benefits of such representation might be most likely to exceed the costs. Representation is in part a deliberative process. Recognizing this deliberative function should alert us to contexts of communication impaired by distrust and contexts of relatively uncrystallized interests. In both of these contexts, descriptive representation usually furthers the substantive representation of interests by improving the quality of deliberation. Systems of representation also have externalities, beyond the process of representation itself, in the creation of political meaning and legitimacy. Recognizing these externalities should alert us to contexts of past denigration of a group’s ability to rule and contexts of low current legitimacy. In both of these contexts, descriptive representation usually produces benefits that extend throughout the political system.

Notes   * This article was completed while the author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the National Science Foundation Grant #SBR-­9601236 and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. I am also grateful for excellent suggestions, on versions of this and a more comprehensive study, from William Bianco, Carol Swain,

92   Deliberation and representation

 †  1

 2

 3  4

 5

 6

Melissa Williams, Iris Marion Young, and participants in seminars at the Ohio State University, Nuffield College, Indiana University, Princeton University, University of California at San Diego, Harvard University, Northwestern University, and Boston College. I would particularly like to thank Benjamin Page for his close reading and incisive comments on that work. This chapter is a lightly edited version of Jane Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes’,” Journal of Politics 61(3): 627–57 (1999). Birch 1993, 72; see also 1964, 16. The term “descriptive representation” was coined by Griffiths and Wollheim (1960, 188) and adopted by Pitkin ([1967] 1972). I use this term instead of the simpler “mirror” representation because of a potential confusion. Many people expect representatives of all kinds to “mirror” the views of their constituents. In the two best recent treatments of the issue, Phillips (1995) uses the term “politics of presence” and Williams (1998) the term “self-­representation.” Sapiro (1981, 712), however, argued that in the case of women descriptive representation was “a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient.” Her argument for necessity rested on the grounds that (1) having women rather than men in office demonstrably makes government somewhat more responsive to women’s interests; (2) participation in government is intrinsically valuable; and (3) increased representation of women will undermine the perception that politics is a male domain. I will reproduce most of these arguments here, while both moving them from the domain of necessity to contingency and agreeing that the contingent circumstances that make some descriptive representation beneficial for women obtain now. The term “microcosmic” comes from Birch 1993, 72; the term “selective” is my own. Burnheim’s (1985) suggestions for microcosmic representation reduce the potential costs of lesser talent with a process based on a mixture of nomination and lot. Manin ([1995] 1997) traces the different uses of lot in the political systems of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Italian republics of the Renaissance, specifying in each case the mechanisms that increased the likelihood of competent and responsible action on the part of the officeholder chosen by lot. He plausibly attributes the relatively sudden disappearance in the eighteenth century of political interest in the lot both to a concern that citizen consent be expressed in electoral participation and—among many writers in England, France, and the Federalists in America—to a desire for representatives to rank higher than most of their constituents in talent, virtue, and wealth. Representation by some forms of lot, he argues, was practicable even in polities as large as those of eighteenth-­century England (82). For a general discussion of the uses of randomization, see Elster [1987] 1989. Mueller, Tollison, and Willett (1972), Barber (1984, 290–93), and Callenbach and Phillips (1985) have proposed election of officials by lot, but not with the expectation of having their suggestions widely adopted. Dahl (1970, 149; 1977, 17; 1985, 86–89; 1992, 54–57) has suggested adding a third assembly, chosen by lot from a nationwide population, to advise the United States Senate and House of Representatives. More recently Dahl has suggested creating smaller deliberative bodies, drawn by lot from a nationwide population, to consider specific issues, such as health care, in which the re-­election incentives of politicians and the desire among the populace to benefit without paying costs combine to curtail appropriate deliberation (Dahl 1997). These bodies are similar to Nagel’s (1992) “deliberative assembl[ies] on a random basis” (DARBs), Fishkin’s (1991, 1995, 1996) “deliberative opinion polls,” and Crosby’s (1995, 1996) more local “citizen juries,” the last two of which have already developed a notable track record in practice. None of these theorists advocating forms of microcosmic representation has, however, either used the terms “descriptive” or “mirror” representation, or evaluated their recommended microcosmic forms in explicit response to the literature critical of descriptive representation. If adding descriptive criteria, in fact, made a selection process dip significantly lower into the pool of potential representatives, polities could compensate for any expected

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   93

 7  8

 9

10

11

12

13

descriptive decrement by reducing the negative impact of the other factors on selection (e.g., by instituting public funding for campaigns or increasing the salary of the legislators). The number of talented and dedicated individuals currently driven away from state and federal electoral politics by low salaries and the politically compromising activities of fund-­raising is undoubtedly far higher than the number that would be overlooked if, say, ethnicity and gender played greater roles in the selection process. 1981, 431, quoting the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974, which called for consumers of health care to sit on the boards of more than 200 Health Systems Agencies. Grofman writes, for example, “One difficulty with the mirror view is that it is not clear what characteristics of the electorate need to be mirrored to insure a fair sample” (1982, 98). See also Pitkin [1967] 1972, 87–88; Voet 1992, 395; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 154. The questions of which perspectives will contribute to understanding and which interests conflict will often be contested, as will the question of how close in any given case an issue comes to either common or conflicting interests. Moreover, the ideals of achieving understanding and settling conflict legitimately are always “regulative” ideals—that is, ideals at which one should aim but not expect fully to achieve (see Mansbridge 1996 on actual polities never achieving full democratic legitimacy). Giving any group veto power over issues deeply important to that group can be useful in a compromise instituting some form of cooperative self-­rule when cooperation would otherwise not take place, but such vetoes favor the status quo in inegalitarian ways. Restricting such vetoes to disadvantaged groups. Young (1990) raises the thorny question of how to define which groups deserve such a veto (Kymlicka 1995, 145; Phillips 1992, 89; Williams 1998, 198). Pitkin’s ([1967] 1972) condemnation of descriptive representation recognized its uses in deliberation, but set up what I believe to be a false dichotomy between “talking” and “actively governing” (63, 84), as well as sometimes seeming to restrict the deliberative function to simply “giving information” (63, 81, 83, 84, 88, 90). See Swain 1993, 41, 49–71, for Gray and Crockett, and passim for the diversity in opinions and styles within the spectrum of African Amer­ican representation in Congress in the 1980s and early 1990s. See Young 1997 for the concept of diversity of opinion within a single “perspective.” For both deliberative and aggregative purposes, the full diversity within any larger perspective or interest should ideally be represented in proportion to numbers in the population, subject to the critical deliberative limitations of (1) threshold representation when a useful perspective would otherwise not be represented at all in a proportional distribution (Kymlicka 1995, 147) and (2) the winnowing out and reduction in salience of relatively harmful and useless ideas. The intent of this argument is not to restrict groups designated for selective representation to those who have been legally deprived of the vote or other rights of citizenship, but to draw normative attention to this characteristic on the grounds of past societal responsibility. Such responsibility is also involved when a form of discrimination, such as that against gays and lesbians, has run so deep that it has not been necessary legally to forbid their political participation. Historical discrimination is also usually responsible for communication impaired by distrust, a social meaning of lesser citizenship, and impaired de facto legitimacy, three of the four contexts that in the central argument in the text mandate particular concern for descriptive representation. See Phillips 1992, 1995; Kymlicka 1993, 1995; and Williams 1998 on historical and systemic disadvantage; Guinier (1994, 140) points out, however, that her argument does not rely primarily on the historic context of group disenfranchisement. Political marginalization, our concern here, need not require economic inferiority. To draw an example from the organizational level, the Amer­ican Psychological Association seems to have devolved into a series of separate subassociations after its

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14

15

16

17

18 19

sections acquired more power, whereas the Amer­ican Political Science Association seems to have taken on greater vitality since the Organized Sections acquired a greater say in its governance. Arguments for and against strong state and local governance have also addressed these issues, but I know of no comparative studies designed to explore in what contexts strong subordinate governments weaken the superordinate government and in what contexts they strengthen the superordinate government. The representative’s lack of vigilance derives in part from the fact that “Black representatives from historically black districts are essentially guaranteed re-­election if they survive their primaries” (Swain 1993, 220), a condition that in turn derives partly from the almost uniform commitment of Black voters “to the party, faction, or individual candidate that is most supportive of racial reform” (Pinderhughes 1987, 113). See Guinier 1994, 35, 58–60, 82, and de la Garza and DeSipio 1993 on the importance of designing representative systems that increase political participation and attentiveness among the electorate, and the problems of majority-­minority districts in this respect. See Williams 1998 on “trust,” for the history of Blacks’ justified mistrust of Whites in the United States. See Tannen 1994, 73, 188, for implied comparisons of gender and ethnicity differences. Only after Hyde’s (1990) injunction to pay attention to size of difference as well as existence of difference have psychologists begun routinely to include measures of size of difference in their studies, particularly of gender difference. Many linguists have not yet adopted this strategy. In neither field is it standard to compare the size of gender differences to the size of other common differences— an omission that contributes to the common magnification of gender differences (Mansbridge 1993). I know of no studies on class differences in communicating with representatives (for suggestive data see Heilig and Mundt 1984, 85–91). Note that this analysis focuses on communicative distrust as it obstructs fruitful deliberation. On surveys taken in the United States women do not report having more generalized distrust of “the government” than men or Blacks than Whites (see Orren 1997, 86). Surrogate representation is in many ways similar to what Burke called “virtual representation” ([1792] 1869, 293). It differs in applying to the aggregative as well as the deliberative function of democracy, to will as well as wisdom, to changing preferences as well as relatively fixed and objective interests, and to negotiations among self-­interested groups as well as the good of the nation as a whole (Pitkin [1967] 1972, 169–75; see Williams 1998, 33ff. for a nuanced discussion of Burke’s concept of a “description” of people). Burke therefore did not address questions of proportionality, as does my concept of surrogate representation, Weissberg’s (1978) similar “collective representation,” and Jackson and King’s (1989) “institutional” representation. For a fuller analysis of surrogate representation, see Mansbridge 1998. Two of Anne Phillips’s four “key arguments” for descriptive representation turn on this issue. One is “the need to tackle those exclusions that are inherent in the party-­ packaging of political ideas” and the other “the importance of a politics of transformation in opening up the full range of policy options” (1995, 25; see also 43–5, 50, 70, 151ff.). Her analysis, particularly of transformative politics, goes much further than I have the opportunity to do here. Holding other features of substantive representation equal, one might expect descriptive representatives in a field of uncrystallized interests to be most efficacious when dominant groups have kept key issues off the political agenda (see Bachrach and Baratz 1963). Mansbridge 1998. Others have called this process representation by “recruitment” (Kingdon 1981, 45), “initial selection” (Bernstein 1989), or “electoral replacement” (Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995). Or, as a member of Congress put it to John Kingdon: “I grew up with these people and I guess I reflect their thinking” (1981, 45). Because of this almost complete attitudinal identity with a majority of their constituents, members of Congress will say and believe, “You’ll find congressmen most of the time will want to vote according to

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20

21 22 23

24 25 26

27

their obligations and principles as they see them. The political considerations are less important” (ibid., 46). As one journalist summed up the relationship: “They [the members of Congress] just reflect where they came from” (ibid., 47). Such statements reflect assumptions of a relative homogeneity of interests and perspectives within the majority that elected the representative (Bianco 1994). Conversely, both the West Indian background of General Colin Powell and other signals in his language, deportment, and political identification led some African Amer­icans not to see him as a descriptive representative whom they would expect to act “like them” in the legislature. See Williams 1998 for the centrality of shared experience to descriptive representation. Adam Clymer, “Daughter of Slavery Hushes Senate,” New York Times, July 23, 1993. See also Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 135–36. Her experience as an African Amer­ican also helped Moseley-­Braun find words to describe the issue that would convince the other senators to change their minds. See Williams 1998 on “voice.” Thomas (1994) summarizes the literature on gender differences among legislators and adds important data of her own. She and Mezey (1994) each point out that although on several feminist issues party affiliation predicts feminist position better than female gender, gender has its own independent effect. See also Berkman and O’Connor 1993; Skjeie 1991; Jonasdottir 1988; Strauss 1998. Representative diversity (and the critical mass of important subgroups within that diversity) in any descriptive group greatly increases the chances of diverse perspectives being represented in deliberation. For example, although there was one Black woman on the 16-member Illinois Commission on the Status of Women when it debated the Sexual Assault Act (which also changed the burden of proof in rape, requiring the alleged rapist rather than the victim to show that the victim had consented), it is not clear how deeply, if at all, the commission discussed the distinctive concerns of Black women on this issue. The differential conviction rates of African Amer­ican and White men, the historical legacy of lynching, and the ongoing racism of most contemporary police forces complicate for Black women approval of any law such as this that shifts the burden of proof on consent in rape from the victim to the alleged rapist (see Crenshaw 1991; Gilmore 1996, ch. 3; Richie 1996; Walker 1981). I take this point from Representative Barney Frank (personal communication, June 1998), who as an openly gay legislator in the U.S. Congress serves as a surrogate descriptive representative for many on gay and lesbian issues. The concept has a word in German: Regierungsfähig, “fit to rule.” Distinguishing between minority “nationalities” and minority “ethnic groups” within a nation-­state, Kymlicka (1995) makes a convincing case on the basis of reparations for nationalities having forms of representation separate from those of the majority population. Although Kymlicka does not espouse descriptive representation for minority ethnic groups or women, a similar historically based case could be made for temporary forms of selective descriptive representation. See Williams 1998 on “memory,” suggesting for selective descriptive representation only the two criteria of contemporary inequality and a history of discrimination. Using only these criteria would generate as candidates for selective descriptive representation Asians, Latinos, 18- to 21-year-­olds, and the propertyless, among other groups. Heilig and Mundt (1984) found that although moving from at-­large to single-­member district systems in the 1970s increased the number of Mexican Amer­ican and Black members on city councils, the fiscal constraints of the cities were so great that even achieving a majority of the group on the council brought few results that greatly affected the citizens (see also Karnig and Welch 1980). At the same time, however, they found that council members from low-­income districts were far more likely than at-­large representatives to adopt an “ombudsman” role, helping constituents with personal problems and government services. Whatever the cause, the result seemed to be

96   Deliberation and representation 28 29

30 31

greater satisfaction among constituents after moving to a single-­member district system (Heilig and Mundt 1984, 85, 152). On role models see, e.g., the interview with Representative Craig Washington in Swain 1993, 193. Preston (1978, 198) and particularly Cole (1976, 221–23) stress what I call social meaning. The state of Illinois practiced cumulative voting until the process was eliminated in 1982 in a cost-­cutting effort that reduced the size of the assembly. The cumulative voting system produced greater proportional representation of Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature but not a great degree of voter choice, because for strategic reasons the two major parties often ran altogether only three candidates for the three seats available in each district (Sawyer and MacRae 1962; Adams 1996). See Zimmerman 1992, 1994 for the positive and negative features of cumulative voting and different forms of proportional representation. Directing attention to the eligible pool, Darcy, Welch, and Clark (1987, 101), indicate that the percentage of women in state legislatures rose from 1970 to 1984 in tandem with the percentage of women in the law.

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Should Blacks represent Blacks?   97 Crosby, Ned. 1995. “Citizen Juries: One Solution for Difficult Environmental Problems.” In Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation, ed. Ortwin Renn et al. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Crosby, Ned. 1996. “Creating an Authentic Voice of the People.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. Dahl, Robert A. 1970. After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1977. “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States.” Political Science Quarterly 92(1): 1–20. Dahl, Robert A. 1985. Controlling Nuclear Weapons. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1992. “The Problem of Civic Competence.” Journal of Democracy 3(4): 45–59. Dahl, Robert A. 1997. “On Deliberative Democracy.” Dissent 44(3): 54–58. Darcy, Robert, Susan Welch, and Janet Clark. 1987. Women, Elections, and Representation. New York: Longman. de la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Louis DeSipio. 1993. “Save the Baby, Change the Bathwater, and Scrub the Tub: Latino Electoral Participation after Seventeen Years of Voting Rights Coverage.” Texas Law Review 71(7): 1479–539. Diamond, Irene. 1977. Sex Roles in the State House. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Elster, Jon. [1987] 1989. “Taming Chance: Randomization in Individual and Social Decisions.” In Solomonic Judgements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fenno, Richard F., Jr. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Fishkin, James. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 1995. The Voice of the People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 1996. The Dialogue of Justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fuss, Diana. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge. Gay, Claudine. 1996. “The Impact of Black Congressional Representation on the Behavior of Constituents.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. 1996. Gender and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gosnell, Harold Foote. 1948. Democracy: The Threshold of Freedom. New York: Ronald Press. Griffiths, A. Phillips, and Richard Wollheim. 1960. “How Can One Person Represent Another?” Aristotelian Society. Suppl. 34: 182–208. Grofman, Bernard. 1982. “Should Representatives Be Typical of Their Constituents?” In Representation and Redistricting Issues, ed. Bernard Grofman et al. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. Guinier, Lani. 1994. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, Angela. 1990. “Race and Essentialism in Legal Theory.” Stanford Law Review 42(3): 581–616.

98   Deliberation and representation Haynes, Elizabeth. 1997. “Women and Legislative Communication.” Harvard University. Typescript. Heilig, Peggy, and Robert J. Mundt. 1984. Your Voice at City Hall: The Politics, Procedures, and Policies of District Representation. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hyde, Janet Shibley. 1990. “Meta-­Analysis and the Psychology of Gender Differences.” Signs 16(1): 5–73. Jackson, John E., and David C. King. 1989. “Public Goods, Private Interests, and Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 83(4): 1143–164. Jonasdottir, Anna G. 1988. “On the Concept of Interest: Women’s Interests and the Limitations of Interest Theory.” In The Political Interests of Gender, ed. K. B. Jones and A. G. Jonasdottir. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Jones, Mack H. 1976. “Black Office-­Holding and Political Development in the Rural South.” Review of Black Political Economy 6(4): 375–407. Karnig, Albert K., and Susan Welch. 1980. Black Representation and Urban Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kingdon, John W. 1981. Congressmen’s Voting Decisions. New York: Harper and Row. Kymlicka, Will. 1993. “Group Representation in Canadian Politics.” In Equity and Community: The Charter, Interest Advocacy, and Representation, ed. F.  L. Seidel. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lublin, David. 1997. The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Madison, James. [1788] 1987. “Federalist Ten.” In The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin. Manin, Bernard. [1995] 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. [1980] 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1981. “Living with Conflict: Representation in the Theory of Adversary Democracy.” Ethics 91(1): 466–76. Mansbridge, Jane. 1986. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1993. “Feminism and Democratic Community.” In Democratic Community: NOMOS XXXV, ed. John W. Chapman and Ian Shapiro. New York: New York University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1996. “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity.” In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1998. “The Many Faces of Representation.” Working Paper, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Mansbridge, Jane. 2009. “A ‘Selection Model’ of Political Representation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17(4): 369–98. Mezey, Susan Gluck. 1994. “Increasing the Number of Women in Office: Does It Matter?” In The Year of the Woman: Myths and Realities, ed. Elizabeth Adell Cook, Sue Thomas, and Clyde Wilcox. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Minow, Martha L. 1991. “From Class Actions to Miss Saigon.” Cleveland State Law Review 39(3): 269–300. Morone, James A. and Theodore R. Marmor. 1981. “Representing Consumer Institutions: The Case of Amer­ican Health Planning.” Ethics 91: 431–50.

Should Blacks represent Blacks?   99 Mueller, Dennis C., Robert D. Tollison, and Thomas D. Willett. 1972. “Representative Democracy via Random Selection.” Public Choice 12: 57–68. Nagel, Jack H. 1992. “Combining Deliberation and Fair Representation in Community Health Decisions.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 140(5): 2101–121. Orren, Gary. 1997. “Fall from Grace: The Public’s Loss of Faith in Government.” In Why People Don’t Trust Government, ed. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pennock, J. Roland. 1979. Democratic Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Anne. 1992. “Democracy and Difference.” Political Quarterly 63(1): 79–90. Phillips, Anne. 1995. The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinderhughes, Dianne. 1987. Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. [1967] 1972. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Popkin, Samuel L. 1994. The Reasoning Voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Preston, Michael. 1978. “Black Elected Officials and Public Policy: Symbolic and Substantive Representation.” Policy Studies Journal 7(2): 196–201. Richie, Beth. 1996. Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge. Sapiro, Virginia. 1981. “When Are Interests Interesting?” Amer­ican Political Science Review 75(3): 701–16. Sawyer, Jack, and Duncan MacRae. 1962. “Game Theory and Cumulative Voting in Illinois: 1902–1954” Amer­ican Political Science Review 56: 936–46. Schlozman, Kay, and Jane Mansbridge. 1979. Review of Sex Roles in the State House by Irene Diamond. Harvard Educational Review 49: 554–56. Skjeie, Hege. 1991. “The Rhetoric of Difference: On Women’s Inclusion into Political Elites.” Politics and Society 19(2): 233–63. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Stimson, James A., Michael B. Mackuen, and Robert S. Erikson. 1995. “Dynamic Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 89(3): 543–65. Strauss, Julie Etta. 1998. “Women in Congress: The Difference They Make.” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University. Swain, Carol M. 1993. Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Amer­icans in Congress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1994. Gender and Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thomas, Sue. 1994. How Women Legislate. New York: Oxford University Press. Voet, Rian. 1992. “Gender Representation and Quotas.” Acta Politica 4: 389–403. Walker, Alice. 1981. “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells.” In You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Weissberg, Robert. 1978. “Collective vs. Dyadic Representation in Congress.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 72(2): 535–47. Williams, Melissa S. 1998. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

100   Deliberation and representation Young, Iris Marion. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs 19(3): 713–38. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. “Deferring Group Representation.” In Ethnicity and Group Rights: NOMOS XXXIX, ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka. New York: New York University Press. Zimmerman, Joseph F. 1992. “Fair Representation for Women and Minorities.” In United States Electoral Systems: Their Impact on Women and Minorities, ed. Wilma Rule and Joseph F. Zimmerman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Zimmerman, Joseph F. 1994. “Alternative Voting Systems for Representative Democracy.” PS: Political Science and Politics 27(4): 674–77.

5

Everyday talk in the deliberative system (1999)*†

What I will call “everyday talk” does not meet all of the criteria implicit in the ordinary use of the word “deliberation.” It is not always self-­conscious, reflective, or considered. But everyday talk, if not always deliberative, is nevertheless a crucial part of the full deliberative system that democracies need if citizens are, in any sense, to rule themselves. Through talk among formal and informal representatives in designated public forums, talk back and forth between constituents and elected representatives or other representatives in politically oriented organizations, talk in the media, talk among political activists, and everyday talk in formally private spaces about things the public ought to discuss—all adding up to what I call the deliberative system—people come to understand better what they want and need, individually as well as collectively. The full deliberative system encompasses all these strands.1 If a deliberative system works well, it filters out and discards the worst ideas available on public matters while it picks up, adopts, and applies the best ideas. If the deliberative system works badly, it distorts facts, portrays ideas in forms that their originators would disown, and encourages citizens to adopt ways of thinking and acting that are good neither for them nor for the larger polity. A deliberative system at its best, like all systems of democratic participation, helps its participants understand themselves and their environment better. It also helps them change themselves and others in ways that are better for them and better for the whole society—though sometimes these goals conflict. How one judges a deliberative system thus depends heavily on what one believes to be a “good” or “bad” way of thinking or acting and what one judges to be a better or worse understanding of self and environment. Such judgments will always be heavily contested. This chapter has two aims. First, it argues that theorists of deliberation ought to pay as much attention to citizens’ everyday talk as to formal deliberation in public arenas. Although talk intended to conclude with a binding decision differs from talk that has no such intention, that difference is not significant for judging the quality of the deliberation for democratic purposes. Second, it argues that existing criteria for judging democratic talk are inadequate and need revision. The analysis calls throughout for a democratic theory that puts the citizen at the center.

102   Deliberation and representation Everyday talk anchors one end of a spectrum at whose other end lies the public decision-­making assembly. Everyday talk produces results collectively, but not in concert. Often, everyday talk produces collective results the way a market produces collective results, through the combined and interactive effects of relatively isolated individual actions. A decision-­making assembly, by contrast, produces results in concert, usually through the give-­and-take of face- to-­ face interaction. Everyday talk is not necessarily aimed at any action other than talk itself; deliberation in the assembly is, at least in theory, aimed at action. Everyday talk may be almost purely expressive; deliberation in the assembly, being aimed at action, is usually intentional. Deliberation in a public assembly is often aimed at creating a collectively binding decision. It may seem, then, that everyday talk and decision-­making in an assembly differ in kind rather than in degree, because only a governmental assembly aims at and creates a collectively binding decision. Yet everyday talk among citizens on matters the public ought to discuss prepares the way for formal governmental decisions and for collective decisions not to “decide.” One can trust formal governmental decisions to reflect the considered will of the citizenry only insofar as that will has gone through a process of effective citizen deliberation—in the everyday talk of homes, workplaces, and places where a few friends meet, as well as more formal talk in designated public assemblies.2 Few of the standards that various theorists have offered for judging deliberation map onto the one great difference between governmental assemblies and other forms of deliberation: that such assemblies (including the governing bodies of grassroots organizations, hospital committees, and sports and professional associations) aim at producing a decision binding on the participants while other venues for talk do not. I conclude, both from this lack of fit and from analyzing the features of everyday talk directly, that the larger deliberative system (including everyday talk) should be judged by much the same standards as classic deliberation in assemblies. Those standards must be loosened to accommodate the more informal character of the nongovernmental parts of the deliberative system, but in this loosening they do not lose their character. In both legislative bodies and the rest of the deliberative system, the concept of “public reason” should be enlarged to encompass a “considered” mixture of emotion and reason rather than pure rationality. The standards of publicity and accountability, which in are designed primarily for representative assemblies, have counterparts elsewhere in the deliberative system, including everyday talk. Reciprocity applies well to everyday talk. So do the standards of freedom, equality, consideredness, accuracy in revealing interests, and transformative capacity that arguably apply to the deliberations in assembly whose procedures democratically legitimate their conclusions. In the full process of citizen deliberation, the different parts of the deliberative system mutually influence one another in ways that are not easy to parse out. Television, radio, newspapers, movies, and other media both influence their intended audiences and are influenced by them. So too in social movements, which work as much by changing the way people think as by pressuring

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   103 governments to enact legislation, the intentionally political talk of political activists both influences and is influenced by the everyday talk of nonactivists.3 The interaction between activists and nonactivists in a social movement, for example, combines the dynamics of a market and a conversation. In a market, entrepreneurs put forth a product, which consumers then buy or do not buy. By making this binary choice, consumers shape what the entrepreneurs produce. In an ideal market, entrepreneurs try to understand the present and potential desires of the consumers in order to produce a product the consumers will buy; entrepreneurs who offer an undesired product go out of business. Conversations, by contrast, do not depend on binary signals. An ideal conversation, like Jürgen Habermas’s ideal speech situation, aims at understanding. But even a conversation has a component that works a little like a market: Each partner advances words, which the other does or does not understand, does or does not find interesting. Even a partner who does not speak can shape what the other says by nonverbally indicating understanding or confusion, interest or boredom. Nonactivists affect what activists say and think in part by being speaking partners in conversation with the activists or intermediate actors and in part by responding to those offerings with understanding or confusion, interest or boredom, appropriation or rejection. The interaction of activists and nonactivists only begins the real work of nonactivists. In everyday talk and action the nonactivists test new and old ideas against their daily realities, make small moves—micronegotiations—that try to put some version of an idea into effect, and talk the ideas over with friends, sifting the usable from the unusable, what appears sensible from what appears crazy, what seems just from what seems tendentious. In their micronegotiations and private conversations, nonactivists influence the ideas and symbols available to the political process not only aggregatively, by favoring one side or another in a vote or in a public opinion survey, but also substantively, through their practice. They shape the deliberative system with their own exercise of power and reasoning on issues that the public ought to discuss. The activism of nonactivists, which has its greatest effect through everyday talk, includes even the snort of derision one might give at a sexist television character while watching with friends. That snort of derision is, in my analysis, a political act.

Once more into “the personal is political” Outside the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory, and the subculture of certain activist groups, the label “political” may have little relevance or laudatory power. Inside that discipline, subfield, and subculture, however, the label has a legitimating function for objects of study, a normative function in bringing into play criteria of judgment specific to political things, and a valorizing function in marking a particular activity as “serious.” The reader who balks at giving the label “political” to the kind of everyday actions and talk that this chapter describes may, for almost all of the purposes of this chapter, simply think of them as “prepolitical.” But because I am interested in the normative criteria

104   Deliberation and representation appropriate to political things, I will argue that these everyday, informal forms of action and deliberation are best understood as political. I propose that we define as political “that which the public ought to discuss,” when that discussion forms part of some, perhaps highly informal, version of a collective “decision.”4 As a collective, we the people (bounded by some large or small perimeter that we or our forebears have set) make many more “decisions” than appear in our formal state apparatus. Large numbers of mutually interacting individual choices, weighted unequally through patterns of domination and subordination, chance, and other justifiable and unjustifiable inequalities, together create a host of collective choices. Those collective choices, or “decisions,” then affect, often substantially, the individual choices of each member of the collective. To “politicize” one of these collective choices—to make it “political”— is to draw it to the attention of the public, as something the public should discuss as a collectivity, with a view to possible change. What the public ought to discuss is explicitly a matter for contest.5 This process of bringing a collective “decision” to public attention, as something the public ought to discuss, need not involve the state. We may bring to public attention not a decision made in concert but rather one that has emerged from highly informal, unconscious, and aggregative processes. Nor need we involve the state in the discussion or resolution of the issue. A medieval maxim concludes that “What touches all should be decided by all.”6 If that maxim means, as it seems to have been intended to, “decided by all” through formal government with its legitimate monopoly of force, I propose that it is simply wrong. A public might rightly decide, collectively but informally through the evolution of norms, that certain questions that affect all in a particular area should not be decided by all through formal government. My action as CEO of General Motors, or cardinal of the Catholic Church, or anchorwoman for NBC, or simply as a private individual might subtly affect literally everyone in the polity, but collectively though informally the public might decide not to allow formal governmental decision to touch the areas in which the CEO, cardinal, anchorwoman, or individual acts. Too much has been written on the subject of “the political” to cover in any detail here.7 For the moment, however, let me explain how I came to the definition I suggest, give some examples of what I want to cover and why, and explain why previous definitions do not seem to me fully satisfactory. Carol Hainisch first used the phrase “The personal is political” in print, expressing an idea developed in the group to which she belonged, New York Radical Women. In the article with that title, Hainisch (1970) explained to critics within the women’s movement why consciousness-­raising groups, which often discussed issues such as individual women’s experiences with menstruation or sexual orgasm, were as “political” as more action-­oriented groups. Hainisch argued that such issues as feeling ashamed of menstruation or believing incorrectly that vaginal orgasms were different from and better than clitoral orgasms were, in my terms, matters that the public should discuss. These feelings and beliefs require public discussion because they support a structure of male dominance that for reasons of justice ought to be changed. Although that change had

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   105 to be collective in the broadest sense, it did not necessarily require action in concert or by a formal government. Indeed, many of these issues were almost certainly best left outside the realm of formal government. The personal became political once individual struggles were linked conceptually with a larger normative struggle for equal status in the polity as a whole. By coining the phrase “The personal is political,” feminists meant that a host of concerns, previously trivialized as “personal” and experienced as individual or idiosyncratic, we now saw as “political,” experienced by women as a group or by subgroups of certain women, and deserving of collective discussion with a view to deciding whether or not it was appropriate to take collective (though perhaps informal and piecemeal) action. An issue becomes “political” when it deserves public discussion and possibly action. Defining the political as whatever involves “power,” by contrast, includes too much and too little. It includes too much: All else equal, I exercise power but it is not “political” if I hold a gun to your head and demand your money, if I threaten anger when you want the last cookie, or if I constrain your ability to use the car because I took it to Wisconsin. More important, the definition includes too little: It excludes all that involves persuasion rather than power. It excludes all that creates and fosters commonality. In this vein, Jean Elshtain convincingly took to task several early feminist writers for concluding, as Kate Millet did, that power “is the essence of politics” (cited in Elshtain 1981, 218), or, as Nancy Henley put it, that “the personal is political” means “there is nothing we do—no matter how individual and personal it seems—that does not reflect our participation in a power system” (cited in ibid.). The opposite mistake is to say, with Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, that “the political” is only the ground of “commonality,” when commonality excludes procedural arrangements, such as majority rule, for deciding matters of fundamentally conflicting interest through relatively legitimate forms of power, or as Arendt called it, “violence.” The political should neither exclude the grounds of commonality, the way a definition based solely on power is likely to do, nor be confined to commonality. Finally, what the public ought to discuss is a matter of collective concern and in a sense a matter of collective “decision,” but it is not always a matter for positive action. Whether or not to take action is one of the issues that the public ought to discuss. We might discuss an issue collectively (formally or informally) and decide collectively (formally or informally) that we ought not to take action on that issue, either through formal government or through the most informal, individual processes. In this I disagree with Benjamin Barber, who defines the realm of “politics” as “circumscribed by conditions that impose a necessity for public action” (1984, 121, 137, 161, 174, and passim). I adapt the formulation of Ronald Beiner, who depicts “politics” as the medium in which human beings try to “make sense of their common situation in discourse with one another” (1983, 148), adding that “making sense” almost inevitably has decisional implications for action, when “decision” and “action” are defined in the highly informal, weakly collective sense that I define them here.8

106   Deliberation and representation Does defining the political this broadly “[erode] the terms of the private sphere” (Elshtain 1981, 333)? I believe it does—in small part. To suggest that the public should discuss many intimate and familial matters, at least in general terms, destroys one strong defense against the invasion of the private world by the public. That strong defense is simply to say that what goes on in the family, or in the sphere of intimacy, is not for public discussion. Appropriate norms should put sexual orgasm or child-­rearing practices, for example, simply off-­ limits. Informal prohibitions on public speech about these issues constitute one of the strongest defenses I can imagine against the invasion of the public into the private. I would argue, however, that the private sphere can be protected sufficiently against serious incursions from formal government without so limiting public discussion. What the public ought to discuss is contested and essentially contestable. The question “Is this political?” demands an argument aimed at convincing the interlocutor that an issue ought to, or ought not to, be discussed by the public. This kind of argument has to produce reasons why the matter in question should be of larger collective concern, why it should go beyond the two of us (or the four or ten of us). An argument of this sort would not collapse the distinction between the public and private realms. It would not eliminate either or subordinate either to alternative concepts. It would not demand that the private be integrated fully within or subsumed by the public. It would not insist that the public realm be privatized. It would not devalue the private sphere or suggest that the relationships that characterize that sphere had little significance or value.9 But it would say that some matters, hitherto thought too intimate for the public to discuss, or of so little importance that they did not need to be discussed by the public, were matters on which the collective, the public, ought to deliberate.

Everyday activism and everyday talk Everyday activism occurs when a nonactivist takes an action in order to change others’ actions or beliefs on an issue that the public ought to discuss. Much everyday activism takes place through talk. Here is an African Amer­ican woman reporting an instance of everyday activism to other participants in a focus group: I was born and raised in Chicago, and I’ve never been south in all of my life. But all my in-­laws are from the South. So I go to this big family dinner and I’m just waiting, you know, sitting at the table, waiting. And all of a sudden all the men shift [speaker makes a funny shifting noise; laughter from others] to one side of the room. And all of a sudden all of the women shift [makes another shifting noise] into the kitchen. And I’m sitting there at the table by myself scratching my head. And the women come out with the plates, handing out the plates, and my husband says: “You gonna fix my plate?” “I don’t fix your plate at home. Why would I do it here?” Well, it ties in. It’s a generation thing. It’s a cycle, a never-­ending cycle. His father

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   107 did it, and his father’s father did it. They just sit there and wait while the women go [shifting sound] around. [Others in the group chime in, ask questions.] Well, what I did was I ended up like liberating the other women in the family and then all of a sudden they stopped serving them all of a sudden— [Others interrupt with their stories].10 With this small act—a combination of speech and, in this case, nonperformance of an expected action—the nonactivist intervened in her own and others’ lives to promote a relatively new ideal of gender justice, exemplified by her verb “liberating.” She intended to affect the others by her actions and words. She undoubtedly also believed that the issues on which she acted were issues that the public ought to discuss. On the issue I am currently studying—changing conceptions of gender justice—the everyday activism of the nonactivists I have met has relied less on power, that is, the threat of sanction or the use of force, than on influence, that is, persuading another of a course of action on its merits.11 In one or two incidents that my informants described, a form of power did most of the work of social change—as when a woman phoned the company of a sexist window salesman to get him fired. In several other incidents, power in the form of a threat of personal anger and withdrawal played an important role. Yet even in those incidents in which power played the greatest role, persuasive appeals to justice underlay my informants’ approach to the conflict. Consider the act of calling someone a “male chauvinist.” The hurling of an epithet, often in anger, surely ranks near the bottom of a scale of articulated, nonmanipulative, and humane forms of deliberation. It falls far short of the ideal that deliberation should be conducted in a context of mutual respect, empathy, and listening. It serves itself as a sanction, and it implicitly threatens further sanctions, thus fitting solidly within the particular constellation of causal effects that I call “power.” Yet the summary indictment captured in the term “male chauvinist” also works as a crude and shorthand form of influence. It inherently makes two claims—one structural, the other normative. Descriptively, it claims that the behavior in question results in part from a structure of gender relations that extends beyond the particular individuals engaged in this interaction. Normatively, it claims that the man’s behavior is not merely disagreeable but also unjust. Persuading others to act or refrain from acting on the basis of shared and contested ideals of human interaction often takes just such a shorthand form. Here is a professional-­class woman, self-­identified as “conservative” on a liberal–conservative spectrum, reporting that she had called her husband a male chauvinist. JM:  What was your R:  I remember him

husband’s reaction to you saying something like that to him? being surprised and then saying that he didn’t think he was, but as he thought about he guessed he was a little. It never occurred to him that he was male chauvinist before I said it.

108   Deliberation and representation JM:  Do you think he took it as a criticism? R:  Yes. I don’t think he wanted to be that

way—especially since he values my intelligence and that is why he married me. I think he has improved; I am looking back a couple of years, and he is better now.12

In some of the reported instances of women calling a man a “male chauvinist,” the phrase sparked an interchange that led to changed behavior, primarily through persuasion based on an implicit appeal to justice. In many instances, men simply laughed the criticism off or got angry, and the women in the interaction thought there was no chance the men would change. In several instances the women did not challenge the men directly at all. Instead, they talked with one another “backstage,” using the phrase and the analysis it embodies to reinforce one another in an emerging sense of injustice that they did not yet dare to bring into the open.13 In social movements, new ideas—and new terms, such as “male chauvinist” or “homophobia”—enter everyday talk through an interaction between political activists and nonactivists. Activists craft, from ideals or ideas solidly based in the existing culture, ideals or ideas that begin to stretch that base. Social enclaves in which activists talk intensely with one another foster this kind of innovation. The activists, along with others who for various reasons find themselves in these enclaves, discuss and try to put into practice these extensions and revisions of received ideas. In the protected space of the enclave, and also on the borders between that enclave and mainstream society, activists experiment with persuading others. They discover through empathy, intuition, logic, and trial and error which ideas move others to change their own ideas and behavior and which do not. The enclave nourishes the development of extreme ideas—such as that gun control advocates consciously intend to destroy citizens’ capacities to resist government, or that babies should be produced in test tubes by cybernetricians. The enclave confirms some of its participants in the reality of their perceptions, both accurate and inaccurate. It stokes collective anger. It encourages creative, sometimes harebrained, solutions to collective problems. It helps remove the deadening conviction that nothing can be done. It stirs the intellectual and emotional pot. From the enclave crucible and the surrounding ferment emerge ideas that may or may not get anywhere in the larger society. To change the thinking and behavior of large numbers of people, an idea must be sufficiently congruent with existing ideas to find a niche in the schemas people already employ to interpret the world. It must explain hitherto unexplained phenomena or apply old lessons to something relatively new. A new idea will often emerge from a new material base. But the powerful role of interpretative schemas, both in the particular cultures of competing enclaves and in the often conflicting strands of mainstream thought, ensures that no new idea can be predicted simply from material change. As the activists, with their many tendencies and factions, take their ideas out into the larger society, they become willy-­nilly entrepreneurs, or carriers of infection, or participants in a somewhat one-­sided conversation. Whether in the market many consumers buy the ideas, whether in the epidemic many become

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   109 infected, or whether in the conversation many eyes light up or glaze over, depends on the activists, on translators with one foot in the enclave and one in the larger society, and on the needs and ideas of members of the society at large. As new ideas enter the larger society, different kinds of people pick them up and try them on, for different reasons. Some find in these ideas a new club with which to beat old enemies, others an enticement with which to seduce would-­be friends. Some find in them the answer to intellectual and emotional puzzles. Some see them as healthy extensions of ideals they already hold. Pundits weigh in. Newsmagazines run side articles, then possibly lead articles or even cover stories. Television programs lightly air the new ideas, then drop or focus on them. If the ideas have relevance to the lives of ordinary citizens, those citizens begin to take positions and talk the ideas over with their friends. Women may talk with their husbands and the other women in the family. They may stop fixing plates and may call the men they know “male chauvinists.” If parts of the new ideals begin to win more general acceptance, many people, including nonactivists, begin changing their lives in order to live up to those ideals in a better way. Those whose material lives are improved by putting the new ideals into practice have incentives to promulgate those ideas. Those whose material lives will be harmed have incentives to denigrate them. But material loss and gain do not fully explain adherence to or rejection of an idea. People are governed in part by their ideals, and they often want to act consistently. Showing that a new ideal is consistent with an old ideal, or that previous arguments for why the new ideal did not apply are wrong, can make at least some contemporary human beings change their ideas of right relationships, their ideas of right action, and their lives. The ideas and ideals that generate and are generated by this process can be either good or bad. The process that generates, over time, a growing conviction that schools should be racially integrated is the same process, in its outlines, as the process that generates, over time, a conviction that Jews should be sent to concentration camps. But although the outlines may be the same, the process in its details may not be the same. The ideals of good deliberative process have been derived, in part, from long human observation of what procedures produce good decisions over time, as well as, in part, from understanding what procedures have elements that are good in themselves. The democrat’s faith is that good deliberative systems will, over time, produce just outcomes. Yet what the criteria for good deliberation are is at the moment an open question. It is also unclear whether the criteria for good deliberation in a public assembly are the same as the criteria for a good deliberative system. Criteria for judging deliberation and everyday talk Gutmann and Thompson suggest the standards of reciprocity, publicity, and accountability as criteria for judging deliberation in a public assembly. These criteria apply in a modified manner to the larger deliberative system, including everyday talk. The criteria also need revision to capture adequately what distinguishes good democratic talk from bad in an assembly or in everyday talk.

110   Deliberation and representation Joshua Cohen (1989) was the first theorist to specify criteria by which one might judge the democratic legitimacy of deliberation, that is, the degree to which suitably structured deliberation generates the legitimate authority to exercise power. His criteria for legitimate deliberation apply equally well to deliberation in public assemblies and to everyday talk, for the quality of everyday talk affects the normative legitimacy of our many informal collective “decisions.” Yet his criteria too require revision. Cohen’s first criterion is that a deliberation be free. This criterion is best reinterpreted as the Habermasian ideal of “freedom from power,” that is, freedom from the threat of sanction or use of force.14 Although Foucault is right that no situation can be “free” from power, and each of us both is constituted by power and exercises power in every interaction, nevertheless, some spaces for talking and acting are, although never fully free, more free than others.15 We seek out such spaces both in democratic constitution-­making and in our everyday search for self-­understanding and the creation of commonality. Democratic constitutions often try to insulate public deliberative forums from the worst effects of external power: The United States Constitution, for example, exempts congressional representatives from liability for their official acts. Negotiations are often arranged so that with two parties (such as labor and management) each side has an equal number of representatives and votes, allowing the formal power of each to cancel out the formal power of the other. To guarantee sufficient freedom for everyday talk, a polity must not only provide the specific liberties of speech, press, and association needed for good deliberation (Dahl 1989; Knight and Johnson 1994) but also generate for all groups some spaces that are relatively free from power.16 Equality, another of Cohen’s criteria, applies to judging both everyday talk and formal deliberation. Deliberation is never fully free of power. Therefore, Cohen points out rightly that the criterion of equality requires making participants “substantively equal in that the existing distribution of power and resources does not shape their chances to contribute to the deliberation” (Cohen 1989, 23). Insofar as threats of sanction and force do enter the deliberative arena, each participant should have equal resources to use as the basis for the threat of sanction and the use of force. Asymmetries should not give unfair advantage to any participant (Knight and Johnson 1998, 293; Mansbridge 1988). When systemic power, derived from a history of domination and subordination, produces a set of naturalized expectations and norms that disadvantage subordinates, both classic deliberation and everyday talk must, in order to approach the condition of equality, draw from a stream of alternatives to those expectations. The need to solicit and encourage previously excluded constituents in order to come closer to equality (Knight and Johnson 1994, 1998; Young, 1999) does not mean that every forum need include all those affected, but rather that in the deliberative system as a whole no participants should have an unfair advantage.17 Yet the equality appropriate to either everyday talk or formal deliberation does not require equal influence. Although Cohen writes that each participant should have “an equal voice” in the decision, deliberative equality should not

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   111 mean that each participant ought to have an equal effect on the outcome. Rather, the force of the better argument (including, as we shall see, the force of good arguments based on emotion) should prevail, no matter from whom that argument originates or how frequently it originates from one or more participants.18 In practice, influence is not easy to separate from power, but both a smoothly functioning public assembly and a group of friends in everyday talk will try to perform that separation as best they can. They will take a good idea from any source but will reject attempts to exercise power, particularly unequal power, in the sense of the threat of sanction and the use of force.19 The criterion of equality also mandates some form of mutual respect among participants. Mutual respect, a major component of Gutmann and Thompson’s reciprocity, requires listening (Barber 1984). It requires your trying, through imagination and empathy, to put yourself in another’s place (Williams 1962; Minow 1987; Benhabib 1991). It also requires recognizing the differences between you and others that make it impossible for you fully to put yourself in their place (Young 1997). Until the recent work of Black feminist and post-­ colonial writers (e.g., Harris 1990), theories of mutual respect did not emphasize, or even recognize, the need to honor those differences. The criterion of equality in deliberation should therefore be modified to mandate equal opportunity to affect the outcome; mutual respect; and equal power only when threats of sanction and the use of force come into play. Cohen’s next criterion is that deliberative outcomes should be settled only by reference to the “reasons” participants offer. Yet requiring of legitimate deliberation that it be “reasoned” implicitly or explicitly excludes the positive role of the emotions in deliberation. Amelie Rorty (1985) and Martha Nussbaum (1995) point out the flaws in dichotomizing “reason” and “emotion.” The emotions always include some form of appraisal and evaluation, and reason can proceed only rarely without emotional commitment, if only an emotional commitment to the process of reasoning. Nussbaum’s positive account of the role of emotions in deliberation further singles out the emotion of compassion as an essential element of good reasoning in matters of public concern. Other emotions, such as solidarity, play equally important roles. Because making the best sense of what we collectively ought to do requires a finely tuned attention to both cognitions and emotions, the third criterion for normative legitimacy should be that a deliberation be “considered” rather than “reasoned.”20 Cohen’s fourth criterion is the degree to which deliberation “aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus” (Cohen 1989, 23, emphasis in original). This is not, in my view, an appropriate criterion for legitimate deliberation. Even at the formal assembly level, normatively legitimate deliberation should aim not only at consensus but also at clarifying conflict, sharpening that conflict if necessary. Similarly, Cohen’s criteria for an “ideal deliberative procedure” include that it should be “focused on the common good” (1989, 19), but such a singular focus on the common good makes it harder to recognize that deliberation may legitimately conclude correctly that the interests of the participants are fundamentally in conflict (Mansbridge [1980] 1983, 1992a; Knight and Johnson 1994,

112   Deliberation and representation 1998; Young 1996; Sanders 1997). The conscious or unconscious pressure to frame one’s argument in terms of the common good can seriously distort participants’ understandings of the issue, making it far harder to resolve it through legitimate bargaining (e.g., taking turns or equalizing outcomes with side payments). For the same reasons, deliberation should not ideally shape the “identity and interests of citizens” only “in ways that contribute to the formation of a public conception of the common good” (Cohen 1989, 19). Formal deliberation, everyday talk, and other forms of democratic participation should enable citizens to see conflict more clearly when that conflict has previously been masked (e.g., by elite “nondecisions” and by hegemonic definitions of the common good; see Bachrach and Baratz 1963; Bachrach 1974; see also the criterion of “enlightened understanding” in Dahl 1979, 104–5). Women, for example, have often been socialized to put the interests of others ahead of their own in ways that interfere with understanding their own interests. The articulation of self-­interest has a legitimate role in democratic deliberation, particularly in discussions of fair distribution (Mansbridge 1992a; Stoker 1992; Knight and Johnson 1998). A legitimate deliberation should therefore meet the criterion of helping citizens understand their interests better, whether or not these interests can be forged into a larger common good. Revised in these ways, both Gutmann and Thompson’s criteria for justifiable decisions in a public assembly and Cohen’s criteria for legitimate decisions in a binding forum turn out also to be reasonable criteria for judging everyday talk. In settings of relative liberty and equality, considering both reason and emotion, both everyday talk and more formal deliberation should help participants understand their conflicts and their commonalities. I will not try to resolve here how we may judge formal deliberation and everyday talk on the basis of their capacity for transforming a participant from a “private person” to a “citizen.”21 In both venues, we should judge these transformations by the kinds of solidarity and commitment to principle they involve.22

A range of forums, a range within standards The venues for deliberation fall along a spectrum from the representative assembly (Bessette 1994), to the public assembly producing a binding decision (Cohen 1989; Gutmann and Thompson 1996), to the “public sphere” (Habermas [1962] 1989), to the most informal venues of everyday talk. Moving along this range entails moving along a similar range, from formal to informal, within the same standards for good deliberation. Jürgen Habermas has drawn a bright line between the binding assembly, as the locus of “will-­formation,” and the rest of the deliberative system, as the realm of “opinion-­formation.”23 But this line does not, I believe, imply any great difference in the standards for deliberation. Habermas’s public sphere is not restricted to a binding forum. Nor do his two constitutive elements of the public sphere—that in it “the private people … come together to form a public” and

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   113 that it evinces critical reasoning—define or map onto the binding/ nonbinding distinction.24 The criteria for judging deliberation thus fall along a continuum that may not break at the binding/nonbinding distinction. At the most stringent end should be the standards that help create political obligation (Applbaum 1992). Possibly less stringent, but possibly no different, are the standards that generate the legitimate authority to exercise power (Manin 1987; Cohen 1989). Less stringent still are standards that allow us to judge which arguments are “justifiable” to other citizens (Gutmann and Thompson 1996), adequate for continued cooperation (Bohman 1996), or simply productive of higher-­quality decisions (Estlund 1993).25 Everyday talk was once revered as the prime locus of the formation of public judgment. Today it appears too rarely in the theoretical literature on deliberation, as theorists direct their attention primarily toward deliberation in formal and binding assemblies. It is time to broaden our descriptive and analytic horizons again and give adequate credit, as a critical component of democracy, to the entire deliberative system, including its centerpiece, the citizen’s everyday talk.

Notes   * I would like to thank Michael Bratman, Kimberly Curtis, Jean Elshtain, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Sabl for comments on all or parts of this chapter, and Kimberly Curtis, Marshall Ganz, and Amy Gutmann for conversations that persuaded me to change my earlier phrase “everyday deliberation” to “everyday talk.” This chapter was prepared while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by National Science Foundation Grant #SBR-­9601236.   † This chapter is a significantly edited version of Jane Mansbridge, “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System,” in Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 211–39.   1 By using the word “system” I do not want to imply that the parts of the whole have a mechanical or perfectly predictable relation to one another, although both of these attributes are connotations of the words “system” and “systematic” in ordinary speech. Rather, I want to imply an interrelation among the parts, such that a change in one tends to affect another. (See Christiano 1996 for interest groups and political parties as part of what I call the deliberative system.)   2 Although Habermas includes in his deliberative “public sphere” privately owned settings with restricted access, such as the coffeehouses in England in the late seventeenth century ([1962] 1989), he does not include the kitchens and bedrooms that often host everyday talk.   3 In a 1989 representative survey, about a third of the U.S. public reported not engaging in any political act beyond voting (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1996, 83). By “nonactivists” I mean people like these. By “activists” I mean people who identify with a social movement, who feel an obligation toward that social movement, that is, a commitment to pay some price to promote the ends of the movement), and who actively discuss, craft, and propagate the ideas of the movement as a major part of their identities and lives. The majority of citizens in the United States today fall somewhere between these groups. They may have moments of activism, but in most of their identities and actions they are nonactivists. My term “nonactivists” also applies to the nonactivist sectors of the lives of this great majority of partially active citizens. The

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 4

 5

 6

 7  8  9 10 11

analysis in this chapter does not, I believe, depend on the exact definition of either group. It also focuses on only one aspect of the deliberative system—the everyday talk of nonactivists—and not on other aspects of the deliberative system or on other ways nonactivists influence the political process. This formulation is intended to be more specific than Habermas’s ([1974] 1979, 49) “matters of general interest” or Benhabib’s (1994, 26) “matters of common concern.” It is not intended to be much more specific, as all of these formulations leave open to contest the meaning of “general,” “common,” and “what the public ought to discuss.” This formulation, however tries to underline that openness to contest by making the “ought” explicit. Note that Habermas used the phrase “matters of general interest” to describe the “public,” not the “political;” he wrote chat citizens “behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion … about matters of general interest” ([1974] 1979, 49). By contrast he used the adjective “political,” modifying “the public sphere,” to designate discussion that “deals with objects connected to the activity of the state” (ibid.). The formulation I suggest does not restrict the meaning of the political to issues connected with the activity of the state. Other words, such as “state” and “governmental,” allow us to retain the important distinction between matters of state decision and matters of collective decision outside the state. Young (1990, 9) quotes Hannah Pitkin (1981, 343) and Roberto Unger (1987, 145) as defining politics, respectively, as “the activity through which relatively large and permanent groups of people determine what they will collectively do, settle how they will live together, and decide their future, to whatever extent this is within their power,” and the “struggle over the resources and arrangements that set the basic terms of our practical and passionate relations. Pre­ eminent among these arrangements is the formative institutional and imaginative context of social life.” These definitions are highly compatible with mine. Simply allowing certain issues, such as pedophilia, into public debate gives them a legitimacy grounded in the possibility that such debate might usher in approval. Jean Elshtain (personal communication) argues on these grounds for excluding such issues from public debate and therefore from the realm of the political. For different but parallel reasons, John Stuart Mill (1840, 272–3) suggested keeping certain fundamental values “above discussion” (his emphasis). Cited in, e.g., Walzer 1983, 292. This is a relatively common understanding in modern theory as well. Dewey, for example, defined “public” matters as those whose consequences “affect the welfare of many others” and are “so important as to need control.” He defined “the public” as “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” ([1926] 1994, 12, 16). Leaving aside the problematic indefinite subject in “is deemed,” this definition leaves unexplored the meaning of “control” and “systematically,” in which much of the meaning must lie if the definition does not simply extend the boundaries of the public to anyone even indirectly (though “seriously”) affected ([1926] 1994, 35). See below, n.  21 on the boundaries of the polity and n. 24 on the normative dimensions of Dewey’s “public.” On the private/public distinction, see, e.g., Elshtain 1981, 217–18, 331–53; Dietz 1985; Young 1987, 74; Benhabib [1987], 1988, 177, n.  12; Okin 1990, 124–33; MacKinnon 1989, 120; Mansbridge and Okin 1993. My definition is compatible with Barber’s if one defines “action” to include the decision not to take action and “public” to include the informal collective processes with which I am primarily concerned as well as the formal processes of state action. These comments respond to arguments in Elshtain 1981. Focus group, 1994, drawn from a representative Chicago sample, of African Amer­ ican women who had said in an earlier survey that they had less than a college education and considered themselves “feminist.” For an elaboration of this distinction between power and influence, see Mansbridge 1995. I would like to avoid the purely rationalist implication of “persuasion on the

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   115

12 13 14

15

16 17

merits” but cannot find in English a phrase that includes a legitimate appeal to the relevant emotions along with a legitimate appeal to the relevant reasons. For the legitimate appeal to relevant emotions, see below p. 111. From a 1994 in-­depth follow-­up to a survey earlier in 1994, in which 63 percent of women in a representative sample of the Chicago area reported having used the phrase “male chauvinist.” See Scott 1990 for parallels. Cohen categorizes Habermas’s concept not under the criterion of freedom but under the criterion of a reasoned decision. Cohen’s own criterion of “freedom” includes not being “constrained by the authority of prior norms or requirements” (1989, 22). This condition seems problematic unless it means, as I assume Cohen intended it to mean, absolutely constrained by the traditional authority of prior norms or requirements. Our lives and selves have no meaning apart from prior norms and requirements. One might almost say that our lives and selves are made up of prior norms and requirements. Many of those norms and requirements are right and just. Some (like language) are in many ways merely convenient but also contain elements of the use of force against the interests of some, often subordinate, groups. Some of the norms and requirements are highly unjust. Deliberation, even in the ideal sense, should be constrained by these priors when they are neutral or just. It should not be absolutely constrained; nor should it be constrained merely by tradition or by other requirements that cannot stand up under scrutiny. These considerations are included in my definition of freedom from power.    Conceptually, what I call “freedom” has strong links to Bentham’s and Kant’s understanding of publicity. Habermas describes how Kant’s principle, that political actions are “in agreement with law and morality only as far as their maxims were capable of, or indeed in need of, publicity,” derived from his thinking about the role of giving reasons in everyday talk (Habermas [1962] 1989, 108). Kant’s conclusion that “the public use of one’s reason must always be free” (quoted in Habermas [1962] 1989, 106), which animates his distinction between “private” and “public” reason, is fully appropriate as a regulative ideal in everyday talk.    All these criteria, including freedom, should be understood as regulative ideals, that is, as ideals that can never be fully achieved but serve instead as standards at which to aim. As such, the regulative ideals of deliberative democracy parallel the regulative ideals of aggregative (or “adversary”) democracy, e.g., that in the aggregation each should count for one and none for more than one. In practice, neither deliberative democracy nor aggregative democracy can ever fully live up to its regulative ideals. This fact does not mean we should reject these ideals as goals, or fail to use them to judge the degree of legitimacy (which will never, therefore, be full) of existing democratic practice. It is therefore not an appropriate criticism of a regulative ideal (such as “love thy neighbor as thyself ”) to say (with, e.g., Sanders 1997) that it cannot fully be reached in practice. It is an appropriate criticism of such an ideal to say that aiming at it produces ill effects in utility, justice, or other values, or that aiming at an ideal that cannot fully be achieved in practice itself produces ill effects. (See Christiano 1996 for a good critique of making only deliberation the basis for legitimacy.) See Allen 1970 and Evans and Boyte 1986 on “free space”; Mansbridge 1990, 1995, on deliberative enclaves; Fraser [1992] 1997 on subaltern counterpublics; Scott 1990 on sequestered spaces; and Johnson 1997 for an interpretation of Foucault as searching for spaces of concrete freedom. Freedom in deliberation might also include what John Rawls (1971) called “the worth of liberty,” but I categorize those considerations under equality. Young (1990), Fraser [1992] 1997), and Mansbridge (1990, 1995), among others, address the institutional requirements that usually increase equality in deliberation. See Maier 1953 and Hastie 1993 on encouraging minority voices in deliberation. The question of inclusion involves norms regarding the boundaries of the polity (Dahl

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18

19

20 21

22 23

24

1956, 64–7). Without putting bounds on the polity, the maxim “What affects all should be decided by all” could entail weighting the power of individuals in a decision (including their capacity to block consensus and therefore retain the status quo) by the degree to which the decision would affect them. For the effect of equality in opening an arena for the authority of the better argument, see Habermas [1962] 1989, 36; for deliberation not requiring equal influence, see Mansbridge [1980] 1983, esp. 235–44, and more recently Warren 1996 and Brighouse 1996, 125. When Cohen (1989, 22) uses the term “equal voice” as a requirement for participants in legitimate deliberation, he presumably does not mean to imply equal numbers of words from each participant or an equal effect on the outcome. The term “equal voice” does not as yet have an exact or even a frequently stipulated meaning in democratic theory. A new generation of theorists has recently begun to tackle the formidable problems involved in formulating a concept of equality congruent with deliberative ideals. In their excellent essay on the subject, Knight and Johnson’s most challengeable argument is that “deliberation requires equal capacity to advance persuasive claims,” including “the ability to reason, articulate ideas, etc.” (1998, 281). One could, it is true, argue for such an ideal, stressing its regulative and unachievable side, on the grounds of full agency, self-­development, and the precisely faithful representation of one’s interests in deliberation. But it is not clear that equality in these capacities is required for deliberation or even deliberative equality. Many participants in deliberation might prefer Christiano’s formulation, in which although “I have a great interest in having my views expressed … it is not essential that I do the expressing” (1996, 259). Christiano’s further formulation, that for equality to prevail in deliberation “equal time should be given” to different opinions, is, however, overly mechanical, unsuited to how thinking and deliberation actually work (when one point may be made well in five words and another may require 500). Bohman’s (1996) institutional suggestions for furthering equality in deliberation are more persuasive than his analysis of the normative ideal (see 107, 113, 122, 124, 126, 131, for differing formulations of that ideal). Legitimate influence does not encompass manipulation (getting others to agree to positions against their deepest interests through persuasion that has the external form of “the better argument”). Manipulation is illegitimate in any democratic deliberation, including everyday talk. See Mansbridge 1992b, 1997; Lindblom 1990, 32; Barber 1984, 174; Knight and Johnson 1998, 284. Habermas [1962] 1989. Dewey ([1926] 1994) also wanted “The Public” to “form itself ’ (31), “define and express its interests” (146), and become “organized” (28), in contrast to the “mass,” which he saw as “scattered, mobile and manifold” (146), forming “too many publics” (126). See also Barber 1984. For an invigorating skepticism on transformation, see Rosenblum 1998; also Knight and Johnson 1994. By 1992, Habermas had borrowed from Nancy Fraser ([1992] 1997) the idea that the “general” public sphere consists of both a “strong” public sphere that engages in making binding decisions and a “weak” public sphere that engages exclusively in opinion-­formation and consists of “overlapping, subcultural publics” that can form “collective identities” ([1992] 1997, 307–8, esp. n.  26). I argue here that the weak public sphere should include the full range of everyday talk on matters that the public should discuss. This weak public sphere is responsible for the “informal opinion-­ formation that prepares and influences political decision making” (171). As the realm of “opinion-­formation,” it differs from the realm of “will-­formation,” that is, the formal arena making binding decisions (314). Habermas [1962] 1989, 25. Although these two criteria of coming together to form a public and critical reasoning do not exclude nonbinding forums such as the coffeehouse, they might seem to exclude everyday talk. On the first criterion, informal

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   117 everyday talk itself can “pull[]together the scattered critical potentials” of the public (Habermas [1962] 1989, 382). Ideas, loosed upon a population by individuals linked with social movements, governments, a differentiated media and other sources of intellectual ferment, do some of the required “pulling together.” Whether the group then forms a “public” raises a contested question. My portrayal of the public sphere intentionally blunts the critical edge of both Dewey’s conception of the “Public” (see n.  21 above) and Habermas’s ideal public sphere (which should produce a transformation from “private person” to “citizen”) on the grounds that if these concepts require the citizenry to aim at a common good (even while disagreeing, sometimes violently, on that good), they do not define the only appropriate ends and if they do not require such an aim their meaning is ambiguous. On the second criterion, “critical consideration” of appropriate reasons and emotions seems a better requirement for a public sphere (see above, pp.  111–12), particularly if that consideration encompasses forms of deliberative shorthand, such as entire arguments summed up in a word, rules of thumb, and other time-­and cognition-­saving heuristics (Popkin 1991). 25 Gutmann and Thompson 1996 do link the binding quality of decisions to their justifiability. The decisions they analyze “are collectively binding, and they should therefore be justifiable, as far as possible, to everyone bound by them” (13). However, how one comes to be “bound” is not fully clear.

References Allen, Pamela. 1970. Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Libera­ tion. New York: Times Change Press; shorter version reprinted in Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine and Anita Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1973, pp. 271–9). Applbaum, Arthur Isak. 1992. “Democratic Legitimacy and Official Discretion.” Philo­ sophy and Public Affairs 21:240–74. Bachrach, Peter. 1974. “Interest, Participation, and Democratic Theory.” In Participation in Politics: NOMOS XVI, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman. New York: Lieber-­Atherton. Bachrach, Peter, and Morton Baratz. 1963. “Decisions and Non-­Decisions: An Analytical Framework.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 57:632–42. Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beiner, Ronald. 1983. Political Judgement. London: Methuen. Benhabib, Seyla. [1987] 1988. “The Generalized and Concrete Other.” In Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Ducilla Cornell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1991. Situating the Self. New York: Routledge. Benhabib, Seyla. 1994. “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy.” Constellations 1:26–52. Bessette, Joseph M. 1994. The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and Amer­ ican National Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bohman, James. 1996. Public Deliberation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brighouse, Harry. 1996. “Egalitarianism and the Equal Availability of Political Influence.” Journal of Political Philosophy 4:118–1. Christiano, Thomas. 1996. The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

118   Deliberation and representation Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dahl, Robert A. 1956. After the Revolution? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1979. “Procedural Democracy.” In Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and James Fishkin New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dewey, John. [1926] 1994. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. Dietz, Mary G. 1985. “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking.” Political Theory 13:19–37. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1981. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Estlund, David M. 1993. “Who’s Afraid of Deliberative Democracy? On the Strategic/ Deliberative Dichotomy in Recent Constitutional Jurisprudence.” Texas Law Review 71:1437–77. Evans, Sara M., and Harry C. Boyte. 1986. Free Spaces. New York: Harper & Row. Fraser, Nancy. [1992] 1997. “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” In Justice Interruptus. New York: Routledge. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lattimore. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. [1974] 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hainisch, Carol. 1970. “The Personal is Political.” In Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, Major Writings of the Radical Feminists, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. New York: Radical Feminists. Harris, Angela. 1990. “Race and Essentialism in Legal Theory.” Stanford Law Review 42:581–616. Hastie, Reid, ed. 1993. Inside the Juror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, James. 1997. “Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus.” Political Theory 25:559–83. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 1994. “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy.” Political Theory 22:277–96. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 1998. “What Sort of Political Equality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?” In Deliberative Democracy, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lindblom, Charles E. 1990. Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maier, Norman. 1953. “An Experimental Test of the Effects of Training on Discussion Leadership.” Human Relations 6:161–73. Manin, Bernard. 1987. “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation.” Political Theory 15:338–68. Mansbridge, Jane. [1980] 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Everyday talk in the deliberative system   119 Mansbridge, Jane. 1988. “The Equal Opportunity to Exercise Power.” In Equality of Opportunity, ed. Norman E. Bowie. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1990. “Feminism and Democracy.” Amer­ican Prospect 1: 127–36. Mansbridge, Jane. 1992a. “A Deliberative Theory of Interest Representation.” In The Pol­ itics of Interests, ed. Mark P. Petracca. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1992b. “Self-­Transformation within the Envelope of Power.” Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Amer­ican Political Science Association, Chicago, 111, September 2. Mansbridge, Jane. 1995. “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity.” In Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1997. “The Many Faces of Representation,” Working Paper, Politics Research Group, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Mansbridge, Jane and Susan Moller Okin. 1993. “Feminism.” In A Companion to Con­ temporary Political Philosophy ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. Oxford: Blackwell. Mill, John Stuart. 1840. “Coleridge.” London and Westminster Review, March. Minow, Martha. 1987. “Foreword to the Supreme Court 1986 Term.” Harvard Law Review 101:10–95. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1995. “Emotions and Women’s Capabilities.” In Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Martha Craven Nussbaum and Johnathan Glover. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, Susan Moller. 1990. Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Pitkin, Hannah. 1981. “Justice: On Relating Public and Private.” Political Theory 9:327–52. Popkin, Samuel. 1991. The Reasoning Voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. 1985. “Varieties of Rationality, Varieties of Emotion.” Social Science Information 2:343–53. Rosenblum, Nancy L. 1998. Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sanders, Lynn M. 1997. “Against Deliberation.” Political Theory 25: 347–76. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stoker, Laura. 1992. “Interests and Ethics in Politics.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 86:369–80. Unger, Roberto. 1987. Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry G. Brady. 1996. Voice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. Warren, Mark. 1996. “Deliberative Democracy and Authority.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 90: 46–60. Williams, Bernard. 1962. “The Idea of Equality.” In Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, Iris Marion. 1987. “Impartiality and the Civic Public.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

120   Deliberation and representation Young, Iris Marion. 1996. “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy.” In Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” Constellations 3:340–63. Young, Iris Marion. 1999. “Justice, Inclusion, and Deliberative Democracy.” In Delibera­ tive Politics, ed. Stephen Macedo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6 Rethinking representation (2003)*†

Along with the traditional “promissory” form of representation, empirical political scientists have recently analyzed several new forms, called here “anticipatory,” “gyroscopic,” and “surrogate” representation. None of these more recently recognized forms meets the criteria for democratic accountability developed for promissory representation, yet each generates a set of normative criteria by which it can be judged. These criteria are systemic, in contrast to the dyadic criteria appropriate for promissory representation. They are deliberative rather than aggregative. They are plural rather than singular. Over the past two decades empirical political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated descriptions of how Amer­ican legislators relate to their constituents. Yet although the empirical work has often been motivated by normative convictions that one way of relating is better than another, the normative theory of what constitutes “good” representation has not kept pace with current empirical findings. This chapter seeks to narrow the gap. The traditional model of representation focused on the idea that during campaigns representatives made promises to constituents, which they then kept or failed to keep. I call this promissory representation. In addition, empirical work in the last 20 years has identified at least three other forms of representation, which I call “anticipatory,” “gyroscopic,” and “surrogate” representation. Anticipatory representation flows directly from the idea of retrospective voting: Representatives focus on what they think their constituents will approve at the next election, not on what they promised to do at the last election. In gyroscopic representation, the representative looks within, as a basis for action, to conceptions of interest, “common sense,” and principles derived in part from the representative’s own background. Surrogate representation occurs when legislators represent constituents outside their own districts. These are all legitimate forms of representation. None, however, meets the criteria for democratic accountability developed for promissory representation. I argue that the appropriate normative criteria for judging these more recently identified forms of representation are systemic, in contrast to the dyadic criteria appropriate for promissory representation. The criteria are almost all deliberative rather than aggregative. And, in keeping with the conclusion that there is more than one way to be represented legitimately in a democracy, the criteria are plural rather than singular.

122   Deliberation and representation The forms of representation identified here do not map well onto the traditional dichotomy of “mandate” and “trustee.” Both mandate and trustee forms can appear as versions of promissory representation (or, alternatively, the trustee concept can figure as a subset of gyroscopic representation), but the new concepts of representation implied by recent empirical work do not have an obvious relation to the earlier dichotomy. In practice, representative behavior will often mix several of these forms. One cannot always tell by looking at a specific behavior what dynamics lie behind it. Yet analyzing each form separately makes it possible to identify the underlying power relation in each form, the role of deliberation in each, and the normative criteria appropriate to each. These normative criteria are goals toward which to strive (“regulative ideals”), not standards that can be fully met. Conceiving of democratic legitimacy as a spectrum and not a dichotomy, one might say that the closer a system of representation comes to meeting the normative criteria for democratic aggregation and deliberation, the more that system is normatively legitimate. Addressing the norms appropriate to a system of representation assumes that representation is, and is normatively intended to be, something more than a defective substitute for direct democracy.1 Constituents choose representatives not only to think more carefully than the about ends and means but also to negotiate more perceptively and fight more skillfully than constituents have either the time or the inclination to do. The difference between representation and direct democracy creates a need for norms designed particularly for democratic representation. Yet democratic representation comes in different forms, with norms appropriate to each.

Promissory representation Promissory representation, the traditional model, follows the classic principal-­ agent format. The problem for the principal (in Bristol or Ohio) is one of keeping some control over the agent (in London or Washington). The problem in politics does not differ greatly from the problem of keeping any economic agent responsive to the desires of the principal. Economic history and theory have focused recently on the problem of long-­distance trade when there was no governmental infrastructure to enforce contractual arrangements. In the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, this situation necessitated either kinship ties or above-­market payment rates to ensure that ships loaded with the surplus value of thousands of workers actually returned with the goods received in trade (see Greif 1993). When control (as in a sea-­bound ship) or information (as in relations with an expert) is asymmetric, the problem for the principal is to make sure that the agent (the captain, the lawyer, the accountant) acts to further the interests of the principal (the merchant, the client). So too in political representation, both descriptive and normative writers have perceived the problem as one of the voters in a district keeping legal or moral control over their distant representatives. The normative understanding of accountability in promissory representation is that

Rethinking representation   123 the representative is “responsible to,” “answerable to,” “bound,” and even “bound by” those voters.2 In the “mandate” version of the model, the representative promises to follow the constituents’ instructions or expressed desires; in the “trustee” version the representative promises to further the constituency’s long-­ run interests and the interests of the nation as a whole. In promissory representation, the power relation from voter to representative, principal to agent, runs forward in linear fashion. By exacting a promise, the voter at Time 1 (the election) exercises power, or tries to exercise power, over the representative at Time 2 (the governing period): VT1 → RT2 Promissory representation thus uses the standard forward-­looking concept of power, as in Robert Dahl’s (1957) intuitive “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (202–203). Indeed, any definition of power derived, like Dahl’s, from Weber ([1922] 1978, 53) will imply this kind of forward-­looking intentionality. Dahl’s “get” implies both that A acts with intention and that B’s action will occur in the future. The power relation follows the simplest version of a principal–agent model, with the voter as principal, statically conceived, trying to exercise power over the representative as agent.3 Promissory representation works normatively through the explicit and implicit promises that the elected representative makes to the electorate. It works prudentially through the sanction the voter exercises at the next election (Time 3). That sanction is a reward or punishment for acting or failing to act according to the promise made at the previous election (Time 1). Both normatively and prudentially, the electoral audit at Time 3 focuses on whether or not the promises at Time 1 were kept. George Bush thus angered his supporters deeply by breaking an explicit campaign promise (“Read my lips: No new taxes”).4 Promissory representation has the advantage that, at least in its more mandated versions, it reflects in a relatively unmediated manner the will (although not necessarily the considered will) of the citizenry. It comes closer than any other model to an ideal in which the simple imprint of the voter’s will is transmitted through institutions to an equal exertion of power on the final policy. Although promissory representation has never described actual representation fully, it has been and remains today one of the most important ways in which citizens influence political outcomes through their representatives. Promissory representation thus focuses on the normative duty to keep promises made in the authorizing election (Time 1), uses a conception of the voter’s power over the representative that assumes forward-­looking intentionality, embodies a relatively unmediated version of the constituent’s will, and results in accountability through sanction. How we conceive of representation begins to change, however, when we consider the implications of instituting a sanction at Time 3.

124   Deliberation and representation

Anticipatory representation For more than a generation now, empirical political scientists have recognized the significance in the representative system of “retrospective voting,” in which the voter looks back to the past behavior of a representative in deciding how to vote in the next election. Yet the normative implications of this way of looking at representation have not been fully explored. Returning to the model of promissory representation, it seems obvious that the power exercised in that model works through the voter’s potential sanction of voting a representative out of office at Time 3. This is “retrospective voting.” From the representative’s perspective, however, retrospective voting does more than provide the potential retribution for broken promises. It also generates what I call “anticipatory” representation, in which the representative tries to please future voters. Whereas in promissory representation the representative at Time 2 (the period in office) represents the voter at Time 1 (the authorizing election), in anticipatory representation the representative at Time 2 represents the voter at Time 3, the next election.5 In anticipatory representation, what appears to the representative to be a “power relation” thus works not forward, but “backward,” through anticipated reactions, from the voter at Time 3 to the representative at Time 2: RT2 ← VT3 Strictly speaking, the beliefs of the representative at Time 2 about the future preferences of the voter at Time 3, not the actual preferences of the voter at Time 3, are the cause of the representative’s actions at Time 2. A later event cannot cause an earlier event. Indeed, the representative’s beliefs may turn out to be mistaken. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the representative, the entity that exerts the sanction and thus the control appears to be the voter at Time 3. The model of anticipatory representation thus requires a concept of power different from traditional, forward-­looking, intention-­based concepts such as Dahl’s or Weber’s. It requires a concept of power that can include “anticipated reactions.” We find early formulations of this idea in the writings of Carl Friedrich (1937, 16–17, 1958, 1963, ch.  11), Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1963), and Stephen Lukes (1974). The best formulation for the purposes of this analysis comes from Jack Nagel (1975, 29), who defined power, at the highest level of generality, as a “causal relation between the preferences of an actor regarding an outcome and the outcome itself.” The neutrality of this definition in regard to intention and time make it compatible with anticipatory representation. Unlike Dahl’s definition, Nagel’s definition allows the anticipated preferences of the voter at Time 3 (that is, the representative’s beliefs about those preferences) to cause the actions of the representative at Time 2. Anticipatory representation directs empirical attention away from the relation between Time 1 (the authorizing election) and Time 2 (the representative’s period of service), and toward the relations that arise between the beginning of

Rethinking representation   125 Time 2 (the representative’s period of service) and Time 3 (the next election). When preferences are stable over time, there is no important difference between the voter at Time 1 and Time 3 (Miller and Stokes 1963, 50; Nagel 1975, 24ff.). But when preferences are unstable or emergent, the representative has incentives to search during Time 2 for the characteristics of the voter at Time 3. Because this anticipation usually poses an extremely difficult information problem (Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995, 545), the search prompts attention to public opinion polls, focus groups, and gossip about the “mood of the nation” (Kingdon 1984, 153; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995, 544). It also prompts attempts to change the voter at Time 3 so that the voter will be more likely to approve of the representative’s actions. This temporal shift has three implications for empirical description and analysis. First, the model becomes more deliberative. The space between Time 1 and Time 3 becomes filled with reciprocal attempts at the exercise of power and communication, much of it instigated by the representative: RT2a ↔ VT2a ↔ RT2b ↔ VT2b ↔ etc. ↔ VT3 Second, anticipatory representation prompts attention to underlying interests as well as present preferences. Benjamin Page (1978, 221–22), for example, points out that a theory of democracy based on the representative’s anticipation of reward and punishment “orients government responsiveness toward fundamental needs and values of the people rather than toward ephemeral or weakly held policy preferences.” Douglas Arnold writes that the representative is better off thinking of the voters in the next election as having “outcome” preferences rather than “policy” preferences (1990, 17, 1993, 409). James Stimson (1995, 545) and his colleagues similarly argue that the information problem involved in rational anticipation encourages representatives to aim at general rather than specific knowledge. If we add to these formulations the idea that voters can change their preferences after thinking about them, we can find a place in empirical theory for the concept of “interests” (defined as enlightened preferences) in what would otherwise be a purely preference-­oriented model of political behavior.6 Third, following from the first two points, anticipatory representation encourages us to think of voters at Time 3 as educable (or manipulable). Between Time 1 and Time 3 the voters can be “educated” not only by the representative, who seeks and prepares “explanations” of his votes (Fenno 1978; Kingdon 1981), but also—critical for the practice of democracy—by parties, interest groups, media, opposition candidates, and other citizens (Arnold 1990, 1993, 409; Kuklinski and Segura 1995, 15–16; Young 2000). (In the following diagram, groups, media, opposition and other citizens are all demarcated as “G” for “Groups.” The arrow indicates both power and communication.) RT2a

VT2a GT2a

RT2b VT2ab

VT2b GT2b

etc.

VT3

126   Deliberation and representation Arnold (1993), Stimson et al. (1995), and others have drawn the attention of empirical political scientists to this form of representation. They have done so, however, without emphasizing its deliberative side. Arnold’s “alternative control model,” which otherwise describes well the process I call “anticipatory representation,” does not fully capture the crucial elements of continuing communication and potentially changing voter preferences. Arnold (1993, 410) describes citizens in the model statically, as acting “more like spectators who register their approval or disapproval at the end of a performance.” Yet Arnold (1993) himself recognizes that anticipatory representation can be intensely interactive with citizens when he notes that legislators “learn from interest groups, committee hearings, staff members, and other legislators about the policy consequences and the political consequences of specific decisions” (412). Interest groups and committee hearings are both institutions by which citizens communicate their evolving interests and opinions (although not without intervening biases introduced by the selection and medium of communication). Arnold also describes legislators statically, as “controlled agents.” Although he is right in saying the legislators are not “instructed delegates,” his phrase “controlled agents” does not capture the legislators’ role as potential initiators and educators. In contrast, the model of anticipatory representation is in most instances interactive and more continually reflexive. Anticipatory representation derives from a marketplace model, which Arnold (1993, 412) himself adopts when he writes that “movie makers, auto makers, and real estate developers attempt to anticipate and satisfy consumers’ preferences.” In the marketplace, customers are not mere “spectators”; nor are entrepreneurs “controlled agents.” Rather, customers actively (if not intentionally) exert power and influence on the marketplace, and entrepreneurs too are active, in searching out and sometimes even creating preferences. Like the customer/entrepreneur relation in the marketplace, the voter/representative relation in anticipatory representation is best conceived as one of reciprocal power and continuing mutual influence. The temporal shift produced by anticipatory representation has parallel implications for normative theory. Most prominently, it undermines the traditional understanding of accountability. It therefore demands new normative criteria in its place. The traditional concept of accountability, focusing on the relationship between Time 1 and Time 2, asks whether the representative is doing what the statically conceived constituent wanted the representative to do at Time 1. By substituting the voter at Time 3 for the voter at Time 1, anticipatory representation makes the voter at Time 1 irrelevant. If we think of the representative as an entrepreneur, anticipating future customers’ preferences, the forces that make the representative “accountable” are all forward looking. Yet it would seem strange to say that the representative was accountable to the voter at Time 3. The argument that anticipatory representation undermines traditional notions of accountability will seem counterintuitive, because, of all the models I introduce here, anticipatory representation is most intimately related to those traditional notions. The desire for reelection is usually, and quite reasonably,

Rethinking representation   127 interpreted as simply a mechanism for insuring the fidelity of the representative to the voter’s wishes, making no distinction between the voter at Time 1 and the voter at Time 3. Indeed, if the voter at Time 3 does not differ from the voter at Time 1, then we can think of the voter at Time 3 as simply doling out the reward or punishment to enforce the power relation in promissory representation. Most theorists and most members of the public still envision representation through the traditional model of promissory representation, in which the voter’s power works forward and the representative’s attention looks backward. The public’s advocacy of term limits, for example, adopts this static feature of the traditional model. The voters fear that the farther away the representative gets from home, literally and figuratively, the weaker the tether that holds that representative to them. The voters want their “hooks” in the representative to be strong. In the intensity of that desire, they seem willing to forgo the reelection incentive. Their implicit calculus seems not to include the incentives built into Time 3. But the shift in temporal emphasis in anticipatory representation brings unexpected normative changes in its wake. To the degree that we think of the legislator as representing the voter at Time 3, we turn the legislator into a Shumpeterian entrepreneur, motivated to try to attract the votes of future customers. As we have seen, in this conception, strictly speaking, the traditional principal–agent model disappears. We do not think of an economic entrepreneur as an agent, with the future customers as principals. A representative trying to anticipate the desires of voters at Time 3 has a prudential, not a moral, relationship to those voters. To the degree that the representative wants to be reelected, he or she will see pleasing the voters (and funders) at Time 3 as the means to that end. Whereas in traditional accountability, we would say that the representative “ought” to do what he or she had promised the voters at Time 1, we do not say that the representative “ought” to try to please the voters at Time 3. In this respect, purely prudential incentives have replaced a combined moral and prudential imperative. Replacing morality with prudence in the incentive structure of anticipatory representation leads us to judge the process with new normative criteria. It makes us shift our normative focus from the individual to the system, from aggregative democracy to deliberative democracy, from preferences to interests, from the way the legislator votes to the way the legislator communicates, and from the quality of promise-­keeping to the quality of mutual education between legislator and constituents. Anticipatory representation forces normative theory to become systemic. In most anticipatory representation, the better the communication between voter and representative in the interval between Time 1 and Time 3, the better the representation. A representative could in theory accurately anticipate the desires of the voter at Time 3 without any mutual communication. In practice, representatives usually initiate and welcome the opportunity to communicate with voters, both to anticipate their preferences at Time 3 and to influence them. The quality of that mutual communication then depends only in small part on the

128   Deliberation and representation dyadic efforts of the representative and the constituent. It depends much more on the functioning of the entire representative process—including political parties, political challengers, the media, interest groups, hearings, opinion surveys, and all other processes of communication. Each of these has important functions in an overall process of what might be called “continuing representation.” Normative theory should ask, and empirical political science should try to answer, how well the entire representative system contributes to ongoing factually accurate and mutually educative communication (see Williams 1998 and Young 2000, 128, 130 on interaction; Thompson 1988 on representation over time). Focusing on the changes in voter and representative between Time 1 and Time 3 also underlines the deliberative function of representation. Recognizing that the representative’s initiatives have the potential to change as well as to anticipate voters at Time 3, normative theorists should be able to help empirical political scientists ask whether those changes are best described as “education” or “manipulation.”7 Manipulation may be distinguished by the intent to deceive or create conditions of choice leading others to make a choice not in their interests (see Lukes 1974). Beyond non-­manipulation, the quality of education can be judged by the deliberative criteria of whether the mutual interaction between Time 1 and Time 3 makes the voters at Time 3 (1) more or less aware of their underlying interests and the policy implications of those interests and (2) more or less able to transform themselves in ways that they will later consider good (including, when appropriate, becoming more concerned with the common interest). Education, in short, is a form of what I will call “influence” and manipulation a form of what I will call “coercive power.” Within Nagel’s broad understanding of power as preferences causing outcomes, we may distinguish analytically between these two forms. Influence, marked by (relatively) common interests on the issue between influencer and influenced, is exercised through arguments on the merits. Coercive power, marked (except in paternalism) by a conflict of interest between power exerciser and recipient, has two subtypes: “The threat of sanction,” which involves the will of the actor subject to power, and “force,” which includes not only physical force but any structuring of alternatives that conceived as a form of influence, as it works through arguments on the merits and is by definition in the recipients’ interests. “Manipulation” maybe conceived as a form of force, as it occurs, by definition, against the recipients’ interests without their recognizing characteristics of the situation that might have led them to take another action.8 None of these forms of power is easy to operationalize, because their definitions involve contests over what is and what is not in an individual’s interests. Normative theorists are currently working to define the appropriate standards for the use of coercive power and influence. Regarding coercive power, the normative theory appropriate for aggregative models of democracy mandates that each voter’s preferences should have roughly equal coercive power over the outcome. In deliberation, in contrast, the ideal is the absence of coercive power.9 In deliberation, influence can legitimately be highly unequal (at least under

Rethinking representation   129 c­ onditions in which the unequal exercise of influence does not undermine a rough equality of respect among participants, foreclose further opportunities to exercise equal power, or deny any of the participants the opportunity to grow through participation). Knight and Johnson (1998) argue convincingly for an ideal of “equal opportunity of access to political influence” in democratic deliberation. But even that ideal is a default position, holding unless good reasons can be given for unequal access to influence. In formal representation, for example, citizens for good reasons place the representative in a position of greater potential influence and coercive power than most constituents. When a representative uses that greater coercive power in a deliberation, e.g., to set the agenda, that act is not automatically normatively wrong (as suggested by both ideals of equal access to influence and absence of coercive power) but should be judged by the three criteria, appropriate to deliberation, of non-­manipulation, illuminating interests, and facilitating retrospectively approvable transformation. Unfortunately for analyses that try to be purely “objective,” questions regarding voters’ interests, in contrast to their preferences, are not susceptible to certain resolution. They are “essentially contested” (Gallie 1962). They are nevertheless the right questions to ask. These questions force the observer to consider whether the process of mutual communication with the representative deepens the base on which the voters’ preferences rest, or instead introduces misleading considerations or emphases that, given adequate information and the time for adequate reflection, the voters would reject. At the moment, the existing representative apparatus in the United States does not facilitate well the processes of mutual education, communication, and influence. For example, when William Bianco (1994, 51) asked members of Congress whether they thought they could explain to their constituents a vote (against the repeal of Catastrophic Coverage for health insurance) that they considered a vote for good public policy, many found that their attempts at education only made their constituents angry.10 In this case, some constituents (whose private policies covered much of what the bill would provide) had far greater access to influence than others. Some political entrepreneurs deceived the public, probably intentionally (King and Scott 1995). Critically, representatives had neither the political space nor the time to explain their reasoning to their constituents and be educated in turn. The citizens did not have forums in which they could discuss together all aspects of the matter. The deliberative process thus fell far short of meeting not only the criteria of equal opportunity for access to influence and non manipulation but also the criteria of interest clarification and (less relevantly here) retrospectively approvable transformation, which might have justified unequal access. In the case of Catastrophic, political parties, the media, and the relevant interest groups played only minor roles in rectifying distortions in the process of representation. Yet in a polity the size of the United States, these intermediaries play a crucial role in the larger system of representation. By emphasizing the distance between the representative and the voter, the traditional model of promissory representation puts little weight on the quality of communication

130   Deliberation and representation between the two. In contrast, the incentive structure behind anticipatory representation has created an entire apparatus of opinion polling, focus group, and interest group activity that deserves closer normative scrutiny. Rather than treating opinion polls and focus groups as tools of manipulation and interest groups as no more than the tool of “special interests,” an empirical analysis driven by appropriate normative concerns should ask how well these institutions, along with opposition candidates, political parties, and the media, avoid the biases of unequally funded organizational forms and how well they serve the normatively worthy purposes of mutual communication and education.11 Such a focus would inevitably draw one away from the dyadic representative–constituent relation and toward the larger system of multi-­actor, continuing representation. In short, if in anticipatory representation the representative simply anticipated the preferences of the voter at Time 3 and made no move to change those preferences, the aggregative norms of equal power per voter that underlie the promissory model would need no supplementation. But if, as seems to be the case in almost all actual instances, representatives use their power and influence to affect the preferences of voters at Time 3, the norms of good deliberation must come into play, and we must ask whether the criteria of non manipulation, interest clarification and retrospectively approvable transformation that justify unequal access to influence are being met or at least approached. Anticipatory representation thus focuses on the prudential incentive to please the voter in the next election (Time 3), uses a conception of the voter’s power over the representative that allows anticipated reactions, replaces the constituent’s transmission of will with the representative’s desire to please, and shifts normative scrutiny from the process of accountability to the quality of deliberation throughout the representative’s term in office.

Gyroscopic representation I have given the label “gyroscopic representation” to a conception of representation that not only differs from, but is to some degree incompatible with, anticipatory representation. Others have called this representation by “recruitment” (Kingdon 1981, 45), by “initial selection” (Bernstein 1989), or by “electoral replacement” (Stimson et al. 1995).12 In this model of representation, voters select representatives who can be expected to act in ways the voter approves without external incentives. The representatives act like gyroscopes, rotating on their own axes, maintaining a certain direction, pursuing certain built-­in (although not fully immutable) goals. As in the other new models of representation introduced here, these representatives are not accountable to their electors in the traditional sense. In this case, the representatives act only for “internal” reasons. Their accountability is only to their own beliefs and principles. This model can take several forms. In all forms the representative looks within, for guidance in taking action, to a contextually derived understanding of interests, interpretive schemes (“common sense”), conscience, and principles. In the United States, a voter may select the narrowest version of the type, dedicated

Rethinking representation   131 to a single issue such as the legalization of abortion. Or a voter may select the broadest version, a person of integrity with a commitment to the public good. In general, people often try to select what Fearon (1999, 68) calls a “good type,” with the characteristics of (1) having similar policy preferences to the voter, (2) being honest and principled, and (3) being sufficiently skilled. They explain their choices, for example, with the phrase, “He’s a good man” or “She’s a good woman” (Fenno 1978, 55; Miller and Stokes 1963, 54). Character, including adherence to principle, is an important feature on which voters select. But it is not the only feature. In the United States, voters also use descriptive characteristics, along with party identification and indicators of character, as cues by which to predict the representative’s future behavior (Popkin 1994). Legislators themselves often adopt this understanding of representation, seeing themselves as having an attitudinal identity with a majority of their constituents (Bianco 1994, 39; Fenno 1978, 115; Kingdon 1981, 4547). Thus the two principal features that Fearon (1999) enunciates, of having policy preferences similar to the constituent’s and being honest and principled, are analytically separable but entwined in practice, because similar policy preferences will not suffice if the representative can be bribed.13 In the “party discipline” models characteristic of much of Europe, representatives look within to a set of principles and commitments that derive partly from their own ideals and partly from their commitment to the collective decisions of the party. The representative is also subject to party sanctions for not obeying the party, and the party in turn is subject to sanctions from the voters. I focus here only on the model of gyroscopic representation that prevails in the United States. In all versions of gyroscopic representation, the voters affect political outcomes not by affecting the behavior of the representative (“inducing preferences,” as in promissory or anticipatory representation), but by selecting and placing in the political system representatives whose behavior is to some degree predictable in advance based on their observable characteristics. Whereas in promissory and anticipatory representation the representative’s preferences are induced, in this model the representative’s preferences are internally determined. Whereas in promissory and anticipatory representation the voters (at Time 1 or Time 3) cause changes in the representative’s behavior, in gyroscopic representation the voters cause outcome changes first in the legislature and more distantly in the larger polity not by changing the direction of the representative’s behavior but by placing in the legislature and larger polity (the “system”) the active, powerful element constituted by this representative. The voters thus have power not over the representative, but over the system: VT1 → SYSTEMT2 In this form of representation, the representative does not have to conceive of him- or herself, in Pitkin’s ([1967] 1972) terms, as “acting for” the constituent, at either Time 1 or Time 3. The motivations of the representative can remain a

132   Deliberation and representation black box. The voter selects the representative based on predictions of the representative’s future behavior derived from past behavior and other cues. We may envision the candidates vying for election as a set of self-­propelled and self-­ directed thinking, feeling and acting machines, from which the voter selects one to place in the system. After the selection, the self-­propelled machine need have no subsequent relation to the voter. The key to the voter-­representative relationship in this model is thus not traditional accountability but deep predictability, in the sense of predicting an inner constellation of values that is, in important respects, like the constituent’s own. In some electoral systems, the political party is often far more predictable and easier for voters to relate to their own interests than are individual politicians. In the United States, a politician’s personal reputation, descriptive characteristics, and character (as the voters judge it) provide deep predictability above and beyond the predictor of party identification. In the United States, gyroscopic representation forms a relatively large part of the representative process. As John Kingdon (1981, 45) writes, “The simplest mechanism through which constituents can influence a congressman is to select a person initially for the office who agrees with their attitudes.” Approximately three-­quarters of the time Kingdon (1981, 45) found no conflict between what a majority of the constituency wanted and the personal attitudes of their member of Congress. Gyroscopic representation (or representation by recruitment) could therefore comprise as much as three-­quarters of the dynamic of representation in the United States Congress. Robert Bernstein (1989) agrees with this assessment, dubbing the prevailing fixation on what I call promissory representation and anticipatory representation “the myth of constituency control.” In the most elegant analysis to date, Stimson et al. (1995) provide data suggesting that in the United States Senate and presidency, gyroscopic representation (their “electoral replacement”) is the most important mechanism by which the representatives respond to public opinion changes. In the House of Representatives, their data suggest, the most important mechanism is anticipatory representation (their “rational anticipation”). Like anticipatory representation, gyroscopic representation has some ties to the traditional form of accountability postulated in promissory representation, but there are also crucial differences. In gyroscopic representation, the representatives do have a normative responsibility to their constituents not to lie about the characteristics on which they are being selected at election time. But in the gyroscopic model the deeper accountability of the representatives is to themselves or (particularly in electoral systems outside the United States) to the political party with which they identify. They are not expected to relate to their constituents as agents to principals. As Kingdon (1981, 46) puts it, in this model the member of congress “never even takes [the constituency] into account.” Or, as Fearon (1999, 56) writes, “electoral accountability is not necessary.” The fiduciary component to the relation is weak. The tether to the voter at Time 1 is almost nonexistent. Gyroscopic representation also differs from Burke’s “trustee” form of representation. Burke ([1774] 1899) envisioned the representative as a statesman,

Rethinking representation   133 c­ oncerned with interests rather than mere preferences and with the interests of the entire nation rather than the district.14 Yet in gyroscopic representation, the voter may select a representative only because both voter and representative share some overriding self-­interested goal, such as lowering taxes. Or the voter may select a representative with many of the voter’s own background characteristics, on the grounds that such a representative will act much the way the voter would if placed in the legislature. The point for the voter is only to place in the system a representative whose self-­propelled actions the voter can expect to further the voter’s own interests. Burke’s “trustee” conception thus comprises one subset within the larger concept of gyroscopic representation. The gyroscopic model does resemble Burke’s trustee conception in one important respect. Having decided that the representative already wants, for internal reasons, to pursue much the same course as the one the voter wants, the voter often expects the representative (or the party) to act with considerable discretion in the legislature. This expectation opens the door to creative deliberation and negotiation at the legislative level. Compromises, changes of heart, and even the recasting of fundamental interests are all normatively permitted. As we have seen, traditional accountability is irrelevant in the gyroscopic model. In the pure form of the model, as Kingdon points out, the representative never takes the constituency into account and is not expected to do so. The quality of ongoing communication between representative and constituent is also irrelevant. In the pure form of the model, as Kingdon also points out, the ongoing communication between the representative and the constituent can, even ideally, be nil. The normative process of judging this form of representation thus requires criteria that differ from those of traditional accountability. One critical criterion, deliberation at authorization, requires normatively estimating the quality of deliberation among constituents and representatives before and at Time 1, the authorizing election. Good deliberation at this moment would result in voters achieving both developed understandings of their own interests and accurate predictions of their chosen representatives’ future behaviors. Good deliberation requires that representatives not intentionally deceive the public as to their future behavior. The voter’s aim is to discern and select on the criterion of commonality of interests between the representative and the constituent (see Bianco 1996). A second criterion, ease of maintenance and removal, requires that the voters be able at periodic intervals to reenter the system, either perpetuating its current direction by maintaining their self-­propelled representatives in office or changing that direction by removing one representative and inserting another. Term limits, which make sense in a model of promissory representation, make little sense either for anticipatory representation or for gyroscopic representation. Term limits make it impossible to maintain one’s chosen representative in the system. In short, the normative criteria appropriate for gyroscopic representation are good system wide deliberation at the time of selection (the authorizing election) and relative ease in maintaining one’s selected representative in office or removing

134   Deliberation and representation that representative and placing another in the system. Gyroscopic representation stresses the representative’s own principles and beliefs, sees the voter as having power not over the representative but over the system (by inserting the representative in that system), and shifts normative scrutiny from traditional accountability to the quality of deliberation in the authorizing election.

Surrogate representation Surrogate representation is representation by a representative with whom one has no electoral relationship—that is, a representative in another district. As with the other forms of representation, I am not the first to notice the importance of this kind of representation in the United States today. Robert Weissberg described it in 1978 as “collective representation,” and John Jackson and David King in 1989 called something similar “institutional” representation. Edmund Burke had a version he called “virtual” representation, but Burke’s concept focused on morally right answers, wisdom rather than will, relatively fixed and objective interests, and the good of the whole, which is only one of many possible goals for surrogate representation.15 In the United States today, individuals and interest groups representing individuals often turn to surrogate representatives to help advance their substantive interests, including their ideal-­regarding interests. A member of Congress from Minnesota, for example, may lead the Congressional opposition to a war opposed by significant numbers of voters in Missouri and Ohio whose own representatives support the war. The situation has changed from the time when territorial representation captured many of a voter’s most significant interests, but in the United States the representational system has not changed with it. In the United States, surrogate representation—a noninstitutional, informal, and chance arrangement—is the preeminent form of non-­territorial representation. For the affluent (or the organized, e.g., through labor unions), surrogate representation is greatly enhanced by the possibility of contributing to the campaigns of representatives from other districts. Individual candidates, political parties, and many other political organizations as a matter of course solicit funds from outside their districts. Citizens with ample discretionary income find many of their most meaningful instances of legislative representation through what one might call “monetary surrogacy.” Surrogate representation, both state- and nationwide, plays the normatively critical role of providing representation to voters who lose in their own district. Because both federal and state electoral systems use single member districts, with first-­past-the-­post, winner-­take-all majority elections, citizens whose preferred policies attract a minority of voters in their own districts could theoretically end up with no representation at all in the legislature. Yet with sufficient geographic clustering, the interests and perspectives that lose in one district will win in another, so that voters in the minority in District A will have surrogate representation through the representative of District B. In electoral systems structured this way, the accidental supplement to existing institutions provided

Rethinking representation   135 by surrogate representation is crucial to democratic legitimacy. As we shall see, if serendipity did not produce enough surrogate representation to meet systemic criteria for legitimacy, the electoral system as a whole would not withstand normative scrutiny. In the kind of surrogate representation that is not anchored in money or other contributions (“pure” surrogate representation), there is no relation of accountability between the representative and the surrogate constituent. Nor is there a power relation between surrogate constituent and representative: VT1 → 0. The only power relation (in the sense of the threat of sanction or the use of force) arises between those who contribute money or other goods and the representatives to whose campaigns they contribute. In a relation of monetary or contributing surrogacy, the contributor exerts power through exacting promises as in traditional representation, through anticipated reactions as in anticipatory representation, and through placing in the system a legislator who will predictably act in certain ways as in gyroscopic representation. Because all the power that is exercised in any surrogate representation works through monetary or other contributions and through contributors rather than voters, surrogate representation in the United States today embodies far more political inequality than does even the traditional legislator-­constituent relation. Yet even without the fear of losing monetary or other contributions, and without any formal accountability, surrogate representatives sometimes feel responsible to their surrogate constituents in other districts. Legislators deeply allied with a particular ideological perspective often feel a responsibility to nondistrict constituents from that perspective or group. That sense of surrogate responsibility becomes stronger when the surrogate representative shares experiences with surrogate constituents in a way that a majority of the legislature does not. Representatives who are female, African Amer­ican, or of Polish ancestry, who have a child with a disability, or who have grown up on a farm, in a mining community, or in a working-­class neighborhood, often feel not only a particular sensitivity to issues relating to these experiences but also a particular responsibility for representing the interests and perspectives of these groups, even when members of these groups do not constitute a large fraction of their constituents. Feelings of responsibility for constituents outside one’s district grow even stronger when the legislature includes few, or disproportionately few, representatives of the group in question.16 Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, consciously sees himself as a surrogate representative for gay and lesbian citizens throughout the nation. Frank, who is himself openly gay, has a sympathetic district constituency: “My constituents at home understand my position. Issues concerning gay and lesbian discrimination are important to me.” He points out that he is able to play this role because it does not take a great deal of time and therefore does not detract much from what he does for his district. Frank takes his surrogate

136   Deliberation and representation responsibilities seriously. He believes that his surrogate constituents nationwide “know I understand their concerns … I have a staff with three openly gay, talented lawyers who feel committed to helping this problem at large.”17 He receives mail from gay and lesbian citizens across the nation “regarding their concerns about gay rights and discrimination,” and he feels a special responsibility to that group, because he is one of the few openly gay members of Congress. In his case, this sense of responsibility is increased because the constituents who write him from around the nation are often not in a position, due to prejudice against them, to become politically active on their own.18 The relation of a surrogate representative with surrogate constituents can also be somewhat deliberative. In addition to their contributions of money, in-­kind services, and volunteer time, which foster a form of power relation, groups represented in surrogate fashion may provide information and expertise. (The moral approbation or disapproval that they also provide may be conceived in part as information and in part as an exercise of power.) Surrogate representatives may consult with group members, particularly those who have some formal or informal claim to represent others of the group, so that information and insights flow both ways. Although dyadic, district-­based, representative-­constituent accountability is completely absent in pure surrogate representation, we can nevertheless develop normative criteria to judge the degree to which, on a systemic basis, that surrogate representation meets democratic standards. The most obvious criterion is that the legislature as a whole should represent the interests and perspectives of the citizenry roughly in proportion to their numbers in the population. But to this larger criterion we must enter certain caveats. First, the aggregative aims of democracy require that the most conflictual interests be those on which most effort is made to achieve proportionality in representation. When interests conflict in ways that cannot be reconciled by deliberation, the Anglo-­Amer­ican theory of democracy that has evolved since the seventeenth century rests the fairness of the conflict-­resolving procedure on some approximation to equal coercive power among the parties. The norm of “one person/one vote” implies the equal individual power of a vote in a direct democracy and equal proportional power in a representative democracy. The more important the conflict, the more vital becomes a proportional representation of the relevant interests. Second, the deliberative aims of democracy require that the perspectives most relevant to a decision be represented in key decisions. Such perspectives do not necessarily need to be presented by a number of legislators proportional to the number of citizens who hold those perspectives.19 The goal is to produce the best insights and the most relevant information, through mutual influence, which in deliberation may legitimately be unequal, not through coercive power, which ideally should be absent. Deliberative goals may also justify some of the inequality currently characteristic of surrogate and other forms of representation. When the deliberative mechanisms built into an electoral system work well, they should select, through “the

Rethinking representation   137 force of the better argument,” against, at the very least, the least informed political positions in the polity. Accordingly, the representatives in the legislature who advocate these positions should be fewer proportionately than the number through other processes of mutual education to winnow out the least informed ideas, leaving the best in active contest.20 The current surrogate selection process in the United States departs significantly from the democratic standard. Although existing electoral systems do to some degree select the best ideas, surrogate systems, even more than direct elections, select primarily for the best financed ideas and interests. In the United States inequalities of this sort are often justified on the grounds that they reflect freedom of “speech,” as conveyed through monetary contribution. But unequal contributions to surrogate representatives are, I would argue, not justified on the grounds of either adversary fairness (providing proportional representation to conflicting interests) or deliberative efficacy (providing some representation for relevant perspectives on a decision).21 The normative questions to be asked with regard to surrogate representation differ from the questions posed by traditional accountability. In surrogate representation, legislators represent constituencies that did not elect them. They cannot therefore be accountable in traditional ways. As in gyroscopic representation, the legislators act to promote their surrogate constituencies’ perspectives and interests for various reasons internal to their own convictions, consciences, and identities. Or they act to assure the continuous flow of dollars into their campaigns. The normative question for surrogate representation is not, therefore, whether representatives accurately reflect the current opinions or even the underlying interests of the members of their constituencies. Rather, it is whether, in the aggregate, each conflicting interest has proportional adversary representation in a legislative body (Weissberg 1978, esp. 542) and each important perspective has adequate deliberative representation. Such a normative analysis must involve a contest regarding what interests most conflict (and therefore most deserve proportional representation) in aggregation and what perspectives count as important in deliberation.22 In short, surrogate representation must meet the criteria for proportional representation of interests on relatively conflictual issues (an aggregative criterion) and adequate representation of perspectives on matters of both conflict and more common interest (a deliberative criterion). Surrogate representation thus focuses not on the dyadic relation between representative and constituent but on the system wide composition of the legislature, sees the represented as exercising no power over either the representative or the system, except when the represented takes a (usually monetary) contribution to the representative, and shifts normative scrutiny from on constituent-­oriented accountability to systemic inequities in representation.

Deliberative, systemic, and plural normative criteria Table 6.1 summarizes some of the characteristics of these different forms of representation.23 When empirical political scientists want to answer the question

Authorizing election

Over the representative (forward looking)

Keeping promises

Yes

Focus

Direction of voter power

Normative criteria

Traditional accountability

Promissory

Table 6.1  Forms of representation

No

Quality of rep/constituent deliberation during term

Over the representative (“backward” looking)

Reelection and preceding term

Anticipatory

No

2. Significant representation of important perspectives

Ease of selection, maintenance, and removal No

1. Representation of conflicting interests in proportion to numbers in population

None for voters; only for contributors

Composition of legislature

Surrogate

Quality of deliberation during authorizing election

Over the system

Authorizing election

Gyroscopic

Rethinking representation   139 of how well a political system meets democratic norms, they need a democratic theory that will clarify those norms in ways that make it easier to tell when real-­ world situations conform to or violate them. In the field of United States legislative studies, the democratic norms regarding representation have often been reduced to one criterion: Does the elected legislator pursue policies that conform to the preferences of voters in the legislator’s district? This criterion is singular, aggregatively oriented, and district-­based. In contrast, this analysis advocates plural criteria (cf. Achen 1978; Beitz 1989). It further suggests that some of these criteria should be deliberatively-­oriented and systemic. From a deliberative perspective, even promissory representation requires good deliberation to ascertain whether or not representatives have fulfilled their promises or have persuasive reasons for not doing so. Anticipatory representation requires good deliberation between citizens and representatives in the period of communication between elections whenever—as is almost always the case—a representative tries to influence the voter’s preferences by the time of the next election. Gyroscopic representation requires good deliberation among citizens and between citizens and their representatives at the time the representative is selected. Surrogate representation requires not only equal gladiatorial representation of the most important conflicting interests in proportion to their numbers in the population but also good deliberative representation of important perspectives. Each form of representation should also be judged by its contribution to the quality of deliberation in the legislature. In anticipatory representation, a good quality of communication among citizens, groups, and representatives between elections probably improves the quality of deliberation within the legislature. In contrast, one form of gyroscopic representation—based on voters’ choosing a representative whom they expect to pursue a vision of the public interest—facilitates good legislative deliberation not by mutual continuing contact and education but by selecting individuals likely to deliberate well and leaving them free to pursue that goal as they think fit. Surrogate representation contributes to good legislative deliberation by making it more likely that varied and important perspectives will be included. Although a normative judgment on each of these forms of representation involves judging the quality of the deliberation that they produce or that produces them, political theorists are currently only gradually working out what the criteria for good deliberation should be. The standard account is that democratic deliberation should be free, equal, and rational or reasonable. As we have seen in the case of equality, however, each of these characteristics needs greater specification, because not all of the ordinary language meanings of these words ought to apply to the deliberative case. Democratic deliberation should be free in the sense of open to all relevant participants (much hangs here, as elsewhere, on the definition of “relevant”). It should ideally come as close as possible (in a world created by and suffused by power) to a situation in which coercive power has no role and the only “force” is that of the better argument. It should ideally allow equal opportunity of access to influence for all constituents, except where good reasons can be given for unequal opportunity. It should facilitate the expression

140   Deliberation and representation and processing of relevant emotions as well as cognitions. It should be nonmanipulative. And it should both clarify and appropriately transform individual and collective interests in the directions of both congruence and conflict.24 None of these criteria replace the criterion of constituent-­representative congruence. They add to it. Indeed, congruence of a sort is a factor in each of the forms of representation. It is most obvious in promissory representation, where one would expect explicit promises to reflect points of congruence between constituent preferences and a representative’s future actions. It applies in anticipatory representation to the re-­election, where one would expect constituents to have moved both toward and with the representative’s positions and the representative to have moved similarly both toward and with the constituents. In gyroscopic representation one would expect greater congruence to the extent that the representative was elected descriptively to duplicate the median voter but less to the extent that the representative was elected to behave as a principled notable. In surrogate representation, norms of congruence, when applicable, apply to the polity as a whole. None of the recently identified forms of representation, however, involves accountability in its classic form. In anticipatory representation, strictly interpreted, the representative acts only as entrepreneur, preparing to offer and offering a product to a future buyer. In gyroscopic representation, strictly interpreted, the voter selects a representative who then acts purely autonomously. In pure surrogate representation, there need be no relation at all between the representative and the individual constituent. These three forms of representation supplement the traditional model of promissory representation, which does involve accountability in its classic form. They do not replace the traditional model; nor do they replace the concept of accountability. As legitimate and useful supplementary forms of representation, however, they require separate normative scrutiny. In most respects, these models of representation are compatible with one another and with promissory representation. They have complementary functions for different contexts and can, thus, be viewed as cumulative, not oppositional. Compatibly, they direct attention to deliberation at different points in the representative system: to the moment of election, between elections, and in the legislature. Compatibly, they all require each voter’s interests to have equal weight in contexts of conflicting interests, although promissory representation comes closest to the normative standard of direct democracy, in which the people themselves rule. Compatibly, surrogate representation provides at the national level elements required for systemic democratic legitimacy that the other three forms do not provide. Gyroscopic representation is most appropriate for uncrystallized interests and changing situations but requires considerable constituent trust, which many situations may not warrant. Promissory representation requires little open-­ended trust but works badly in situations of rapid change. Anticipatory representation requires little trust and easily accommodates change, but produces incentives for short-­term thinking and manipulation focused on the next election.

Rethinking representation   141 In a few respects, the models come into conflict. Most importantly, promissory representation restricts the representative’s action after election, while gyroscopic representation frees it. Anticipatory representation attracts entrepreneurs; gyroscopic representation, public-­spirited notables. Certain functions that might be thought compatible in a division of labor (e.g., gyroscopic representation requiring considerable constituent trust and anticipatory representation relatively little trust) might, from another point of view, be considered conflicts (institutions that assume little trust sometimes drive out institutions that assume greater trust). Other conflicts may become visible over time. These forms of representation are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, they may interact over time with one another. An anticipatory representative may become a promissory representative at the next election. A legislator may start as a gyroscopic representative and, wings clipped and some trust lost, become a promissory representative. The preferences that constituents express at Time 1 in promissory representation may be the product of earlier anticipatory, gyroscopic, or surrogate processes.25 Although in some respects the normative criteria for judging these forms of representation are additive, the plural criteria of this analysis do not require the models to be fully congruent with one another, any more than the separate normative mandates of freedom and equality need to be congruent. As a consequence, what representatives ought to do when faced with constituent preferences that are not in the constituents’ long-­term interests or not compatible with the good of the whole is, from the perspective of representational theory, indeterminate. Representatives may legitimately act in several ways, as long as they respect moral norms and the norms appropriate for the model, or combination of models, they are following.

Notes   * This paper has evolved over time. Most recently I am grateful for the suggestions of Douglas Arnold, David Brady, Martha Minow, Mark Moore, Dennis Thompson, and participants in seminars at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Princeton University, the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Toronto. For excellent suggestions on earlier versions I thank William Bianco, Carol Swain, Melissa Williams, Iris Marion Young, and participants in seminars at the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, the Ohio State University, Nuffield College Oxford, Indiana University, Princeton University, the University of California San Diego, Harvard University, and Northwestern University. I particularly thank Benjamin Page for his close reading and incisive comments at an early stage, and the insightful reviewers. This paper, begun with support from the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, was completed while the author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-­9601236.   † This chapter was originally published as Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” Amer­ican Political Science Review 97(4): 515–28 (2003).   1 Although deliberative forms of direct democracy can be effective methods of democratic governance in many circumstances, representative forms of democracy have

142   Deliberation and representation

 2

 3

  4  5

 6

 7  8

 9

10

their own uses, functioning not just as “transmission belts” for constituent opinion (Schwartz 1988; see also Achen 1978,476; Hibbings and Theiss-­Morse 2002; Manin 1997; Pitkin [1967] 1972). See, e.g., Pitkin [1967] 1972, 55ff. Traditional accountability theory incorporates two analytically separable strands, usually intertwined. In the first, accountability means only that the representative has an obligation to explain (“give an account of ”) his or her past actions, regardless of the system of sanctioning (e.g., Behn 2001, 220 n. 12, and Gutmann and Thompson 1996). The second focuses only on the capacity for imposing sanctions for past behavior (e.g., Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999, 8–10). See Fearon 1999, 55, and Goodin 1999. This analysis employs the second meaning. Except when discussing Nagel’s (1975) definition of power at its highest level of generality (see below p. 142), I mean by “power” here and elsewhere “coercive power,” a subtype of Nagel’s more general power. Coercive power, in contrast to “influence,” involves either the threat of sanction or the use of force (see below p.  128 and footnote 8). I thank Douglas Arnold for this example. As Manin (1997) points out, however, no polity has ever legally compelled its representatives to abide by their electoral promises. The concept of anticipatory representation is thus a corollary to the concept of retrospective voting (as in Fiorina 1981). With early formulations in Downs 1957; Key 1961, and Fiorina 1974, 32–33, 1977, 1981 (see Page 1978, 32), the concept of retrospective voting has now become standard in Amer­ican empirical political science. For related views on anticipation, see Fiorina 1981, 5–6; Goodin 1999; Manin, Przeworkski, and Stokes 1999, and Zaller 1994. In this analysis the preferences and interests into which deliberation should provide insight may be self-­regarding, other-­regarding, or ideal-­regarding. I thus use the word “interest” in its Amer­ican, rather than European, sense to include foundational (that is, identity-­constituting) ideal-­regarding commitments as well as material needs and wants. Because transforming identities transforms interests, interests can be seen both as “enlightened preferences” (with “enlightenment” seen as the product of experience and emotional understanding as well as of simple cognition) and as changeable and contested. Cf. Jacobs and Shapiro 2000. “Education” in this context intrinsically requires distinguishing what people actually want from what they ought to want (and therefore should be “educated” to want) with regard to both means and ends. See Bachrach and Baratz 1963 and Lukes 1974. These stipulative definitions, useful analytically, do not encompass all of the ordinary meanings of these terms. In this section, in order to avoid confusion with Nagel’s broad definition of power, I have labeled “coercive power” what elsewhere in the chapter (along with many others) I simply call “power.” This analysis omits any discussion of positive incentives, which pose a thorny problem of categorization in these terms (see, e.g., Barry [1975] 1991 and Nozick 1972). For other interpretations of power, see, e.g., Wartenberg 1990. For the aggregative ideal of equal coercive power (a regulatory ideal that cannot be reached in practice), see, e.g., Lively 1975 and Mansbridge [1980] 1983 (but cf. Beitz 1989). For the deliberative ideal of absence of (coercive) power, see, e.g., Habermas [1984] 1990, 235. (This regulatory ideal also cannot be reached in practice, because no exercise of influence can be separated fully from the exercise of coercive power, which will always affect the background conditions of the discussion, the capacities of those in the discussion, and the implementation of the decision.) See also other examples in Bianco 1994, 50, and Kingdon 1981, 48 (e.g.: “Very frankly, if I had a chance to sit down with all of my constituents for 15 minutes and talk to them, I’d have voted against the whole thing. But I didn’t have that chance. They wanted [x]. If voted against it, it would appear to them that I was against [x],

Rethinking representation   143

11

12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21 22 23

and I wouldn’t have had a chance to explain myself.”) Richard Fenno concurs: “… If education is a home activity that by definition has to hurt a little [in asking people to change their minds], then I did not see a great deal of it” (1978, 162; Bianco 1994, 51). Taking these intermediary institutions seriously as vehicles of mutual learning suggests expanding and enhancing the interest group universe in ways that increase political equality (see, e.g., Cohen and Rogers 1995; Crosby 1995; Dahl 1997; Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1996; Nagel 1992; and Schmitter 1995). Miller and Stokes 1963 (50) also described their “first” means of constituency control as “for the district to choose a Representative who so shares its views that in following his own convictions he does his constituents’ will.” Their second means was a form of anticipatory representation. Fearon’s “good type” thus differs subtly from the virtuous and wise representative whom James Madison (along with James Wilson and many other Federalists) wanted selected (Manin 1997, 116–19), in being based more on similarity in preferences than on a universalistic understanding of and commitment to the public good. In emphasizing voters selecting on virtuous character, Brennan and Hamlin (1999, 2000) also omit similarity in preferences or interests. See also Lott 1987, 183. For a standard interpretation, see Miller and Stokes 1963, 45: “Burke wanted the representative to serve the constituency’s interest but not its will” (emphasis in original). More fully, see Pitkin [1967] 1972. Burke [1792] 1869. Pitkin ([1967] 1972, 174ff.) discusses these and other ways in which Burke’s concept of virtual representation differs from modern concepts. For a related concept, see Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 144ff. on “moral constituents.” For African Amer­ican members of Congress see, e.g., Swain 1993, 218; for women see, e.g., Carroll 2002; Congressional Quarterly 1983, 76; Dodson et al. 1995, 15 21; Thomas 1994, 74; and Williams 1998, 141. For the political psychological effects of belonging to a group, see Conover 1988. For increased feelings of responsibility in the absence of other potentially responsible actors, see Latane and Darley 1970. For more on norms of “descriptive” representation, see Mansbridge 1999, Phillips 1995, and Williams 1998. The feelings of responsibility grow particularly strong when the disproportionately small number of descriptive representatives can be traced to past or present acts of injustice against the group. Interview with Representative Barney Frank, April 14, 1997, in DiMarzio 1997. Personal communication from Barney Frank, May 15, 1998. Kymlicka 1993, 77–78, 1995, 146–47, Phillips 1995, 47, 67ff., and Pitkin [1967] 1972, 84, point out that deliberation generally requires only a “threshold” presence of each perspective to contribute to the larger understanding. Important exceptions to this general rule come when greater numbers guarantee a hearing, produce deliberative synergy, or facilitate divergences, interpretations, and shades of meaning within a perspective (Mansbridge 1999). The underlying criterion remains, however, the contribution a perspective can make to the decision rather than strict proportionality. For “the force of the better argument,” see Habermas [1977] 1984, 22ff., summarized in Habermas [1984] 1990, 235. One would expect good deliberation also to reduce or even eliminate the least moral positions in the polity. The normative issues raised by what one might call “deliberative winnowing,” with its tension between respecting “remainders” (Honig 1993) and provisionally recognizing some arguments as better than others, require fuller discussion elsewhere. For a supporting argument, see Sunstein 1990. A deliberation among all potentially affected participants, marked by a minimal intrusion of power and by better rather than worse arguments, should ideally decide which interests most conflict and which perspectives are most crucial. Table 6.1 presents in a crude form some of the major points in this analysis. It does not pretend to incorporate all of the normative criteria relevant to judging the quality

144   Deliberation and representation of representation (e.g., “clean” elections, equal votes). Nor does it incorporate all of the considerations presented in the text. 24 The criteria listed are not intended to exhaust the criteria for good deliberation. For the early ‘standard account’ of criteria for democratic deliberation linked to a theory of democratic legitimacy, see Cohen 1989. For criticisms, further criteria and discussion see, e.g., Applbaum 1999; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Thompson 1988; Young 2000, and, from a more empirical perspective, Braybrooke 1996; Entman 1989; Herbst 1993; and Page 1996. For positive views of transformations in the direction of the common good, see Barber 1984 and Cohen 1989. For appropriate cautions, see Knight and Johnson 1994, 1998 and Sanders 1997. 25 I thank Dennis Thompson for this point.

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Rethinking representation   145 Burke, Edmund. [1774] 1899. “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” In The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke. Vol. 2. Boston: Little Brown. Carroll, Susan J. 2002. “Representing Women: Congresswomen’s Perceptions of their Representational Roles.” In Women Transforming Congress, ed. Cindy Simon Rosenthal. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma University Press. Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, eds. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cohen, Joshua, and Joel Rogers. 1995. “Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance.” In Associations and Democracy, ed. Eric Olin Wright. London: Verso. Congressional Quarterly Weekly. 1983. “Varied Legislative Styles, Philosophies Found Among Congress’ 23 Women.” 41 (April 23): 784–5. Conover, Pamela Johnston. 1988. “The Role of Social Groups in Political Thinking.” British Journal of Political Science 18 (January): 51–76. Crosby, Ned. 1995. “Citizen Juries: One Solution for Difficult Environmental Problems.” In Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation, ed. Ortwin Renn et al. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science (July): 201–15. Dahl, Robert A. 1997. “On Deliberative Democracy.” Dissent 44 (Summer): 54–8. DiMarzio, Amy. 1997. “Surrogate Representatives: A Congressional Voice for Minorities.” Undergraduate paper. Harvard University. Dodson, Debra L., et al. 1995. Voices, Views, Votes: The Impact of Women in the 103rd Congress. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for the Amer­ican Woman and Politics, Rutgers University. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Entman, Robert M. 1989. Democracy Without Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press. Fearon, James D. 1999. “Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types versus Sanctioning Poor Performance.” In Democracy, Accountability, and Representation, ed. Adam Przeworski, Bernard Manin, and Susan C. Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fenno, Richard F., Jr. 1978. Home Style: House Members in their Districts. Boston: Little, Brown. Fiorina, Morris P. 1974. Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Fiorina, Morris P. 1977. “An Outline for a Model of Party Choice.” Amer­ican Journal of Political Science 21 (August): 601–25. Fiorina, Morris P. 1981. Retrospective Voting in Amer­ican National Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 1995. The Voice of the People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 1996. The Dialogue of Justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Friedrich, Carl J. 1937. Constitutional Government and Politics. New York: Harper and Bros. Friedrich, Carl J. 1958. “On Authority.” In Authority: NOMOS I, ed. Carl J. Friedrich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedrich, Carl J. 1963. Man and His Government. New York: McGraw-­Hill. Gallie, W. B. 1962. “Essentially Contested Concepts.” In The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

146   Deliberation and representation Goodin, Robert E. 1999. “Accountability.” In The International Encyclopedia of Elections, ed. Richard Rose. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. Greif, Avner. 1993. “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghiribi Traders’ Coalition.” Amer­ican Economic Review 83 (June): 525–48. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. [1977] 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol.  1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. [1984] 1990. “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6.’ ” Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. In The Moral Domain: Essays in the Ongoing Discussion between Philosophy and the Social Sciences, ed. Thomas E. Wren. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Herbst, Susan. 1993. Numbered Voices. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hibbings, John R., and Elizabeth Theiss-­Morse. 2002. Stealth Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jacobs, Lawrence R., and Robert Y. Shapiro. 2000. Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, John E., and David C. King. 1989. “Public Goods, Private Interests, and Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 83 (December): 1143–64. Key, V. O., with Milton C. Cummings. 1961. The Responsible Electorate. New York: Vintage Press. King, David, and Esther Scott. 1995. Catastrophic Health Insurance for the Elderly. Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Government Case C18-95-1278.0. Kingdon, John W. 1981. Congressmen’s Voting Decisions. New York: Harper and Row. Kingdon, John W. 1984. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Boston: Little Brown. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 1994. “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy.” Political Theory 22 (May): 277–96. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 1998. “What Sort of Political Equality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?” In Deliberative Democracy, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuklinski, James H., and Gary M. Segura. 1995. “Endogeneity, Exogeneity, Time, and Space in Political Representation.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 20 (February): 3–21. Kymlicka, Will. 1993. “Group Representation in Canadian Politics.” In Equity and Community: The Charter, Interest Advocacy, and Representation, ed. F.  L. Seidle. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press Latane, Bibb, and John M. Darley. 1970. The Unresponsive Bystander. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall. Lively, Jack. 1975. Democracy. Oxford: Blackwell. Lott, John R. 1987. “Political Cheating.” Public Choice 52 (2): 169–86. Lukes, Stephen. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillian. Manin, Bernard. 1997. Modern Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rethinking representation   147 Manin, Bernard, Adam Przeworski, and Susan C. Stokes. 1999. “Elections and Representation.” In Democracy, Accountability, and Representation, ed. Adam Przeworski, Bernard Manin and Susan C. Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. [1980] 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes.’ ” Journal of Politics 61 (August): 628–57. Miller, Warren E., and Donald E. Stokes. 1963. “Constituency Influence in Congress.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 57 (March): 45–56. Nagel, Jack H. 1975. The Descriptive Analysis of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nagel, Jack H. 1992. “Combining Deliberation and Fair Representation in Community Health Decisions.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 140 (May): 2101–21. Nozick, Robert. 1972. “Coercion.” In Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th ser., ed. Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Blackwell. Page, Benjamin I. 1978. Choices and Echoes in Presidential Elections: Rational Man and Electoral Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Page, Benjamin I. 1996. Who Deliberates: Mass Media in Modern Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Phillips, Anne. 1995. The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. [1967] 1972. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Popkin, Samuel L. 1994. The Reasoning Voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sanders, Lynn M. 1997. “Against Deliberation.” Political Theory 25 (June): 347–76. Schmitter, Philippe. 1995. “The Irony of Modern Democracy and the Viability of Efforts to Reform its Practice.” In Associations and Democracy, ed. Joshua Cohen. New York: Verso. Schwartz, Nancy L. 1988. The Blue Guitar: Political Representation and Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stimson, James A., Michael B. Mackuen, and Roberts S. Erikson. 1995. “Dynamic Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 89 (September): 543–65. Sunstein, Cass R. 1990. After the Rights Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Swain, Carol M. 1993. Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Amer­icans in Congress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Sue. 1994. How Women Legislate. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Dennis. 1988. “Representatives in the Welfare State.” In Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 1990. The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Weber, Max. [1922] 1978. Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weissberg, Robert. 1978. “Collective vs. Dyadic Representation in Congress.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 72 (June): 535–47. Williams, Melissa S. 1998. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Zaller, John. 1994. “Strategic Politicians, Public Opinion, and the Gulf Crisis.” In Taken By Storm: The Media, Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

7 The place of self-­interest and the role of power in deliberative democracy (2010)*† With James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Føllesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin, and José Luis Martí I  The deliberative democratic ideal reformulated Deliberative democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-­ interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power. Our assessment differs in two ways from the traditional one. First, we contend that self-­interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision. Indeed, some forms of negotiation involving self-­interest meet all of our criteria for ideal deliberation, in particular the criterion that in their ideal form deliberative methods eschew coercive power. We thus include such constrained self-­interest and these forms of negotiation in our reformulation of the deliberative ideal, that is, the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. Second, we argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative. These non-­deliberative mechanisms, such as aggregation through voting as well as fair bargaining and negotiation among cooperative antagonists, involve coercive power in their mechanisms of decision. Yet they can and must be justified deliberatively. Our ideal polity is diverse and plural. Its members both strive for the common good and, recognizing that diversity produces irresolvable conflicts in opinions and interests, deliberatively authorize certain non-­deliberative democratic mechanisms.

II  Forms of deliberation Although deliberation might be defined broadly as “communication that induces reflection on preferences, values and interests in a non-­coercive fashion,”1 deliberative democracy involves a decision binding on the participants or those for whom the participants are authorized to speak.2 There is considerable consensus among theorists on many of the regulative ideals of deliberative democracy.3 The deliberation should, ideally, be open to all those affected by the decision.4 The participants should have equal opportunity to influence the process, have equal resources, and be protected by basic rights. The process of “reason-­giving”

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   149 is required and central. In that process, participants should treat one another with mutual respect and equal concern. They should listen to one another and give reasons to one another that they think the others can comprehend and accept. They should aim at finding fair terms of cooperation among free and equal persons. They should speak truthfully. The criterion that most clearly distinguishes deliberative from non-­deliberative mechanisms within democratic decision is that in the regulative ideal, coercive power should be absent from the purely deliberative mechanisms. Participants should not try to change others’ behavior through the threat of sanction or the use of force. Within these criteria, democratic deliberation can take several forms: (a) classic deliberation, (b) more recently expanded versions of the classic ideal, and (c) the newly reformulated ideal that we propose here. The new ideal includes four forms of communicative agreement—convergence, incompletely theorized agreements, integrative negotiations, and fully cooperative distributive negotiations—that, while accommodating suitably constrained forms of self-­interest, derive from non-­ coercive processes. 5

A  Classic deliberation The classic ideal of deliberation, we believe, is insufficient for a polity ideally based on diversity in opinions and interests. In the classic ideal, individuals enter a deliberation with conflicting opinions about what is good for the polity, but after voicing and hearing the reasons for different options, converge on one option as the best, for the same reasons. Ideally, the deliberation is based on reason. It aims at consensus and the common good. In most formulations it explicitly excludes negotiation and bargained compromise. It excludes self-­ interest. In the classic antithesis between deliberation and aggregation, the rejection of self-­interest is a central part of the larger rejection of aggregation, negotiation, and interest-­group pluralism.6 Iris Marion Young summarizes the classic contrast between deliberative and “interest-­based” models of democracy as follows: Democratic processes are oriented around discussing [the] common good rather than competing for the promotion of the private good of each. Instead of reasoning from the point of view of the private utility maximizer, through public deliberation, citizens transform their preferences according to public-­ minded ends, and reason together about the nature of those ends and the best means to realize them.7 Indeed, in Jürgen Habermas’s early work (and that of earlier scholars in this tradition), public and legislative deliberation should ideally rest only on “the standards of ‘reason’ ” and “the authority of the better argument” on matters of “common concern.”8 This view is inseparable from a concept of “law as an expression of reason,” in contrast to will.9 Laws ideally embody “the reasonable consensus of publicly debating” persons, not a “compromise between competing

150   Deliberation and representation private interests.”10 This definition excludes from deliberation not only self-­ interest but also all forms of negotiation. B  Expansions of the classic ideal Contemporary deliberative theorists have moved away from the language of “reason,” with its Enlightenment overtones of a unitary and knowable entity, to a focus on mutual justification. Participants in deliberation advance “considerations” that others “can accept”—considerations that are “compelling” and “persuasive” to others and that “can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them.”11 This criterion of “mutual justifiability” has become central to the concept of deliberation.12 Other features of an expanded understanding of deliberation are more contested. The term “mutual justifiability,” for example, opens the door to storytelling and the non-­cognitive evocation of meanings and symbols that can appeal to actual or imagined shared experiences. Stories can establish credibility, create empathy, and trigger a sense of injustice, all of which contribute directly or indirectly to justification. Not all deliberative theorists have accepted storytelling or other such methods as compatible with deliberative ideals, particularly excluding from deliberation any form of “irrational” persuasion. Yet the stance of mutual respect required for good deliberation almost always requires extending toward the other participants an empathy that attends to commonalities and differences. Acts of empathy, which require trying to put oneself in another’s place, usually engage the non-­cognitive faculties and require non-­cognitive forms of communication. The role of these non-­cognitive faculties in deliberation is contested.13 The very goal of the common good admits of several meanings. The classic ideal implied a relatively unitary conception, discoverable through reason. Expanded theories point out that the giving of good reasons will not always, even ideally, lead to a unique result. Thus expanded theories entertain plural conceptions of the common good, ranging from agreement on the structure of conflict to aggregative understandings of the common good. The definition and meaning of the common good remains highly contested.14 Finally, when interests or values conflict irreconcilably,15 deliberation ideally ends not in consensus but in a clarification of conflict and structuring of disagreement, which sets the stage for a decision by non-­deliberative methods, such as aggregation or negotiation among cooperative antagonists. We assume that the goal at the outset of deliberation ought not necessarily to be a substantive consensus. Indeed, when the more powerful actors have previously unequally influenced the definition of the situation and its appropriate norms, deliberation ought to make less powerful actors more aware of their interests and, when interests conflict, increase their perception of the conflict.16 Deliberation that has clarified and structured conflict well appropriately ends with majority rule or other non-­deliberative democratic methods such as negotiation among cooperative antagonists. In all deliberative theories, disagreement, conflict, arguing, and the confrontation of reasons pro and con are crucial to the process.17 Deliberative democrats

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   151 have always placed a high value on contestation. Conflict in opinion was the very stuff of politics in the classic theory of Jürgen Habermas, for example. It is not conflict per se but the conflict of self-­interests that for such theorists contaminated the “political.” We argue, by contrast, in a further expansion of the deliberative ideal, that any ideal of the political, of legitimate democracy, and of deliberative democracy must include self-­interest and conflicts among interests in order to recognize and celebrate in the ideal itself the diversity of free and equal human beings. C  Deliberative negotiation As we incorporate both self-­interest and conflicts of interest (including material self-­interest) in the deliberative ideal, we deploy the classic distinction between coercive and non-­coercive interactions to draw an analytic line not, as in classic theory, between deliberation and negotiation, but between two categories of negotiation: the non-­coercive forms of negotiation, which we consider deliberative, and those forms that in one or another way intrinsically employ power in the decision process itself and are thus not deliberative. Non-­coercive forms of negotiation, based on mutual justification, fit solidly within our reformulation of the deliberative democratic ideal. We distinguish such deliberative negotiations both from forms of democratic negotiation that permit some forms of threat and from the mechanisms of democratic aggregation such as majority rule whose legitimacy is based at least in part on the equal power ideally inherent in each vote. We also argue later, however, that certain non-­deliberative forms and mechanisms that intrinsically employ coercive power are legitimate and necessary procedures of democracy more broadly conceived to the degree that they and their procedures emerge from and withstand deliberative, mutually-­ justificatory, scrutiny. Four forms of communicative agreement that we consider non-­coercive and thus part of “deliberative” democracy—the processes of convergence, incompletely theorized agreements, integrative negotiation, and fully cooperative distributive negotiation—all incorporate self-­interest without deviating from the criteria for good deliberation. Each of these processes ends in a kind of consensus, that is, a genuine agreement among participants that the outcomes are right or fair.18 Each contrasts, however, with classic deliberative theory, in which participants enter a deliberation with conflicting opinions on the common good, but after hearing others’ judgments and reasons, adopt one understanding or option as the best, for the same reasons. In what we call convergence, deliberation concludes with participants agreeing on a single outcome for the same reasons, but begins without significant conflicts of opinion or interest. Although the participants enter the deliberation with interests or opinions on what is good for the polity that do not greatly diverge, these opinions are often not fully formed or known to one another. The participants bring together facts and insights from their various sources of information, and after deliberation converge on one option as the best for all. The participants

152   Deliberation and representation need to consider what information and interests each brings to the table and sort out what they think is best by talking with and listening carefully to one another. They need to reflect together, perhaps in depth, on their mutual preferences, values and interests. Moments of convergence, frequent in most political bodies, may engage self-­interests that turn out to be compatible, similar opinions on the common good, or both. Deliberation to convergence often generates mutual respect, trust, collective agency, satisfaction, and goodwill. It forges bonds on the basis of common insight and common action. Defining politics to require conflict and relegating moments of convergence to the category of “administration” denies the complexity of political processes, which properly include convergence without significant conflict on a common good.19 Incompletely theorized agreements originate with conflicting opinions on the common good and conclude with participants agreeing on a single outcome, but for different reasons. Cass Sunstein formulated this concept to describe and commend many decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court, but rightly claims that it applies to other deliberations as well. He argues that because incompletely theorized agreements rest on participants’ different reasons, such agreements are more likely than fully theorized ones to preserve openness for future evolution, allow effective decisions in limited time, accommodate the limited human capacity for reason-­giving, and encourage the humility and mutual respect required in plural societies.20 Incompletely theorized agreements do not fulfill the demands of the criterion of mutual justification “all the way down.” By definition such agreements leave certain issues unresolved. But in deliberating to an incompletely theorized agreement, the parties offer mutually acceptable justifications regarding outcomes and sometimes even regarding the midlevel principles (such as precedent) that generate those outcomes. One meta-­principle that might generate such agreement is precisely that of leaving ultimate principles unresolved. To the degree that the parties can genuinely offer one another such justifications, based not only on the need to find a modus vivendi but on mutual respect for the other’s premises, the process of generating incompletely theorized agreements meets the deliberative criteria of mutual justification, mutual respect, reciprocity, fairness, equality among participants, and the absence of coercive power. Integrated solutions, or “win–win” solutions based on integrative negotiation, are also forms of coordination that originate with conflict and conclude with agreement on one outcome but for different reasons. Unlike incompletely theorized agreements, they were originally conceived to deal explicitly with differences in self-­interest, including material interest. In Mary Parker Follett’s original example of an integrated solution, she wanted the window in a library shut to avoid a draft while another patron wanted it open to get more air in the room. Her solution, opening the window in the next room, gave both parties what they wanted.21 Integrated solutions are possible only when the parties have different valuations of the different aspects of the negotiation and can discover a way of exploiting those different valuations for joint gain. Because in the end the  parties have no need to compromise, integrated solutions might be said to

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   153 “dissolve” a conflict or show that a perceived conflict was only apparent. Yet the parties involved do want different things, which at the origin of the deliberative negotiation seemed to present a conflict. They do not agree on an outcome for the same reasons. Only through deliberation, weighing, and exploring their mutual and conflicting interests can they discover how to resolve the apparent conflict by expanding the borders of the problem or introducing new perspectives. Finally, in fully cooperative distributive negotiations (henceforth simply “fully cooperative negotiations”) participants enter a deliberation with conflicting interests, but, after deliberating on the content of those interests and on the principles of fairness appropriate to adjudicating them, adopt a distributive agreement that all consider fair. Distributive negotiations differ from integrative negotiations in having zero-­sum outcomes.22 That is, although the parties reach an agreement that is better for each than the status quo or the other alternatives available, they give up some part of what they want to get agreement. Coining the term “fully cooperative” negotiation to contrast with “cooperative antagonist” negotiation, the far more common form of negotiation and the subject of his classic text, Howard Raiffa wrote that the partners in a fully cooperative negotiation: have different needs, values, and opinions, but they are completely open with one another; they expect total honesty, full disclosure, no strategic posturing. They think of themselves as a cohesive entity and they sincerely want to do what’s right for that entity. This would be true, for instance, of a happily married couple or some fortunate business partners.23 Unlike most negotiations (those among cooperative antagonists), fully cooperative negotiations meet the criteria for deliberation. In the regulative ideal, they are conducted among participants of equal status and resources, who treat one another with mutual respect and concern, listen carefully to one another, speak truthfully, and aim at finding fair terms of cooperation. Fully cooperative negotiations rest solely on mutual justification. Whereas in other distributive negotiations the parties implicitly or explicitly exchange not only promises but threats (particularly each party’s threat of withdrawing from the potential agreement), in the ideal of fully cooperative negotiation each party eschews not only the threat of leaving but also other forms of coercive power.

III  Self-­interest Although judges and administrators should recuse themselves if they have self-­ interests in a matter they must decide for others, in politics participants make decisions not only for others but also for themselves. Those who know their interests best, namely (in general) those whose interests they are, need to deliberate with others about those interests, come to understand them, express them, and stand up for them. Even in a deliberation aimed at consensus on the common

154   Deliberation and representation good, the exploration and clarification of self-­interests must play a role.24 Including self-­interest in deliberative democracy reduces the possibility of exploitation and obfuscation, introduces information that facilitates reasonable solutions and the identification of integrative outcomes, and also motivates vigorous and creative deliberation.25 Including self-­interest in the regulative ideal of deliberative democracy embraces the diversity of human objectives as well as the diversity of human opinions. Self-­interest plays an important role in deliberation in two ways: relatively uncontroversially, as information on the common good or conflict, and, more controversially, as justifiably constitutive of an aggregative common good or conflict. First, even in classic deliberation, where participants try to understand what policy best promotes the common good, self-­interested statements serve as information regarding that common good.26 The deliberation preceding a decision helps to clarify interests and preferences in addition to transforming them. In this process of clarification, participants in the deliberation must be able to explore what they really want and what is right for them as well as for others in a way that does not take self-­interest off the table. A participant should be able to come to a realization of self-­interest, saying, “But that policy would hurt me [or my constituents],” and hear from others that other policies will hurt or help them.27 If self-­interest is not part of the process of exploration and clarification, the chances increase greatly of a group’s adopting a version of the common good that does not take everyone’s interests into account. If members of the group can speak only as “we” and not as “I,” neither they nor the other participants may be able to discover what is really at stake and forge integrated solutions.28 In practice, without this exploration of self-­interest, the understandings of the common good of the more powerful in the polity may dominate, even without ill will or the intent to exercise power. For example, one evening in 1965, 46 faculty members at the University of Michigan who wanted to protest the Vietnam War met until 4 am to decide between two proposals: a day-­long anti-­war moratorium with faculty calling off their classes, which would break the faculty members’ contracts with the university, or an alternative new idea of a 24-hour session on the war with no cancelled classes. A young assistant professor eventually said, I’m in favor of the alternative but it’s not because I think it is more or less effective as a protest against the Vietnam War. It’s because I’m scared. I’m afraid of losing my job. I could repeat some of the arguments for switching that others have given, but that’s not the real reason.29 A majority emerged for the alternative proposal, the disappointed pledged their support, and the “teach-­in” was born. Teach-­ins spread rapidly across the universities in America, at least in part because that solution accommodated self-­ interests that a more restrictive interpretation of a deliberatively justified argument would have excluded from the discussion.

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   155 In this case, the deliberation had been framed to decide which strategy was the most effective protest. The decision was supposed to be not about what was best for “us,” the deciding group, but what was best for the anti-­war cause. The young assistant professor, trying to maintain authenticity but undoubtedly also worrying that this remark showed him insufficiently committed to the cause, offered his self-­interest as information about himself, not as a justification. Yet that information turned out to be highly relevant, as what was best for the anti-­ war cause turned out to include the cost of anti-­war activity for potential participants. A second, more contested claim is that when the common good is composed of individual goods, each individual’s self-­interest is a constituent part of that common good. In this case, the presentation of one’s self-­interest is in itself a justification, a reason in itself for adopting a particular policy. In a highly simplified and completely aggregative case, the members of the polity could deliberate about their interests, explore their options together, flesh out the implications of different choices, contemplate the different forms of common good applicable to the problem, realize that the appropriate form in this case was purely aggregative, and all individually announce what they had concluded was good for them from the perspective of their own self-­interest, saying, “This policy is in my (my group’s) interest.”30 If all the participants, perhaps for different reasons, converge on one policy as in their self-­interest, then that policy, formed by the aggregation of those interests, is for them the common good in an aggregative form. In these circumstances, for each individual and for the others in the group, the fact of self-­interest is a reasonable and sufficient justification of the individual’s stance. One purpose of deliberation should be to clarify conflict as well as commonality, sometimes leading to the conclusion that the issue cannot be handled with deliberative processes alone. If, after deliberatively exploring both the common good and individual interests, participants find that either their understandings of the common good or their more self-­regarding interests cannot be reconciled, they need to recognize this fact and authorize another form of decision-­making, perhaps a form of voting, to produce a relatively legitimate decision. In this situation too the simple fact of one’s self-­interest may constitute a justification to others for desiring one policy, resisting another policy, and coming to the conclusion of irreconcilable conflict. Finally, as explained earlier, the statement and pursuit of self-­interest is in many cases necessary to construct a fair and fully cooperative negotiation, whether integrative or distributive. The claim that may be hard for deliberative theorists to swallow is that self-­ interests are intrinsically self-­justifying, under certain constraints, in those forms of democratic deliberation and decision that construct a common good from particular conflicting interests (including some incompletely theorized agreements, most integrative solutions, and most fully cooperative negotiations). Indeed, because a composite common good is made up of individual goods, which can include material self-­interests, those interests have a self-­evident, primordial claim to be counted in that common good.

156   Deliberation and representation Consider an example in which two individuals have conflicting interests. One member of a married couple has a job offer in Chicago and the other an offer in Boston. It would distort their communication and decision-­making to “force” them to discuss the issues solely in terms of what is good for “us,” e.g., for the “marriage” or for the children. Only by recognizing their self-­interests and the conflict between them can the couple negotiate a fair, perhaps even integrative, agreement. In the good that they forge through their deliberative negotiation, their self-­interested claims are intrinsically justifiable, that is, self-­justifying in the absence of negating considerations. If in the Teach-­In example the group had been making a decision about what was good for “us” rather than for the anti-­ war protest, it should by right have considered the young participant’s interests simply on the grounds that they were good for him and (like the married couple’s interests in their careers) worthy of being counted in the decision on that basis. In the ideal of deliberative democracy, the expression and pursuit of self-­ interest must be curtailed both by the universal constraints of moral behavior and human rights and by the particularly deliberative constraints of mutual respect, equality, reciprocity, fairness and mutual justification.31 Thus many forms of self-­interest are ruled out, not as desires but as justifications. “The desire to be wealthier come what may,” for example, is in most instances not compatible with mutual respect, equality, reciprocity, fairness and mutual justification. But the “desire to be as wealthy as possible consistent with a fair level that others (i.e. equal citizens) find acceptable” is compatible with the values that help constitute the deliberative ideal.32 As we deliberate on a collective course of action, I may justifiably claim that this desire of mine be given its proper weight, perhaps an equal weight with others’ conflicting desires, without its requiring any further justification. To understand how self-­interest might be inherently justified and legitimately act as a justification in deliberation yet be curtailed by certain constraints, we adapt words that John Rawls used in a different context when he identified citizens as “self-­authenticating sources of valid claims,” meaning that citizens are entitled to make claims on their institutions so as to advance their conceptions of the good (provided these conceptions fall within the range permitted by the conception of justice). These claims … [have] weight on their own apart from being derived from duties and obligations specified by the political conception of justice, for example, from duties and obligations owed to society.33 In a similar way, we argue, citizens are entitled to make claims on their institutions to advance their interests (provided these interests fall within the range permitted by the broad constraints of human rights and morality and the deliberative constraints that run from mutual respect through mutual justification). These claims of deliberatively constrained self-­interest have weight on their own, and do not need to be derived from a larger deontological or consequentialist theory.34

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   157 The kinds of deliberation in which the regulative ideal allows participants to advance their particular self-­interests are themselves constrained. Democratic deliberations ending in a binding decision over basic, unrenounceable and generalizable interests such as human rights ought to include statements of self-­ interest only as information. Most democratic deliberations to a binding decision do not, however, involve such basic constitutive decisions. Broadly speaking, the question of which kinds of claim are appropriate in any deliberation must itself be subject to deliberation and mutual justification. When the young anti-­ war faculty member advanced his self-­interested reason for pursuing the less personally costly strategy, the group could have deliberated upon the appropriateness of that reason. Instead, it implicitly accepted the relevance of his reason to the common task. Although there was no actual deliberation on that relevance, his claim was at least potentially open to a process of mutual justification. We have used the word “fair” rather than “impartial” to describe the ideal process in deliberative negotiation because we contend that to participate appropriately in integrative and fully cooperative negotiations the participants often should at one and the same time both try to conceive and follow a goal of fairness, a process that may require an impartial or third person perspective, and also stand up for their own self-­interests. The participants thus need to be partisan or partial in identifying their own interests and promoting them.35 But they should also want to reach an accommodation that is fair, be willing and able to justify their self-­interests to others in terms of fairness, understand the arguments from fairness from the other side, and look for fair adjudications among competing understandings of fairness. While they should seek impartial outcomes in the sense of outcomes that do not benefit one side or another unfairly, it is both permissible and in some institutional instances required that they take particular concern for their own interests. Participants need not be fully neutral or detached in the deliberative process.36 Will legitimating self-­interest, even in constrained form, undermine the capacity of the democratic deliberative ideal to inspire transformations in the direction of the common good? In practice, perhaps yes. Many normative theorists have emphasized the power of deliberation to transform individual participants’ perceptions and even identities in the direction of the common good.37 Deliberation would have no point if it did not produce change in the views of at least some participants, if only a change in the strength and conviction with which those participants held an unchanged opinion. When participants change their minds in deliberation, as in practice they often do, they most frequently do so because they have acquired new factual information.38 They sometimes change their minds because they have detected logical mistakes in their reasoning, or developed new perspectives on the information they have, for example, taking a more long-­range view. We consider deliberation “transformative,” in the sense of transforming self-­interest, not in these instances but rather when participants change their minds because they have adopted to some degree the perspective of another or taken the other’s interests as their own. (This might be the case, for example, when a predominantly male faculty, or one whose members are mostly

158   Deliberation and representation past the age of childrearing, decides to hold faculty meetings at a time that makes it possible for one of their number, with a child in daycare, to pick that child up on time.) In another form of such transformation, participants may change their minds because the deliberation has evoked and strengthened perceptions of, and a commitment to, justice, which now overrides or modifies the self-­interested perspective with which they entered the deliberation. They may even forge new understandings of justice in the deliberation. Or participants may be transformed in this way because the deliberation has evoked and strengthened ties to a communal entity to which they had given less weight before deliberation and that now overrides or modifies their original self-­interested perspective. They may also help create, as they deliberate, the entity that now claims their allegiance.39 When deliberation actually goes so far as to transform an individual’s identity—a relatively rare occurrence—we can say that deliberation has transformed not only that individual’s preferences but his or her interests.40 When before the deliberation real underlying conflicts were obscured, any transformations of preferences and even identities/interests should ideally create or increase conflict. Transformations of preferences, and even on rare occasions transformations of underlying identities, in the direction of a common good can be among the most valuable features of deliberation. To insist on a role for self-­interest in deliberation is not to deny that value. The problem in practice is, as Archon Fung points out, “Discussions aimed at fostering and clarifying individual preferences, for example, by airing conflicts and advocating conflicting principles,” particularly if they encourage the exploration of self-­interest as well as common interest, may render “participants less flexible and more self-­interested,” thus less open to transformation.41 It is admittedly not easy to explore commonalities collectively, remain open to transformation, and forge a common good while at the same time exploring and keeping an appropriate grasp on one’s own self-­ interest and potential conflicting interests. But the task is neither impossible nor a contradiction in terms. It is, in fact, the ideal.

IV  The use of power A  Is power antithetical to deliberation? In all of the deliberative forms of decision-­making specified above, power—in the sense of coercive power—is ideally absent.42 Because, as Foucault points out, every human being is constituted by power relations, including coercive power relations, and at the same time exercises coercive power over others, the absence of coercive power is a regulative ideal, impossible to achieve but serving in many circumstances as a standard against which to measure practice.43 We understand power in general as A’s preferences or interests causing (or changing the probability of ) outcomes, and coercive power as A’s preferences or interests causing B to do (or changing the probability that B will do) what B

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   159 would not otherwise have done through the threat of sanction or the use of force.44 Coercive power arises only when the preferences or interests of A and B conflict. Of the two forms of coercive power, the threat of sanction and the use of force, only the threat of sanction engages the will of the coerced. If I threaten you with a sanction (“Leave this room or I’ll shoot you”), you can always accept the sanction and deprive me of what I want. You will your action, although you do not prefer it and it is not in your interests. Force differs from the threat of sanction in not engaging the will of the coerced. When I use force, I achieve my goal without a choice on your part (I carry you out of the room, kicking and screaming). Because force works against your interest without engaging your choice, it includes any structuring of alternatives that, unknown to you, is detrimental to your interests. The power that is antithetical to deliberation is not power in general, which could include the simple capacity to act, but coercive power, defined as the threat of sanction or the use of force against the others’ interests. Lying is a form of coercive power.45 A’s lying leads B to act, without B’s willing it, against B’s own interests in ways that B would otherwise not act. In normal conditions, occupying the status quo gives one power through both the threat of sanction and the use of force, because established institutions and their accompanying social settings facilitate what everyone has always done, making actions that depart from this pattern subject to automatic and even unintended social and institutional sanctions. Those institutions and settings also propel participants in certain directions whether or not anyone is conscious of this propulsion or knows what the costs to different participants will be. The coercive power of the status quo becomes normatively problematic when it promotes the interests of one individual or group against the interests of another. In the deliberative ideal, including the ideal instantiated in a fully cooperative negotiation, coercive power should have no effect. In this ideal, even the status quo should have no weight other than through persuasion on its merits (for example, in an argument that if something has worked up till now, it will probably work in the future).46 We grant that the ideal of fully absent coercive power (henceforth simply “power”) is not only impossible to achieve but even hard to envision. We are all the products of power relations and exercise power by our very presence in the world. Yet in practice human beings can recognize a rough spectrum that runs from a minimal to a far greater role for power. The regulative ideal of absent power in deliberative interactions prescribes reducing to a practical minimum the threat of sanction and the use of force against another’s interests. B  Power in facilitating structures The closer an actual deliberation comes to the ideal, the less the threat of sanction and the use of force should prevail. In practice, some coercive power is often needed in a deliberation simply to keep order. A moderator’s keeping a list of those who wish to speak, helping to cluster together comments on a particular

160   Deliberation and representation topic, curtailing long-­winded speakers, or making space for those who have not yet spoken threatens sanctions against those who want to speak right then and as long as they want, but this coercion, fairly exercised, promotes the purposes of deliberation. In a context of preexisting inequality, some coercive power may also be necessary to maintain basic rights, equal opportunity, and the other conditions that help participants approach the deliberative ideal. In a metadeliberation over the conditions of deliberation free and equal participants would be likely to adopt these mutually justifiable rules not only as a guard against others but also to curtail their own future weaknesses of the will. C  Power versus power A more seemingly discordant use of power consonant with deliberation arises in attempts to achieve balance when one party in a negotiation has more power resources than the other party and intends to use those resources to achieve her ends against the other’s interests or in other ways to depart from the deliberative ideal. In cases like these, it is morally acceptable for the other party also to exercise power or consonantly depart from the deliberative ideal. Two arguments excuse these departures. The first, closer to the deliberative ideal, aims at creating the conditions for good deliberation. If in a two-­party interaction one party has greater power than the other, the less powerful party may appropriately increase its power to equal the first in order to neutralize the first, thus producing as close as possible an approximation to the ideal of no power in the deliberation.47 A deliberative democrat might, for example, justify strikes or the threat of strikes on these equalizing or neutralizing grounds.48 Any use of power to create the conditions for listening in situations of impeding inequality would also qualify. The second argument is simply one of self-­defense. Deliberative democrats should not be expected to cleave to the norms of deliberation when opposing parties do not meet those norms.49 From the perspective of self-­defense, derogations from the deliberative norm are authorized to the degree of the other’s derogation.50 More broadly, Jon Elster underscores “the harm that can be done by unilateral attempts to act morally” and enunciates the theory of the “second best,” pointing out that “When others act non-­morally, there may be an obligation to deviate not only from what they do, but also from the behavior that would have been optimal if adopted by everybody.”51 In practice, self-­serving bias often leads participants somewhat to overestimate the amount they must do to redress a balance, thereby encouraging escalation.52 D  Power in implementation After the decision, whether a group has deliberated to genuine consensus in a setting relatively free from power or made its decision through forms of democracy that involve power, the decision will still often have to be implemented through coercive power. Collective action problems must often be solved by

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   161 participants agreeing to impose some form of coercion on those (including themselves) who, after the agreement, would otherwise rationally be tempted to defect.53 We assume that democracies will often need to use coercive power (in addition to deliberative processes) in implementing legislative decisions no matter how closely the process of decision approached the deliberative ideal.

Conclusion Deliberative democratic theory continues to “come of age.”54 In this contribution to its development, we assume that deliberation should clarify conflict as well as help participants to discover and forge common interests. Although we want to stress the importance of seeking a genuinely common good, we argue that deliberation can and should in certain conditions include both self-­interest and the negotiation of conflicting interests. Convergence, incompletely theorized agreements, integrative negotiation, and fully cooperative negotiations are compatible with deliberative ideals. They are forms of deliberative negotiation. Voting and the negotiation of cooperative antagonists are not themselves deliberative acts but, when they are justified through deliberative procedures and preceded in practice by such procedures, can be accepted by deliberative theorists as legitimate components of democracy complementary to and in some cases integrated with deliberation. Although we cannot here fully explore the questions of which forms of partisanship in voting and negotiation among cooperative antagonists are compatible with deliberation and in which contexts, or which forms are subject to which criteria of legitimacy, we consider some version of these forms of exercising power a necessary component of legitimate democracy. We conclude by pointing out that “deliberation” is not just any talk. In the ideal, democratic deliberation eschews coercive power in the process of coming to decision. Its central task is mutual justification. Ideally, participants in deliberation are engaged, with mutual respect, as free and equal citizens in a search for fair terms of cooperation. These terms can include the recognition and pursuit of self-­interest, including material self-­interest, and some forms of negotiation, constrained by the deliberative democratic ideals of mutual respect, equality, reciprocity, mutual justification, the search for fairness, and the absence of coercive power.

Notes   * This article was primarily written by Jane Mansbridge [in a process of deliberative co-­authorship], drawing on ideas and concerns common to the group of co-­authors shared through meetings, conversation, correspondence, and collective deliberation. It was revised on a rolling basis to incorporate the suggestions of co-­authors. Although each co-­author would, if writing independently, put things in his or her own way, the paper represents a direction of thought the co-­authors collectively endorse.   † This chapter is a significantly edited version of Jane Mansbridge, et al., “The Place of Self-­Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18(1): 64–100 (2010).

162   Deliberation and representation   1 Adapted from Dryzek 2000, p. 76. For other definitions see also, inter alia: Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Chambers 2003; Goodin 2008; Fishkin 2005; Stokes 1998; Przeworski 1998; Knight and Johnson 1994; and Manin 2005.   2 On the requirement for the concept of deliberative democracy that it aim at a binding decision see Gutmann and Thompson (1996), Thompson (2008) and others. Deliberation aimed at a binding decision may produce a decision not to decide, in which case the status quo is binding. This article does not discuss what some consider deliberation more broadly, which may take place outside the forum of a binding decision in other arenas of the larger “deliberative system” (Mansbridge 1999) in civil society, ideally producing mutual clarification and enlightenment that should then affect the authoritative allocation of values either formally through authorized political bodies or informally through social decision. See Fraser (1992) on “weak” (opinion-­creating) and “strong” (binding) public spheres and Habermas ([1992] 1996) on the two deliberative “tracks” of “opinion-­formation” in the larger public sphere and “will-­ formation” in the formal body that produces a binding decision. For an alternate formulation see Bohman (1996, 1998, 1999). The article also does not discuss the role that deliberation, hypothetical or actual, may play in anchoring or defining a philosophical concept like “justice” (as in Lafont 2004). Our subject is the ideal to which actual political bodies, trying to make a democratic decision binding on the members, should strive. Our use of the word “deliberation” henceforth will refer, unless otherwise specified, to deliberation aimed at such a binding decision.   3 We define a “regulative” ideal, unachievable in its full state, as an ideal to which, all else equal, a practice should be judged as approaching more or less closely. See Kant ([1781] 1998, p. 552, A569/B597; also A570/B598) on a “regulative principle” as a standard “with which we can compare ourselves, judging ourselves and thereby improving ourselves, even though we can never reach the standard.” For the “rationality of pursuing unattainable goals” see Rescher (1987, p.  114). See also: Nozick 1989, ch. 24; Martí 2006a, pp. 24–31; and for a caveat Habermas [1990] 1993, p. 164. We assume a plurality of regulative ideals that may sometimes conflict. An ideal may be unachievable in its full state for practical reasons (e.g., the ideals of absence of coercive power or completely equal power) or because in specific instances it conflicts with other ideals (e.g., the ideal of equality sometimes conflicts with that of liberty). For reasons of “the second best,” it may in some instances be appropriate to act contrary to the ideal (see below note 51 and accompanying text).   4 The question of what input into democratic decision on a policy affected parties outside the deciding polity should have is currently highly contested. One possibility conceives of affected non-­citizens as having a right to some input into deliberation without the full panoply of deliberative rights (e.g., the background equal resources) or the right to equal power in a non-­consensual decision. Unborn affected parties pose further questions. On this issue see, e.g.: Gould 2004; Dryzek 2006; and Goodin 2007. This analysis is restricted to living adult members of the polity.   5 Thompson 2008, p. 498. As we point out below in section B, the concept of “reasons” in “reason-­giving” can include non-­cognitive “considerations” that others can accept.   6 See Habermas (1989, p. 45) on the necessity of “overcoming” one’s “egocentric viewpoint.” For the antithesis between deliberation and aggregation, see, e.g.: Habermas [1962] 1989 (reason versus will); Elster 1986 (the forum versus the market); Michelman 1988 (strategic action versus deliberation); Sunstein 1988 (rejecting the conception of the electoral process “as a self-­interested struggle”); Cohen 1989 (rejecting the aggregative model); Estlund 1993 (deliberative versus strategic models); Cohen 1996 (deliberative politics versus a politics of bargaining); Martí 2006a, pp. 41–52, 2006b, p. 28 (deliberation versus bargaining and voting); and Mansbridge 1980 (unitary and adversary democracy, for different contexts). See also: Manin 1987; Miller 1992, pp.  182–3; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, pp.  1–4, 2004, pp.  13–21; Knight and Johnson 1994; Bohman 1998; Johnson 1998. Fishkin (2005) notes that some versions

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   163

 7  8  9 10

11 12 13

14 15

of the antithesis confound contrasts between methods of preference formation (deliberation versus raw preferences) and methods of decision (consensus versus majority rule). Young 1996, pp. 120–1, citing earlier theorists. Habermas [1962] 1989, pp. 28, 36, 37. Habermas ([1962] 1989, p. 81), citing Schmitt ([1928] 1957, p. 148): the “law is not the will of one or of many people, but something rational-­universal; not voluntas, but ratio.” Habermas [1962] 1989, p. 132; also p. 195. Schmitt also contrasts “discussion”—an “exchange of opinion” on “the truth or justice of something,” characterized by “freedom from selfish interests”—with “negotiation,” arguing that laws should “arise out of a conflict of opinions (not out of a struggle of interests)” ([1926] 1988, pp. 4–6, parentheses in original). See also Arendt ([1963] 1965, pp.  272–3) and Mansbridge (1996) for critique. Martí (2006b, p. 28, n. 2) points out that many theorists explicitly distinguish between deliberation and negotiation, including: Sunstein 1988; Cohen 1989, pp.  17–18; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, pp.  1–4, 2004; Bohman 1998, p.  400; Knight and Johnson 1997; Barber 1984, pp.  136–7; and Pettit 2003, pp. 139–40; but cf. Bohman 1996, p. 282. Cohen 1989, pp. 101–4; 1996, pp. 100, 2. See Scanlon 1982; Gutmann and Thompson 1996 and 2004; Bohman 1998; Lafont 2006. Sanders (1997) and Young (1996) favor storytelling on the grounds that disadvantaged participants are more likely to use this form and use it successfully (per contra, Benhabib 1996, p.  83). See Bohman (1996, esp. pp.  7 and 45), Dryzek (2000, pp. 64–70), Chambers (2003, p. 322) and Thompson (2008, p. 503) for an expansive construal of reason-­giving, and Krause (2008), Hall (2007) and Nino (1996, pp.  124ff.) for emotional communication in deliberation. Galinsky, Ku and Wang (2005) advance experimental evidence that cognitive “perspective taking” may be more effective than emotional empathy in producing joint gains in negotiation. The arguments in this essay do not require a position on this point. For analyses of different meanings of the common good, see Held (1970) and Mansbridge (1998). We use the word “interest” here to mean an “enlightened” preference, that is, what hypothetically one would conclude after ideal deliberation was one’s own good or one’s policy preference, including other-­regarding and ideal-­regarding commitments. Any guess as to what such a conclusion would be is necessarily open to further thought, testing through practice, and political struggle. The word “interest” connotes objective, static or eternal states discoverable through revolutionary action or through reason, and revealed by removing the sources of oppression or repression. We want to discard these connotations, while retaining some distinction between surface preferences, opinions, or prereflective understandings, and understandings of self and commitments that are more considered, emotionally and rationally, and more thoroughly tested in action. Using this definition, transforming one’s “interests” requires transforming one’s self, including one’s identity, in contrast to transforming only one’s preferences or one’s perceptions of one’s interests (see note 40 below). In this sentence we use the phrase “interests or values” not to imply that interests cannot include values but to clarify to the casual reader, who might not use the word “interests” inclusively, that we intend both material and less tangible interests, including other-­ regarding and ideal-­regarding interests. When we specify “self-­interest,” however, we exclude other-­regarding and ideal-­regarding interests, except in the important cases when a representative is arguing against the interests of others for the “self ”-interest of a constituency or an individual for the “self ”-interest of her family or other subgroup with which she is deeply identified. (We thank Amy Gutmann for comments leading to this clarification.)

164   Deliberation and representation 16 Others who have criticized the classic ideal for over-­emphasizing consensus include: Knight and Johnson 1997; Przeworski 1998; Shapiro 1999, p. 31; Bell 1999; Besson 2005, pp.  228–33; and Thompson 2008. Bachrach (1974) early argued that when underlying conflict has previously been obscured (usually by the hegemony of the more powerful), participation in politics should increase conflict. 17 For recent treatments of conflict in deliberation, see: Thompson 2008; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Bohman 1996; Estlund 2001; and Manin 2005. Chambers (2003, p. 321, citations omitted) concludes that deliberative theory is now “more sensitive to pluralism” and “has moved away from a consensus-­centered teleology—contestation and indeed the agonistic side of democracy now have their place.” 18 Earlier theorists have also suggested that in some circumstances deliberative democracy appropriately includes some form of negotiation and compromise on matters of self-­interest; see, e.g., Habermas ([1992] 1996), Gutmann and Thompson (1996, esp. pp.  69–73, permitting bargaining constrained by moral reciprocity), and Bohman (1996, esp. p.  91). For more on deliberative and non-­deliberative negotiations, see Mansbridge (2009). 19 Per contra see, e.g., Barber 1984, p. 129. 20 Sunstein 1995; see also Sunstein 1996, pp. 35–61, 1997, 1999. Bohman also argues for deliberative agreement on the basis of “different publicly accessible reasons” (1996, p. 83, also p. 92, emphasis in the original; but see Pettit 2003 for caveats). By contrast, Habermas requires that the process of producing a “rationally motivated consensus” exclude the different parties accepting the result “each for his own different reasons” ([1992] 1996, p. 166, emphasis in original). 21 Follett ([1925] 1942), originating the idea of integrated solutions/integrative negotiation. 22 Walton and McKersie ([1965] 1991, pp. 4–5) introduced the terms “integrative bargaining” and “distributive bargaining” to distinguish between (1) the system of activities that is “instrumental to the attainment of objectives which are not in fundamental conflict with those of the other party” and (2) the “system of activities instrumental to the attainment of one party’s goals when they are in basic conflict with those of the other party.” We use the term “zero-­sum” colloquially to include what strict game-­ theorists would call “constant-­sum” and “zero-­sum” games, in both of which my gain requires your loss. (Thanks to Joseph Mazor for this point.) 23 Raiffa 1982, p. 18. Raiffa wrote no more than this paragraph on this subject; we have fleshed out the concept as a component of the deliberative democratic ideal. 24 Several theorists have made a role for self-­interest and conflicting interests in their understandings of deliberation: Benhabib 1996, p.  73; Dryzek 1990, p.  43; Mansbridge 1996, 2002, 2006; Sanders 1997, p.  353; Young 1996, p.  126; and Bohman 1996, p. 255, n. 15. In Chambers’ (2003, p. 309) conception of deliberation, “participants are expected to pursue their interests.” Johnson (1998, p. 174) concludes that a plausible argument for deliberation must not—in the effort to differentiate deliberation from bargaining—categorically exclude either self-­interested claims or the conflicts that such claims might generate from the range of admissible topics that participants to deliberation might address. 25 Fung even argues that “hot deliberations with participants who have much at stake make for better deliberation,” because “participants will invest more of their psychic energy and resources into the process and so make it more thorough and creative” (2003, p. 345, emphasis in original). 26 Cohen and Rogers (2003, p. 247) write: Deliberation does not preclude statements of self-­interest. The deliberative view … admits [expressions of self-­interest] as ways to present information. For example, a relevant consideration in deliberation, and a possible justification or

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   165 reason for a policy, is that it represents a fair accommodation of the interests of all, or advances the good of those who are in greatest need. But to know that it does either of these things, we need to know what those interests are, and expressions of self-­interest by relevant persons are one way to find that out. In the omitted ellipsis, however, Cohen and Rogers argue that “expressions of self-­ interest do not qualify as justifications for anything—as statements of reasons in the desired sense” (emphases in original). We argue below that within certain constraints such expressions can qualify as justifications. 27 Pettit (2006, p. 100) argues that interventions such as “That’s going to make life difficult for those of us who are [group characteristic]”, are “likely to be accepted as relevant on all sides” in a deliberation and to “secure acceptance as reasonable.” See also Goodin 1996, p. 341. 28 Per contra, Benjamin Barber (1984, p.  200) articulated the classic position against expressing or pursuing self-­interest: “In place of ‘I want Y,’ the strong democrat must say ‘Y will be good for us.’ ” Jon Elster also reported that  There are certain arguments that simply cannot be stated publicly. In a political debate it is pragmatically impossible to argue that a given solution should be chosen just because it is good for oneself. By the very act of engaging in a public debate—by arguing rather than bargaining—one has ruled out the possibility of invoking such reasons. (Elster 1986, pp. 112–13, citing Midgaard 1980) Gutmann and Thompson (1996, p.  126) respond with an example from the U.S. Senate floor showing that, in fact, such claims are “pragmatically possible.” Elster later gave the label, “the civilizing force of hypocrisy,” to the pressure of the norms by which “even self-­interested speakers are forced or induced to argue in terms of the public interest” (1995, p. 251, our emphasis; also 1998, pp. 13, 111). Other theorists have used language close to Elster’s (but perhaps admitting of self-­interest constrained by fairness). See, e.g., Hannah Pitkin (1981, p. 347, citing Tussman 1960): [In public life] we are there forced to acknowledge the power of others and appeal to their standard, even as we try to get them to acknowledge our power and standard. We are forced to find or create a common language…. We are forced, as Joseph Tussman has put it, to transform “I want” into “I am entitled to,” a claim that becomes negotiable by public standards. See Benhabib (1996, pp. 71–72, citing Arendt 1961): public deliberation  forces the individual to think of what would count as a good reason for all others involved. One is thus forced to think from the standpoint of all involved. … a standpoint that Hannah Arendt, following Kant, had called the “enlarged mentality.” Finally, see Young (1996, p. 128): “Knowledge that I am in a situation of collective problem solving with others who have different perspectives … cultures and values from my own … forces me to transform my expressions of self-­interest and desire into appeals to justice.” (Emphases ours throughout.) To the degree that this force derives from social pressure, as in Elster’s claim for the civilizing force of hypocrisy, it can undermine the deliberative ideal, reducing both authenticity and information. 29 Gamson 1991, pp. 31–2. 30 See per contra Cohen and Rogers (2003, p. 247), arguing that “This policy is in my (group’s) interest” exemplifies a statement that cannot be a justification; also Nino (1996, p. 122), arguing that the “mere expression of wants or description of interests,” such as “This is what I want,” “would be rejected as arguments in any genuine discussion.” We consider it legitimate for a participant to begin a deliberation, perhaps to

166   Deliberation and representation 31

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33 34

35

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convergence, by saying invitationally, “This is in my self-­interest; is it in any of yours?” Some logical circularity may arise in contending, as we do, that the very meaning of moral behavior, human rights, mutual respect, equality, reciprocity, fairness, and mutual justification must be established, albeit temporarily and contingently, by deliberation that is itself constrained by these values. (E.g., concepts of fairness must be deliberated in as close as possible to ideal conditions, as dominant concepts of fairness are usually biased against subordinate interests and perspectives.) Yet, because the kind of deliberation to a binding decision that involves self-­interest as a justification and not just as information appears at a stage at which both the philosophical deliberations and the foundational binding decisions on these matters have already occurred either explicitly or implicitly (see below), the possible philosophical circularity involved in establishing the meaning of these constraints need not affect our more narrow analysis of the role of self-­interest. This modification of Cohen’s (1989, p. 24) original contrast with a justifiable “desire to have a level of wealth that is consistent with a level that others (i.e., equal citizens) find acceptable” permits as justifiable the more self-­interested desire for as much wealth “as possible” within constraints. It also adds fairness to acceptability. Rawls 1993, p. 32. Indeed, both deontological and consequentialist ideals presuppose the intrinsic justifiability of an individual’s self-­interests. In the deontological ideal of equal respect, those interests are part of what we ought to respect. In utilitarianism, if we should count each for one and none for more than one (a standard formulation that has, however, not been traced to the specific words of Bentham or Mill), those interests are part of what we should count. Rawls made self-­interests part of his conception of “primary goods” (1971, p. 93), concluding that “merely reasonable agents would have no ends of their own they wanted to advance by fair cooperation” (1993, p. 52). Habermas also argued that a norm is valid if all affected can accept the consequences it can be anticipated to have “for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests” ([1983] 1990, p. 65), admitting expressly that there therefore is “a remnant of the good at the core of the right” ([1996] 1998, p. 29). (Thanks to Sharon Krause for these citations.) Textbooks on negotiation often warn that friends and other individuals who want to do right by their communal entity may fail to pursue their self-­interests fully enough to realize the gains that can be achieved in negotiation because their concern for the relationship is so great that they hesitate to cause conflict (e.g., Thompson 2005, p. 143). This point opens up a complex discussion that cannot be explored further here. Nagel’s (1986, 1991) and others’ works on impartiality have sparked an immense literature pro and con (see also, e.g., Williams 1973, 1981). Our point here differs from Nagel’s (1991) argument that workable institutions have to find some way of incorporating both impartial ideals and some (not necessarily dominant) self-­ interested motivations. We argue that in deliberative democracy partiality, suitably constrained, should be part of the constellation of values within the ideal itself. In the past some normative deliberative theorists have made impartiality a criterion for good deliberation (e.g., Nino 1996; Estlund 1993 with caveats in n. 61), while others have used as a criterion such terms as “generality” and “generalization” (Manin 1987) or “a general point of view” (Pettit 2003). Some have explicitly distinguished from impartiality their criteria of reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, pp. 59–63, and 2004, pp.  152–3), publicity (Bohman 1996, pp.  40–46, 80–88), or universalism (Sunstein 1988, p. 1574 n. 195). For Habermas the concept of impartiality understood as neutral detachment is appropriate for “discourses of application,” when judges or others like them decide specific cases on the basis of already justified norms, but not for “discourses of justification,” through which the universal validity of norms is earlier determined and in which each discourse participant should take the internal

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39

40

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perspective of the affected others (which is incompatible with adopting a third person perspective); see Habermas [1991] 1993, pp. 35–38, 48–50 and Günther 1993. E.g., Barber 1984; Elster 1986; Warren 1992; Mansbridge 1980, 1992; Chambers 1996. For skepticism, see Knight and Johnson 1994, pp. 282ff. Goodin and Niemeyer 2003; see also Luskin, Fishkin and Jowell 2003. The new information could include, e.g., relevant circumstances not previously considered, relevant interests previously neglected, consequences not previously analyzed, and options not previously contemplated. The value of these transformations must be judged not only by the quality of the procedures that produce them but also by external criteria regarding, for example, the value of the entity or common good that claims the participants’ allegiance. Transformative processes may lead participants to choose a policy that is good for them or their newly adopted objects of concern but bad for others. Most transformations of identities (and therefore interests) will be caused not by discussion with others but by changes in objective circumstances, as when one becomes a parent. Some transformations in identities can be caused by combinations of words and actions, as when a combination of cognitive conclusions about justice and bonding through common action transforms one into an activist willing to give much, perhaps even her life, for the cause. Words alone (at least performative words) can on occasion accomplish such transformations of identities and interests, as when some French nobles on the night of August 4, 1789 entered the National Assembly as relatively self-­interested beings and left committed to ending feudal privileges. Such relatively instantaneous transformations of identities may require a combination of cognition (e.g., specifying what justice demands in a given instance) and emotional exhortation (e.g., to identify with the parts of oneself that are willing to do what justice demands and disown the parts not committed to that goal). Over time, however, transformations of identities (and therefore interests) could take place through primarily cognitive considerations, as when a person already committed to justice assimilates new facts and insights about the content of justice and thereby takes on a new identity (e.g., as a feminist). Fung 2003, pp. 348–49. See also Thompson (2008) on the “internal conflicts problem” and Lax and Sebenius (1986) on the “negotiator’s dilemma.” In Habermas’s ([1962] 1989, p. 202) formulations, both early and late, ideal deliberation embodies “the power-­free flow of communication.” Congruently, our reformulation of the regulative deliberative ideal involves the absence of coercive power within the process of decision, although not in its implementation. Even an ideally deliberated and fully consensual decision might require coercion in its implementation (see below). Some of the mystique of Foucault’s analysis derives from conflating power as capacity with power as coercion. This analysis focuses only on power as coercion. For Foucault’s understanding of power, see Fraser ([1981] 1989) and McCarthy (1990). See note 51 and accompanying text for the “second best” point that in non-­ideal circumstances it may be wrong to try to approach an ideal as closely as possible. More strictly, we define power in general as “the actual or potential causal relation between the preferences or interests of an actor or set of actors and the outcome itself,” a formulation adapted (by adding the words in italics) from Nagel’s (1975) definition, which improves on those of Weber and Dahl by including anticipated reactions and not requiring intent. We thank Philip Pettit for suggesting “changing the probability” of outcomes. The categories of the threat of sanction and use of force derive from Bachrach and Baratz (1963). Our definition of coercive power applies only in situations of conflicting interests (see Lukes 1974) and corresponds with Pettit’s (2001, pp. 72ff.) “hostile coercion.” Coercive power may act subtly and without active interference (see Pettit 2001 on domination). We do not mean by unequal power the unequal capacity to persuade when interests do not conflict (see, e.g., Lukes 1974; Knight and Johnson 1997).

168   Deliberation and representation 45 On deceit as coercion, see: Bok 1978, p. 18; Warren 2006, p. 166. We recognize that the word “force” (from Bachrach and Baratz 1963) has physical and violent connotations that we reject. In addition, we do not use “force” (a form of coercive power) for actions that structure alternatives in ways congruent with the other’s interests, although we recognize that what is and is not congruent with a person’s interests will always be highly contested. We avoid the word “strategic,” because it can mean both (1) actions that merely take account of the potential reactions of other actors, a neutral usage that describes much ideal deliberation (see Johnson 1991), and (2) actions such as manipulating an agenda, withholding information, and misrepresenting facts or perceptions, which (except in paternalism) arise only when interests conflict, involve forms of coercive power, and are antithetical to deliberation. We thus do not describe as deliberation the kinds of interaction analyzed in Austen-­Smith and Feddersen (2006). 46 Inducements pose a problem as yet unresolved in the theory of power. Many discussions of power (e.g., Bachrach and Baratz 1963) define coercion, as we have, to include threats of sanction and the use of force against an individual’s interests but not to include inducements that enhance those interests. Most ordinary language speakers also call threats of sanction and the use of force “coercive,” in part because in general coercion involves a deprivation of freedom, and freedom is often defined by reference to the status quo. (I “freely” choose to improve my lot in response to a promise, but am “coerced” when my lot is worsened in response to a threat.) From an economic perspective, the distinction is nonsense. From a psychological perspective, the distinction has more bite, because losses often decrease happiness more than gains increase it (Bentham [1789] 1961, p.  290; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). From a philosophical perspective that tries to capture, rationalize and improve normative intuitions, the status of inducements remains unclear (cf. Nozick 1972 on coercion; Barry [1979] 1991 on inducements). Classic deliberative theorists, rejecting bargains and negotiation as part of deliberation, bundle together both “threats and promises” (e.g., Habermas [1996] 1998, p.  166; Martí 2006a, pp.  41–52; also Elster 1995; Føllesdal 2006). To correspond with common intuitions, we have singled out “coercive power” as antithetical to deliberation and define coercive power as the threat of sanction or use of force. Yet inducements may also be antithetical to ideal deliberation, particularly when, for example, they come in currencies from inappropriate spheres (Walzer 1983). Proposals for positive measures designed to achieve an integrated solution or produce a fair outcome are not properly inducements, just as predictions and warnings are not threats (see Elster 1995 for the distinction between offers/ predictions and promises/threats), although that distinction is not always easy to draw in practice. 47 David Estlund (2006, p. 87) gives the following example: If you put a gun to my head, and I put a gun to your head in reply, your use of power has been (at least to some extent) countervailed, in the sense that its ability to skew the deliberations has been scaled back by my response. Still, the power-­ free ideal of the ideal speech situation … has not been restored. This logic may lie behind the requirement in some negotiations that each party (e.g., labor and business) have an equal number of representatives, even though the number of individuals that, say, labor represents is presumably much greater than the number business represents. This neutralizing strategy works only in two-­party situations. 48 Lani Guinier (1992, pp. 288–92) similarly argues that minority representatives should occupy crucial strategic locations in a legislature to ensure that the process is responsive to their views. 49 Estlund 1993, p.  1474; see also Estlund 2006, pp.  81–7; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, pp. 72–3, and also p. 90; Young 2001. 50 See Fung (2005) on the criteria of fidelity, charity, exhaustion, and proportionality.

Self-interest in deliberative democracy   169 51 Elster (1986, pp. 116, 119) (emphasis in original), drawing on a line of thought begun by Lipsey and Lancaster (1956–57). E.g., in a collective action problem one might have in general a duty to cooperate, but if the other defects one might have a duty to defect in a tit-­for-tat response that might induce the other to cooperate in the future. See also Goodin 1995. 52 Babcock and Loewenstein 1997. Negotiating parties indulge in, for example, strategic misrepresentation in part because they expect that others will do so and they need to equalize the balance (Shell 2000; Meltsner and Schrag 1974; Freund 1992). Machiavelli ([1513] 1950, p. 64) too advised princes that “as [others] are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.” 53 Olson 1965; Hardin 1982; Grofman and Feld 1988. 54 Bohman 1998.

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Self-interest in deliberative democracy   171 Goodin, R. E. 1995. Political ideals and political practice. British Journal of Political Science, 25, 37–56. Goodin, R. E. 1996. Institutionalizing the public interest: the defense of deadlock and beyond. Amer­ican Political Science Review, 90, 331–43. Goodin, R. E. 2007. Enfranchising all affected interests, and its alternatives. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35, 40–68. Goodin, R. E. 2008. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. New York: Oxford University Press. Goodin, R. E. and S. J. Niemeyer. 2003. When does deliberation begin? Internal reflection versus public discussion in deliberative democracy. Political Studies, 51, 627–49. Gould, C. C. 2004. Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grofman, B. and S. L. Feld. 1988. Rousseau’s general will: a Condorcetian perspective. Amer­ican Political Science Review, 82, 567–76. Guinier, L. 1992. Comment: voting rights and democratic theory. In B. Grofman and C. Davidson (eds), Controversies in Minority Voting. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Günther, K. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness, trans. J. Farrell. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gutmann, A. and D. Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutmann, A. and D. Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. [1962] 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. [1983] 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. 1989. Morality and ethical life: does Hegel’s critique of Kant apply to discourse ethics? Northwestern University Law Review, 83, 38–53. Habermas, J. [1990] 1993. Morality, society, and ethics: an interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen. In Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Cronin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. [1991] 1993. Remarks on discourse ethics. In Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. C. Cronin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. [1992] 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. [1996] 1998. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Cronin and P. De Greif. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, C. 2007. Recognizing the passion in deliberation: toward a more democratic theory of deliberative democracy. Hypatia, 22, 81–95. Hardin, R. 1982. Collective Action. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Held, V. 1970. The Public Interest and Individual Interests. New York: Basic Books. Johnson, J. 1991. Habermas on strategic and communicative action. Political Theory, 19, 181–201. Johnson, J. 1998. Arguing for democracy: some skeptical considerations. In J. Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahneman, D. and A. Tversky. 1979. Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263–91. Kant, I. [1781] 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Self-interest in deliberative democracy   173 Midgaard, K. 1980. On the significance of language and a richer concept of rationality. In L. Lewin and E. Vedung (eds), Politics as Rational Action. Dordrecht: Reidel. Miller, D. 1992. Deliberative democracy and social choice. Political Studies, 40, 54–67. Nagel, J. 1975. A Descriptive Analysis of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nagel, T. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. 1991. Equality and Partiality. New York: Oxford University Press. Nino, C. S. 1996. The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nozick, R. 1972. Coercion. In Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th series. Oxford: Blackwell. Nozick, R. 1989. The Examined Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Olson, M. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pettit, P. 2001. A Theory of Freedom. Oxford: Blackwell. Pettit, P. 2003. Deliberative democracy, the discursive dilemma, and republican theory. In J. Fishkin and P. Laslett (eds), Debating Deliberative Democracy. Philosophy, Politics and Society, 7th series. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pettit, P. 2006. Depoliticizing democracy. In S. Besson and J. L. Marti (eds), Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pitkin, H. 1981. Justice: on relating public and private. Political Theory, 9, 27–52. Przeworski, A. 1998. Deliberation and ideological domination. In Jon Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raiffa, H. 1982. The Art and Science of Negotiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rescher, N. 1987. Ethical Idealism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sanders, L. M. 1997. Against deliberation. Political Theory, 25, 347–76. Scanlon, T. M. 1982. Contractualism and utilitarianism. In A. Sen and B. Williams (eds), Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, C. [1926] 1988. On the contradiction between parliamentarism and democracy. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 2nd edn, trans. E. Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt, C. [1928] 1957. Verfassungslehre, 3rd edn. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. Shapiro, I. 1999. Enough of deliberation: politics is about interests and power. In Stephen Macedo (ed.), Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement. New York: Oxford University Press. Shell, G. R. 2000. Bargaining for Advantage. New York: Penguin. Stokes, S. C. 1998. Pathologies of deliberation. In Jon Elster (ed.), Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunstein, C. R. 1988. Beyond the republican revival. Yale Law Journal, 97, 1539–90. Sunstein, C. R. 1995. Incompletely theorized agreements. Harvard Law Review, 108, 1733–72. Sunstein, C. R. 1996. Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, D. F. 2008. Deliberative democratic theory and empirical political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 497–520. Thompson, L. L. 2005. The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, 3rd edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

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8 A systemic approach to deliberative democracy (2012)*† With James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson, and Mark E. Warren

The last several decades have seen growing agreement among political theorists and empirical political scientists that the legitimacy of a democracy depends in part on the quality of deliberation that informs citizens and their representatives. Until recently those who wanted to study and improve the quality of deliberation in democracies began with, basically, two strategies. One concentrated on deliberation in legislative bodies of all sorts and the campaigns that produce their members. The other strategy, not necessarily at odds with the first, addressed the design, promulgation, and empowerment of small deliberative initiatives in which citizens could deliberate under relatively favourable conditions. Both of these strategies, however, focused only on individual sites and not on the interdependence of sites within a larger system. Typically, the ideal has been cast in the image of the best possible single deliberative forum. Most empirical research on deliberative democracy, accordingly, has concentrated ‘either on a single episode of deliberation, as in one-­time group discussions, or on a continuing series with the same group or in the same type of institution’ (Thompson 2008: 213). Yet no single forum, however ideally constituted, could possess deliberative capacity sufficient to legitimate most of the decisions and policies that democracies adopt. To understand the larger goal of deliberation, we suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the study of individual institutions and processes to examine their interaction in the system as a whole. We recognize that most democracies are complex entities in which a wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work – including informal networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non-­profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, and the courts. We thus advocate what may be called a systemic approach to deliberative democracy.1 Thinking in terms of a system offers several advantages. First, a systemic approach allows us to think about deliberative democracy in large-­scale societal terms. A continual challenge for deliberative democracy theory has been the problem of scale. Face-­to-face deliberation happens only in small groups. Parliamentary deliberation is confined to those forms of deliberation organized by states or subnational units. In what sense can we say that whole societies, demoi, peoples, or even different communities deliberate together? A systemic approach

176   Deliberation and representation allows us to think productively and creatively about this question. It expands the scale of analysis beyond the individual site and allows us to think about deliberations that develop among and between the sites over time. The systemic approach does not dictate that we take a nation or large polity as our object of study. Schools and universities, hospitals, media, and other organizations can be understood along the lines offered by a deliberative system approach. But in allowing for the possibility of ratcheting up the scale and complexity of interrelations among the parts, this approach enables us to think about democratic decisions being taken in the context of a variety of deliberative venues and institutions, interacting together to produce a healthy deliberative system. Second, a systemic approach allows us to analyse the division of labour among parts of a system, each with its different deliberative strengths and weaknesses, and to conclude that a single part, which in itself may have low or even negative deliberative quality with respect to one of several deliberative ideals, may nevertheless make an important contribution to an overall deliberative system. For example, highly partisan rhetoric, even while violating some deliberative ideals such as mutual respect and accommodation, may nonetheless help to fulfil other deliberative ideals such as inclusion. In another example, serious discussions on European Union (EU)-wide matters take place mostly among elites, while the national media and, to a lesser degree, national politicians, organize the public debate on EU issues. Although the overall system is far from ideal epistemically, the elite discourse provides expertise, reasoned and informed mutual accommodation, and mutual respect, while the nationally instigated deliberation provides perspectives that might otherwise not be heard. By enhancing inclusion, the national media also increase the EU’s normative democratic legitimacy. Parts of a system may have relationships of complementarity or displacement. In a complementary relationship, two wrongs can make a right. Two venues, both with deliberative deficiencies, can each make up for the deficiencies of the other. Thus an institution that looks deliberatively defective when considered only on its own can look beneficial in a systemic perspective. Conversely, an institution that looks deliberatively exemplary on its own, such as a well-­ designed mini-­public, can look less beneficial in a systemic perspective when it displaces other useful deliberative institutions, such as partisan or social movement bodies. In another instance of displacement, legislatures are less likely to take their deliberative responsibilities seriously when a constitutional court is treated as the primary deliberative forum (Gutmann and Thompson 1996: 45–7; see also Dryzek 2010: 13). Third, a systemic approach introduces into the analysis large contextual issues and broad systemic inadequacies that have an impact on individual sites and shape the possibilities of effective deliberation. Once we identify what a deliberative system should accomplish, we can identify gaps in a system’s deliberative quality. For example, a deliberative system may fail to include in a policy deliberation individuals with legitimate claims for inclusion, owing to legal exclusion

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   177 or to deficiencies of education, information, or transparency. Or a system may rely excessively on parliamentary processes that frame debate but fail to make space for deliberation, leading to decisions of relatively poor quality. Even if a legislature has a high quality and-­well informed debate about, for example, reducing the deficit, the deliberation looks less adequate in the context of a system that permits highly unequal campaign contributions or enables the media to frame the issue by highlighting the dangers of deficits with little mention of the harm that cuts would do to the least advantaged citizens in society or to fiscal stimuli aimed at stemming recession. A systemic approach allows us to see more clearly where a system might be improved, and recommend institutions or other innovations that could supplement the system in areas of weakness. In the next section we lay out, in general and programmatic terms, what a systemic approach to deliberation entails, and discuss in more detail the benefits of this approach. While we may at times favour certain directions and theoretical orientations over others, we want to stress that the approach we outline could be taken up by any number of theories of deliberative democracy. Like any useful paradigm, deliberative democracy theory contains many theoretical variations, competing articulations, and contested definitions. Our aim is to articulate an overarching approach to deliberation that could signal a new and we think exciting direction for deliberative theory, but which is not itself a free-­standing theory of deliberative democracy. We take up in a separate section three elements of a democratic system that are usually not considered part of the exercise of deliberative democracy, and reconsider their place in terms of the system. We evaluate experts, pressure and protest, and the partisan media [all omitted in this edited chapter], asking whether they do or could enhance the quality of deliberation in the system. We present these three only as examples of the sorts of directions a full systemic approach to deliberative democracy might take. Nevertheless, we think that they represent central elements in almost any deliberative democratic system. They illustrate particularly well the advantages of a systemic approach, because all three are often assumed to be incompatible with deliberative democracy and do in fact create tensions with it. In a final section we identify five potential pathologies that threaten any deliberative system [also omitted in this edited chapter]. Although some of these pathologies have their analogues at the level of individual sites, they are fundamentally problems inherent in a system and most clearly discerned through a broad systemic approach.

What is a deliberative system? A system here means a set of distinguishable, differentiated, but to some degree interdependent parts, often with distributed functions and a division of labour, connected in such a way as to form a complex whole. It requires both differentiation and integration among the parts. It requires some functional division of labour, so that some parts do work that others cannot do as well. And it requires some relational interdependence, so that a change in one component will bring

178   Deliberation and representation about changes in some others. A deliberative system is one that encompasses a talk-­based approach to political conflict and problem-­solving – through arguing, demonstrating, expressing, and persuading. In a good deliberative system, persuasion that raises relevant considerations should replace suppression, oppression, and thoughtless neglect. Normatively, a systemic approach means that the system should be judged as a whole in addition to the parts being judged independently. We need to ask not only what good deliberation would be both in general and in particular settings, but also what a good deliberative system would entail. A systemic approach, in our view, does not require that every component have a function or that every component be interdependent with every other such that a change in one will automatically bring about a change in all others. If a component does contribute to a function, it is not necessary that the function be fulfilled optimally in one location, since in a deliberative system the same function maybe distributed across various subsystems. The concept as we apply it is not intended to be mechanistic; nor do we require a system to have clearly identifiable boundaries. Our point is that normatively, in the systemic approach the entire burden of decision-­making and legitimacy does not fall on one forum or institution but is distributed among different components in different cases. We expect that a highly functional deliberative system will be redundant or potentially redundant in interaction, so that when one part fails to play an important role another can fill in or evolve over time to fill in. Such a system will include checks and balances of various forms so that excesses in one part are checked by the activation of other parts of the system. We also envision systems that are dynamic rather than static. Thus it may be hard to predict in advance when or why some parts of the system will respond to certain forms of public opinion or represent certain interests and publics or certain kinds of values and procedures. It should not be surprising that a political system requires a division of labour. Political judgments are complex, and the system in which they are made should also be complex. Because political judgments involve so many factual contingencies and competing normative requirements, and because politics involves the alignments of will, both in concert and in opposition, among large numbers of citizens, it is virtually impossible to conceive of a political system that does not divide the labours of judgment and then recombine them in various ways. The concept of a system highlights these necessities. A deliberative systemic approach also suggests looking for ‘deliberative ecologies’, in which different contexts facilitate some forms of deliberation and avenues for information while others facilitate different forms and avenues. Partisanship and information heuristics or shortcuts are usually contrasted with deliberation and seen as among the most serious obstacles to good quality deliberation. But a deliberative systemic approach asks when and where there is an appropriate ecological niche for partisan campaigns and heuristics. Because legislators and citizens in their busy lives will tend to rely on partisan organization and heuristics to guide their decisions, a good deliberative system will draw

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   179 from the virtues of these individually deliberatively deficient devices but guard in various ways against their vices. Sometimes associations that are internally non-­deliberative and homogeneous will, for that very reason, be able to assert a coherent public position and sharpen a public debate. Sometimes particular stages of sequences in a political process will embody a useful division of labour, with relatively open deliberations at the beginning narrowing to a focus as the point of decision is reached. Sometimes arguments made in one part of the system will be tested in another part. Such mechanisms enable a good deliberative system to be self-­correcting. Here are three examples of how partisanship may appear to undermine deliberation at a micro level but not at a systems level: •

•

•

The British House of Commons engages in partisan heckling that violates many standards of good deliberation. Yet that very culture of heckling provides incentives to poke holes in the reasoning of a Government that otherwise makes all the major decisions and rules by strict and overriding majority. It may also function to frame and sharpen broader public deliberations. Some politically partisan media are of very low deliberative quality, but in conjunction with other media of equally low deliberative quality bring out information and perspectives that television stations or newspapers aiming at the middle of the road do not raise or address. Activist interactions in social movement enclaves are often highly partisan, closed to opposing ideas, and disrespectful of opponents. Yet the intensity of interaction and even the exclusion of opposing ideas in such enclaves create the fertile, protected hothouses sometimes necessary to generate counter-­hegemonic ideas. These ideas then may play powerful roles in the broader deliberative system, substantively improving an eventual democratic decision.

A systemic approach can also illuminate how partisanship that is functional in one part of the system becomes dysfunctional when it spreads to another part of the system that requires other virtues. For example, the attitudes and practices of campaigning – emphasizing the sharp differences with opponents, refusing to find common ground or look for ways to compromise, and concentrating on defeating rather than cooperating with opponents – are not deliberative but may be appropriate, even necessary, in a campaign. Yet as campaigns become ‘permanent’ and their practices come to dominate the institutions of governing, they can overpower the deliberative practices that promote desirable change, thus creating a bias in the system in favour of the status quo (Gutmann and Thompson 2010). To clarify the systemic approach for democracies, we need to consider the boundaries of the system, the functions within the system, and the standards by which the system should be evaluated.

180   Deliberation and representation

Boundaries of the system What are the boundaries of a deliberative system? In our current analysis, these boundaries define a decision-­making arena that is at least loosely democratic. It is, of course, possible to think about a deliberative system independently of democracy. Authoritarian regimes have deliberation. Much deliberation goes on within the Catholic Church. Scientific communities could perhaps be said to have deliberative systems. But because we focus here on deliberative democratic systems, we begin with systems that are broadly defined by the norms, practices, and institutions of democracy. Deliberative systems include, roughly speaking, four main arenas: the binding decisions of the state (both in the law itself and its implementation); activities directly related to preparing for those binding decisions; informal talk related to those binding decisions;2 and arenas of formal or informal talk related to decisions on issues of common concern that are not intended for binding decisions by the state.3 When Jürgen Habermas (1996) employed the spatial metaphor of centre/ periphery – the centre being the place of binding decisions (will-­formation) and the periphery being the place of less formal deliberation (opinion-­ formation) – his deliberative system took the modern nation-­state as its subject and made the legislature its centre. Many subsequent scholars have done the same, conceiving of the deliberative system as rings around the state.4 By contrast, our understanding of deliberative systems includes both informal decisions by accretion and binding decisions that take place outside the state. It goes beyond the boundaries of the nation-­state to include international, transnational, and supranational institutions, and extends as well to societal and institutional (e.g. corporate) decisions that do not involve the state. We take the state and its legislatures as the ultimate decision-­makers in a polity, but not as the centre to which everything is aimed in the polity’s deliberative system. It is true that, to the degree that any given constitution and set of international agreements permit, the state can in theory make binding decisions in all issue areas. We also recognize the state’s central role in solving human collective action problems by making and implementing binding decisions with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Moreover, the state has a unique role to play in constituting deliberative systems. Liberal-democratic constitutional states create spaces of deliberation within political institutions such as legislatures and courts. They also enable deliberation within society by protecting free speech and association. They encourage deliberation by underwriting institutions in which deliberation is itself constitutive, such as universities and scientific research establishments. But even though states play a central and often constitutive role in deliberative systems, not all efficacious and important parts in the system lead to the state. Nor is the state the terminus of all deliberation. For example, our institutional demarcation of the deliberative system includes societal decisions, many of which have only a very indirect impact on state legislation.

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   181 A map of nodes in the deliberative system would reveal many nodes, with multiple forms of communication among them. Those nodes would include nation-­state bodies at different levels of government and with their different legislative houses, administrative agencies, the military, and the staffs of all of these; international bodies at different levels and their staffs; multinational corporations and local businesses; epistemic communities; foundations; political parties and factions within those parties; party campaigns and other partisan forums; religious bodies; schools; universities with their departments, fields, and disciplinary associations; unions, interest groups, voluntary associations and non-­governmental organizations (NGOs) both ad hoc and long-­standing; social movements with both their enclaves and their broader participation; the media including the internet, blogs, social media, interactive media, books, magazines, newspapers, film, and television; informal talk among politically active or less active individuals whether powerful or marginalized; and forms of subjugated and local knowledge that rarely surface for access by others without some opening in the deliberative system.

Functions of the deliberative system In the systemic approach, we assess institutions according to how well they perform the functions necessary to promote the goals of the system. Theorists disagree about the goals of deliberation within a democracy, and thus they may not agree about the most important functions of a deliberative system. However, we believe that the system approach can accommodate a variety of functions and goals, and its value does not depend on resolving these disagreements. For our purposes, three functions that are relatively non-­controversial in their most general articulation can serve to illustrate how a system approach can be applied. We identify epistemic, ethical, and democratic functions. The epistemic function of a deliberative system is to produce preferences, opinions, and decisions that are appropriately informed by facts and logic and are the outcome of substantive and meaningful consideration of relevant reasons. A healthy deliberative system is one in which relevant considerations are brought forth from all corners, aired, discussed, and appropriately weighed. Locations in which this weighing occurs may or may not manifest publicity, although the absence of publicity often limits deliberative capacity. Because the topics of these deliberations are issues of common concern, epistemically well grounded preferences, opinions, and decisions must be informed by, and take into consideration, the preferences and opinions of fellow citizens. In addition to the epistemic reasons for listening to what others have to say, there are also ethical reasons. A primary ethical function of the system is to promote mutual respect among citizens. Prudentially, mutual respect helps keep the deliberative system running. It serves as the lubricant of effective communication. Ethically, mutual respect among human beings is a good in itself. Mutual respect is also an ethical requirement among democratic citizens. The moral basis for mutual respect in democracy is grounded on the idea that citizens

182   Deliberation and representation should be treated ‘not merely as objects of legislation, as passive subjects to be ruled, but as autonomous agents who take part in the governance of their society, directly or through their representatives’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 3). This moral basis is not controversial, although how mutual respect should be interpreted in practice may be. It is more contestable than the epistemic function of simply improving informational quality and learning about others’ preferences, opinions, and decisions. Theorists and citizens alike disagree about what mutual respect means, what constitutes its successful achievement and how weighty it is compared with other considerations. We stress mutual respect, however, because, even more than other ethical considerations, it is intrinsically a part of deliberation. To deliberate with another is to understand the other as a self-­authoring source of reasons and claims. To fail to grant to another the moral status of authorship is, in effect, to remove oneself from the possibility of deliberative influence. By the same token, being open to being moved by the words of another is to respect the other as a source of reasons, claims, and perspectives. Other goods are closely linked with mutual respect. Mutual respect, for example, implies non-­domination, because relationships of domination have already short­circuited mutual respect and, with this, deliberative influence. A final function of deliberation, not completely separable from the first two, is to promote an inclusive political process on terms of equality. We call this the democratic function. The inclusion of multiple and plural voices, interests, concerns, and claims on the basis of feasible equality is not simply an ethic added to democratic deliberation; it is the central element of what makes deliberative democratic processes democratic. Who gets to be at the table affects the scope and content of the deliberation. For those excluded, no deliberative democratic legitimacy is generated. In short, a well functioning democratic deliberative system must not systematically exclude any citizens from the process without strong justification that could be reasonably accepted by all citizens, including the excluded. On the positive side, it ought also actively to promote and facilitate inclusion and the equal opportunities to participate in the system.5 The successful realization of all three of these functions promotes the legitimacy of democratic decision-­making by ensuring reasonably sound decisions in the context of mutual respect among citizens and an inclusive process of collective choice. Legitimacy in this strong sense maximizes the chances that people who share a common fate will agree, willingly, to the terms of their common cooperation. Of course, these different functions can come into conflict within any democratically deliberative system, and there will be controversy about their relative weights. Some deliberative democrats will assign, for example, much higher priority to mutual respect than to the aim of producing epistemically sound decisions. Normatively, we endorse all three overarching functions, recognizing their potential conflicts and expecting that many conflicts will have to be worked out through deliberation on a provisional basis in any given context. A systemic approach allows for a nuanced application of these functions, recognizing that some will be more important than others in different parts of the system.

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   183

Defects in the deliberative system The ideal of a deliberative system, then, is a loosely coupled group of institutions and practices that together perform the three functions we have identified – seeking truth, establishing mutual respect, and generating inclusive, egalitarian decision-­making. In this section, we describe five pathologies that keep political institutional arrangements from approaching more closely the deliberative ideal in the system as whole: tight-­coupling; decoupling; institutional domination; social domination; and entrenched partisanship. One virtue of a deliberative system is that failures in one institution can be compensated for in another part. When an expert community is too beholden to some conception of disease or risk, for example, citizen-­organizations or journalists can bring latent experiences and etiologies to their attention (Corburn 2005; Epstein 1996; Brown 1992). But when the parts of a deliberative system are too tightly coupled to one another, this self-­corrective quality is lost. Think of tight coupling as the problem of group-­think writ large, at institutional scale.6 Perhaps the most familiar experiences of dramatic deliberative system failure from this pathology arise at the nation-­state level when some public issue is driven by nationalism or xenophobia and those sentiments begin to drive individuals who inhabit all of the locations in a deliberative system. In the decision of the US Government to intern Japanese-­Amer­icans during World War II, for example, what we now believe to be the force of the better argument did not prevail because that argument could find no institutional point of purchase in the deliberative system of that time and place. A second defect in the deliberative system arises when the parts of the system become decoupled from one another in the sense that good reasons arising from one part fail to penetrate the others. Ideally, one would expect the large parts of a deliberative system to converge over time to accept good reasons, at least provisionally, even as each part is open to different considerations in the process of converging. For example, many industrialized democracies now face difficult questions about how best to address their fiscal crises – whether to increase the tax burden, who should suffer that burden, and which public services and social welfare protections to reduce. Proposals and reasons for those proposals emanate from many parts of the deliberative system in these societies – from legislatures expert commissions, the executive branch, the courts, foundations, universities, public opinion, and even citizen deliberations specifically structured around this topic. In the ideal, through processes of convergence, mutual influence, and mutual adjustment, each of these parts would consider reasons and proposals generated in the other parts. It may be the case, however, that some parts are particularly resistant to arguments from other parts. Experts, legislative committees, and citizens in the public sphere, for example, may listen to reasons more broadly, while legislators who have not worked on the issue respond primarily to parochial interests – a constituency’s pet project or a mobilized but extreme minority opposed to increasing taxes no matter what the costs. Another example of deliberative

184   Deliberation and representation decoupling is the resistance of some legislators and interest groups in the US to data from the scientific community on global warming. Third, a deliberative system also fails when one of its parts, whether deliberative or not, dominates all of the others This problem of institutional domination (or in a weaker form, undue influence) appears most starkly in authoritarian societies where a state, party, or leader controls not only the government but also the media and even civil-­society organizations. Even in democratic systems, however, institutional domination can arise, as in Silvio Berlusconi’s corporate control of major mass media outlets when he was prime minister. A fourth and related pathology of, the deliberative system is social domination. It arises when a particular social interest or social class controls or exerts undue influence over many parts of the deliberative systems. Those who possess and control wealth, for example, exercise disproportionate influence in most, if not all, capitalist democracies. From the perspective of the deliberative system, this situation is especially problematic if the effect of wealth is to shift the balance of reasons for laws and policies at multiple sites in the deliberative system – through, for example, financial support for political campaigns, private ownership of concentrated media, financial backing that tilts the ecology of secondary associations and interest groups (Walzer 2002), and even financing university-­based research. Finally, the deliberative system suffers when citizens, legislators, and administrators are so divided, by ideology, ethnicity, religion, or any other cleavage, that they will not listen to positions other than those emanating from their side. We have made clear above that not every part of the deliberative system need itself be deliberative in this respect. Zealous advocacy, protest, and partisan journalism can all contribute to the quality and depth of deliberation in the system as a whole. These political activities enhance deliberation by offering new reasons or making it more likely that old reasons are considered in an equitable way. But reaping these benefits requires an audience that itself possesses the deliberative disposition to weigh reasons and proposals. That audience might be citizens in the mass public, legislators, bureaucrats, or all three. Yet if these audiences are themselves zealously polarized or otherwise non-­deliberative, the arguments fall on deaf ears or reach only the already convinced. Acts of civil disobedience contribute to deliberation by causing an audience (e.g. the public in segregation-­era America) to reconsider the justice of its positions (e.g. segregation).7 If that audience is unreceptive to reasons because it has already made up its mind or has decided not to think more about the question, civil disobedience will not advance public deliberation.

Conclusion From the beginning deliberative theory has had the ambition to provide a normative and empirical account of the democratic process as a whole. The development of such an account has proceeded incrementally. Much of the work during the first phase focused on developing the ideal of deliberation –

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   185 its meaning, justification, and responses to theoretical criticisms. Particularly important at this stage was laying out the idea of legitimacy at the core of deliberative democracy. Many theorists formulated the deliberative ideal on the foundational requirement that legitimate decisions be those that ‘everyone could accept’ or at least ‘not reasonably reject’. Above all, any conception of deliberative democracy must be organized around an ideal of political justification requiring free public reasoning of equal citizens (Cohen 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Habermas 1995). This phase emphasized what might be called ideal proceduralism as a ‘regulative’ ideal (that is, one that recognizably cannot be achieved fully in practice but sets a standard at which to aim). A second phase – a ‘coming of age’ – saw the proliferation of empirical studies and practical applications of the theory (Bohman 1998). Ideal proceduralism had encouraged thinking of the standards for deliberative legitimacy through the image of an ideal deliberative forum. Thus in this second phase, many deliberative democrats started with this image as they tried to think about the ideal in concrete terms and seek approximations in the real world. Activists, theorists, and government officials collaborated on introducing into democratic politics many new varieties of deliberative forums, including citizens’ juries, consensus councils, people’s parliaments, citizens’ assemblies, and other relatively representative ‘mini-­publics’ designed to make possible deliberation within some approximation of a microcosm of the citizenry (see e.g. Fung 2003). This practical and empirical turn opened the door for empirical political scientists to study a variety of settings in which deliberative democracy might work well or badly (Thompson 2008). The empirical studies began to address issues such as the conditions that enable or constrain good deliberative processes. As we have noted, however, most of these empirical studies addressed discrete instances of deliberation, investigated with little if any attention to their relationship to the system as a whole (Thompson 2008). This limitation is understandable. The challenges of conducting research on discrete cases is formidable enough without attempting to relate the findings to deliberation in other parts of the political system, let alone to non-­deliberative practices in the system. Ultimately, however, none of these deliberative processes can be studied adequately in isolation, apart from their broader, systemic context. Legislative forums, deliberative mini-­publics, and other communicative venues have unique and sometimes central roles in deliberative systems, but no single institution can meet all of the demands of deliberative democracy at once. It takes a study of deliberation beyond specific arenas, however important they may be, to understand how each venue is influenced by interactions across the various parts of the deliberative system as a whole. The literature has now reached a point that makes it possible and desirable to begin a third phase, and to try to make good on the original promise of a comprehensive account. Deliberative theory is ultimately concerned with the democratic process as a whole, and therefore with the relationships of its parts to the whole. Deliberative democracy is more than a sum of deliberative moments.

186   Deliberation and representation We have proposed here a systemic approach that is intended to guide the progress in this third phase of work on deliberative democracy. We have shown how an analysis of deliberative functions – epistemic, ethical, and democratic, each contributing in different ways to the legitimacy of the system – can illuminate not only the more familiar and obviously deliberative practices in a system, but also the value or disvalue of non-­deliberative practices that have often been considered antithetical to deliberative democracy. We have considered only a few of those practices as illustrations, and have not attempted at all to examine empirically the conditions under which they may promote or impede the goals of the deliberative system as a whole. Nor have we explored in detail the ways in which the various deliberative functions may interact with one another. But we have shown how the systemic approach can serve as a framework for a wide-­ranging and fruitful normative and empirical study of the democratic process from a deliberative perspective.

Notes * This was written in a process of deliberative co-­authorship led by Jane Mansbridge, who prepared the first draft from multiple contributions and oversaw the many revisions. Although each co-­author, if writing independently, would no doubt present the arguments and analyses somewhat differently, the chapter represents a direction of thought to which each co-­author has substantially contributed and which all collectively endorse. † This chapter is a heavily edited version of Jane Mansbridge, et al., “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy,” in John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge, eds., Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–26. 1 Habermas suggested a broad approach, compatible with a systemic one in his earlier writing. In 1996 he advanced a ‘two-­track’ view combining a relatively ‘wild’ sphere of deliberation among ‘weak’ publics with more formal legislative deliberation. For a recent view, see Habermas (2006). On deliberative systems, see Mansbridge (1999) introducing the term and concept of a ‘deliberative system’, Goodin (2005) on ‘distributed deliberation’, Parkinson (2006) on ‘legitimacy across multiple deliberative moments and the wider deliberative system’, Hendriks (2006) on an ‘integrated deliberative system’, Bohman (2007) on ‘institutional differentiation’ with ‘multiple and intersecting processes of public deliberation’, Krause (2008) on the ‘different types of constraint on deliberation in each domain’, Thompson (2008) on the ‘allocation of deliberation’, Dryzek (2009) on ‘deliberative capacity’ in the system, on the ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative theory (in a book [2010] largely on the deliberative system), and Neblo (2010) on elements of a deliberative system working together to ‘serve the larger deliberative standard’. 2 This kind of talk is often described as informal ‘political’ talk (Searing et al. 2007), talk about ‘politics’ (Neblo 2010), talk about ‘public issues’ (Chambers 2012; Jacobs et al. 2009), or ‘private talk that is recognizably political’ (Parkinson 2012), our emphases. 3 The definition of ‘common concern’ in these non-­state arenas is contested. Mansbridge (1999) defined it as encompassing ‘issues the public ought to discuss’, thus making the contest at its heart explicit, 4 E.g. Searing et al. (2007); Hendriks (2006), and to some degree Neblo (2010). 5 See Goodin (2007). Including affected interests may involve formal representation and new political rights.

Systemic approach to deliberative democracy   187 6 See Janis (1982) for small group ‘group-­think’. 7 See discussion of civil disobedience in Rawls (1971); Dworkin (1985).

References Bohman, James. 1998. The coming of age of deliberative democracy. Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (4): 400–25. Bohman, James. 2007. Democracy across borders: from demos to demoi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Phil. 1992. Popular epidemiology and toxic waste contamination: lay and professional ways of knowing. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33 (3): 267–281. Chambers, Simone. 2012. Deliberation and mass democracy. In Deliberative Systems, ed. John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Joshua. 1996. Procedure and substance in deliberative democracy. In Democracy and difference, edited by S. Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corburn, Jason. 2005. Street science: community knowledge and environmental health justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dryzek, John. 2009. Democratization as deliberative capacity building. Comparative Political Studies 42 (11): 1379–1402. Dryzek, John. 2010. Foundations and frontiers of deliberative governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1985. Civil disobedience and nuclear protest. In A matter of principle, edited by R. Dworkin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fung, Archon. 2003. Survey article: Recipes for public spheres: eight institutional design choices and their consequences. Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (3): 338–367. Goodin, Robert. 2005. Sequencing deliberative moments. Acta Politica 40: 182–196. Goodin, Robert. 2007. Enfranchising all affected interests, and its alternatives. Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (1): 40–68. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2004. Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2010. The mindsets of political compromise. Perspectives on Politics 8 (4): 1125–1138. Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. Reconciliation through the public use of reason: remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 109–31. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Translated by W. Rehg. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. Political communication in media society: does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research. Communication Theory 16 (4): 411–426. Hendriks, Carolyn. 2006. Integrated deliberation: reconciling civil society’s dual role in deliberative democracy. Political Studies 54 (3): 486–508. Jacobs, Lawrence, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X Delli Carpini. 2009. Talking together: public deliberation and political participation in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

188   Deliberation and representation Janis, Irving L. 1982. Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Krause, Sharon. 2008. Civil passions: moral sentiment and democratic deliberation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. Everyday talk in the deliberative system. In Deliberative politics: essays on ‘Democracy and disagreement’, edited by S. Macedo. New York: Oxford University Press. 211–239. Neblo, Michael. 2010. A research agenda for deliberative consultation on health care and bioethics. In Harvard Bioethics Conference. Cambridge, MA. Parkinson, John. 2006. Deliberating in the real world: problems of legitimacy in deliberative democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parkinson, John. 2012. Judging macrodeliberative quality. In Deliberative Systems, ed. John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Searing, Donald D., Frederick Solt, Pamela Johnston, and Ivor Crewe. 2007. Public discussion in the deliberative system: does it make better citizens? British Journal of Political Science 37 (4): 587–618. Thompson, D. F. 2008. Deliberative democratic theory and empirical political science. Annual Review of Political Science 11: 497–520. Walzer, Michael. 2002. Equality and civil society. In Alternative conceptions of civil society, edited by S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 34–49.

Part III

Legitimate coercion

9 On the importance of getting things done (2012)*†

Trend plus inaction equals drift. When a trend has external causes and no one can act to intervene, that inaction leads to drift—the unimpeded trajectory of change. Drift in the United States produces the domination of Amer­ican democracy by business interests. Drift in international decisions produces global warming. Specific institutional designs for government such as the US separation of powers can cause the inaction that facilitates drift. More fundamentally, ingrained patterns of thinking can cause inaction. Here I argue that the long and multifaceted resistance tradition in the West contributes to inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion. By contrast, a political theory of democratic action explicitly recognizes that solving collective action problems requires lawgiving, and that lawgiving requires coercion—getting people to do what they would not otherwise do through the threat of sanction and the use of force. The work of democracy is to make that coercion somewhat more legitimate. Thus, while a theory of democratic action should incorporate resistance, it should not—and cannot—be driven by resistance. In the United States and on the planet, we now face problems vaster than any that James Madison conceived, involving interdependence on a global scale and potential catastrophe for unborn generations. Serious attempts to deal with these problems continue to be stymied, in part by a view of democracy that is in many of its strands a theory of individual and collective resistance, not a theory of collective action.

Dahl’s two impediments to democracy: the unexamined causal link On the occasion of the first Madison Award, the recipient, Robert Dahl, gave a lecture now lost, leading me to begin with a lecture he gave two years earlier, “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States.” In this lecture Dahl identified two significant impediments to democracy: First, the “country’s commitment to only a modest interference by government in the conduct of corporate capitalism” (Dahl 1977, 3). Second, the framers’ deliberate creation of “a framework of government that was carefully designed to impede and even prevent the operation of majority rule” (5).

192   Legitimate coercion Despite identifying these two impediments, Dahl did not point out that they were causally related. When the power of corporate capitalism is increasing, for whatever reasons, a structure of government designed to “impede or prevent” action that might stop or reverse this change becomes a contributory cause of the trend’s continuation. In addition, what neither Dahl nor his audience knew when he offered this diagnosis was that both problems were about to get worse—very much worse. This intensification of the two impediments to democracy that he identified began in the mid-­1970s, when he gave this lecture and accepted the Madison Award, and it has continued ever since. Consider Dahl’s first impediment to democracy, the US “commitment to only a modest interference by government in the conduct of corporate capitalism.” This commitment had, in his view, the consequence “particularly adverse to democracy” that the ensuing economic order generated great differences “in political resources, skills, and incentives within the demos itself ” (8). He reasoned that a country committed to procedural democracy must either place effective limits on the extent to which economic resources can be converted into political resources, or else ensure that economic resources are much more equally distributed than they are in the United States at present. (16, emphasis mine) He thought that efforts to keep economic resources from being converted into political resources had “largely failed.” Thus, he was convinced: “It is time— long past time—to consider the other approach” of distributing the economic resources more equally. “The question of distribution of wealth and income,” he concluded, should be “high on the agenda of national politics” (16). Yet even as Dahl spoke, the conditions that might have led to a more equal distribution of wealth and income were changing around him. Many of these developments had a turning point in the 1970s, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson show in their recent book, Winner-­Take-All Politics. In 1976, when Dahl gave his lecture, the richest 1% of the Amer­ican families received 9% of the total pretax income of the country. This was the inequality that Dahl thought needed redressing. By 2007, that top 1% was getting not 9%, but 24% of the nation’s pretax income. The very top 0.1% was getting more than 12% of the total income.1 The capacity of the wealthy to convert their money into political influence has also increased greatly since the 1970s, both because the political system needs more money and because it can get more money. Electoral campaigns needed more money after the mid-­1970s because television advertising became more necessary, high-­quality TV ads became more expensive, polling became more frequent, and consulting became more hi-­tech. Most importantly, electoral success is positional. What counts is not how much you can spend but how much you can spend relative to your opponent. Campaigns are like an arms race. In the

On the importance of getting things done   193 ten years between 1974 and 1984, real campaign expenditures by the Democratic and Republican candidates for the House more than doubled. Between 1974 and 2010, they more than quintupled.2 Lobbying has experienced a parallel arms race since the mid-­1970s. If I have two skilled lobbyists and my competitor hires three, I need at least three, if not four or six, to keep my edge (Reich 2007). The amount spent on lobbying has nearly doubled in just the last decade (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 114). Some of that money only increases the positional advantage of one corporation vis-­à-vis another. But some of it increases the positional advantage of corporate capital vis-­à-vis other interest groups, such as consumers and workers. In the decade after Dahl spoke, “corporate capital” also grew far stronger organizationally. Between 1974 and 1980, the Chamber of Commerce doubled its membership and tripled its budget. The number of firms with registered lobbyists in Washington grew by a factor of 14. The number of corporate PACs quadrupled. The expenditures of corporate PACS in congressional races increased nearly fivefold between the late 1970s and the late 1980s.3 In general, the number of organizations active in the Washington pressure system took a significant leap in the 1990s, growing by 47% from 1991 to 2001 and by 19% in the five-­year period from 2001 to 2006.4 This money had effects. Larry Bartels, author of the tellingly titled Unequal Democracy, has calculated that the Republican advantage in financing presidential campaigns added more than 3% to the Republican presidential vote in the 1972 and 1976 elections, and almost 7% in the next three elections (Bartels 2008, table 4.11). In 1976, when Dahl gave his lecture, the three main Republican Party groups outspent their Democratic equivalents by about 3 to 1. Ten years later, they were outspending the Democrats by 5 to 1. When the Democrats caught up, they did so in part through an appeal to a particular sector of corporate capital—the financial sector. Hacker and Pierson report that in the 2007–2008 election cycle, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “raised four times as much from Wall Street as its GOP counterpart did.” Growing financial dependence on Wall Street since the 1970s encouraged Democrats to support repeal of regulations on the financial industry, to protect hedge-­ fund managers’ incomes, and to roll back stock option reform.5 The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 has made the power of corporations even greater. Since the 1970s, technological advances such as standardized containerization, cheaper air transport, fiber-­optic cables, and the Internet have also reduced the costs of doing business overseas and importing overseas products (Reich 2007). As it became easier for business to threaten both unions and government with exit, corporate power increased. Amer­ican labor unions also suffered a turning-­point defeat in 1978, just months before Dahl received the Madison award. Despite a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, the unions lost their last major attempt to reform labor law—in large part because of Dahl’s two impediments to democratic action. Business outspent labor 3 to 1, and a filibuster

194   Legitimate coercion prevented action in the Senate. Since then, National Labor Relations Board sanctions against businesses attempting to prevent labor organizing have dramatically weakened. As corporate power has increased, the power of its major organized opponent has declined.6 Finally, in the decades after 1975, as the financial sector succeeded in rolling back the regulations adopted in the 1930s, the big banks grew and became “too big to fail.” Since the mid-­1970s, these forces have produced cumulative feedback effects. Political victories for corporate capital create greater inequalities in resources, which in turn lead to further political victories. The effects of these trends have extended far beyond what Dahl imagined when he warned against the first impediment to democracy in the United States, the “country’s commitment to only a modest interference by government in the conduct of corporate capitalism.”7 The second impediment to democracy that Dahl identified— the system of deadlock embedded in the US constitution—has also gotten far worse since he spoke. The structure and mores of the Senate have evolved since the mid-­1970s from more “relational” interactions (Wawro and Schickler 2010, 299) to more “individualist” ones (Sinclair 2002, 244). At the same time the political parties have become increasingly polarized. As a result, the number and forms of obstruction, including filibusters and threats to filibuster, have skyrocketed.8 Dahl had often argued against the many veto points in the US constitutional system, perhaps most forcefully in his 1956 Preface to Democratic Theory, a work that inspired James McGregor Burns’s 1963 Deadlock of Democracy. But he was unaware when he spoke both of how much worse that system would become and of how closely his two impediments were entwined. Deadlock, James McGregor Burns pointed out, produces “drift”—the unimpeded trajectory of any externally caused phenomenon. Hacker and Pierson make this point central to the analysis in Winner Take All Politics. When external conditions—in this case the combination of increasing business organization and lobbying capacity with union decline and globalization—produce a set of trends— in this case toward increasing economic and political inequality—political deadlock does not preserve the status quo. Rather, it preserves the momentum of exogenous change. Dahl’s second impediment leads directly to his first. Political stasis has the same result on a global scale. When external conditions produce trends such as global warming and nuclear proliferation, political stasis does not preserve the status quo. Instead, stasis allows the forces that created the problem to make it worse. Many Amer­ican political scientists have suggested possible cures for the increasing political inequality in the United States and the increasing stasis in Washington. These proposals include higher taxes on the very wealthy, campaign finance reform, ending the TV arms race through regulation, delegating redistricting to independent commissions and changing the filibuster rules. Although such proposals, and the macro-­political changes they might effect, are manifestly important, I do not comment on them here.

On the importance of getting things done   195 Instead I want to focus on the impediments I see in western, particularly Amer­ican, ideas about democracy and relatedly, on impediments in our political theory. In some important strands of contemporary political theory, a stress on resistance plays into the dynamic of stasis in governing and thus—ironically, given the goals of the theorists—facilitates the drift toward greater concentration of corporate and financial power.

The resistance tradition What I call the resistance tradition runs deep in western political thought. The separation of church and state in Christianity, attributed to Jesus in the Gospels and cemented later by Augustine, placed these two powers in potential opposition. When the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries set the material interests of the church against those of the emperor, the churchmen—who were then the intellectuals of Europe—developed a social contract theory from the implicit assumptions of various practices in Europe at the time. They framed that theory as one of resistance to the emperor. The earliest well-­enunciated version of social contract theory comes from the monk Manegold of Lautenbach in 1085, toward the beginning of the Investiture Controversy. He wrote of a king or emperor that … the people do not exalt him above themselves in order to grant him a free opportunity to exercise tyranny against them … [W]hen he who has been chosen for the coercion of the wicked and the defense of the upright has begun to foster evil [and] to destroy the good … he deservedly falls from the dignity entrusted to him…. [T]he people stand free from his lordship and subjection, when he has been evidently the first to break the compact for whose sake he was appointed[.] Manegold also argued, perhaps with some sardonic glee, that if the owner of some pigs should entrust his pigs … to someone for a fitting wage, and afterwards learned that the latter was not pasturing them but was stealing, slaughtering, and losing them, would he not remove him with reproaches from the care of the pigs, retaining also the promised wage? … [S]o certainly, for good reason, if [kings] break into the exercise of tyranny, … no fidelity or reverence ought to be paid them. ([1085] 1954, 165) Manegold’s formulation puts the people in the role of a principal, hiring an agent—the swineherd or king—to do a job for them and sacking the agent if he does a bad job. It also puts the people in a surveillance role, watching to see if their hired hand does a good job and suspecting that he might not. Social contract theory need not play a resistance role. When the Mayflower pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and signed a document to “covenant and

196   Legitimate coercion combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,” they did so to accomplish collective ends. Yet in western political theory the social contract became preeminently the centerpiece of a resistance tradition that would flower in the sixteenth century among Protestant writers and become a cornerstone of early liberal democracy. Resistance to the state became a deep part of Europe’s DNA. It played a founding role in the nascent understanding of democracy in the United States. The theory of the separation of powers—an integral part of Dahl’s second impediment—illustrates this metamorphosis. Aristotle had enunciated the idea that to govern well a polity needed the contributions of different kinds of government (by the best, by the few, and by the many), in a mixed polity with balance among the parts. By the sixteenth century, however, this formulation had evolved into Machiavelli’s suspicion-­based theory of the separation of powers, in which the role of each part is to “watch the other.” When Montesquieu elaborated this theory, he further developed its resistance aspect (rather than its balance aspect), arguing that the watching and checking function protected individual liberty. By the time Madison and the other framers absorbed the theory, the Aristotelian idea of a mixed government in which a little bit of this and a little bit of that produced the right balance for governing had evolved into a resistance idea—based on protecting each individual from state oppression. The theme of resistance to government resonates throughout Amer­ican political theory, from Madison through Thoreau and Emerson to the present day. George Kateb reminds us, for example, that Emerson saw democracy as “a device to limit rule, to neutralize legislation, … to chasten administration” (Kateb 1995, 190). In the last 30 years, some of the most exciting and engaging political theorists on both sides of the Atlantic have tapped into this strand in western political thought. In Amer­ican political thought, Benjamin Barber penned, in Strong Democracy, what I consider our generation’s most compelling call to common action. Yet Barber argued that political representation—which lies at the base of all democracies capable of far-­reaching action—is “incompatible with freedom” (Barber 1984, 146). Sheldon Wolin, a theorist of great stature, praised the “moments of commonality” in which individuals “concert their powers” and “collective power is used to promote or protect the wellbeing of the collectivity” (Wolin 1994, 24, 11). Yet he also concluded that such moments will be “episodic, rare” (11). In Wolin’s view “institutionalization marks the attenuation of democracy,” so that democracy can only be “a rebellious moment” (19, 23). More recently, Philip Pettit, who is deeply concerned with common action, nevertheless grounds his civic republicanism on “non-­domination”— institutionally “constraining the will of the powerful” both in the private realm through laws and norms and in the public realm through the separation of powers and other forms of making “law relatively resistant to majority will” (Pettit 1997, 173). The formal dispersal of power, with the many channels it gives citizens to contest decisions, is the institutional foundation for realizing non-­domination politically.

On the importance of getting things done   197 Michel Foucault’s evocations of resistance have inspired writers from James Scott to Judith Butler, as well as the larger movement represented by Chantal Mouffe, the early work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig, and others who see the essence of the political as agonism, or struggle—the antithesis of settled decision. Even Jürgen Habermas, whose deliberatively based theories have attracted sharp criticism from agonists, originally conceived the “public sphere” as a sphere of resistance to state domination in his seminal Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Resistance writing rightly underscores the importance of vigilance against overweening power. But the cumulative tendency of these constant warnings is to denigrate “good enough” government, oppose coercion in all its forms, and stress the illegitimate features of any actual instance of coercion at the expense of potentially legitimate features. Such warnings have played a particularly strong role in the United States, from the standard uncritical assessment of the separation of powers in civics texts to a generalized hostility to government action of any kind.

A theory of democratic action Let me suggest another approach, based on two premises. First, we need coercion to solve collective action problems. Second, there can be no such thing as fully legitimate coercion. Therefore we need theories that can guide public action and help improve democratic legitimacy incrementally. We can move toward the ideal of democratic legitimacy without discrediting every state that falls short of it. Resistance has an important place in any democracy, and at times the goal of democratic citizens should be stopping the state. But a theory of democratic action must also work to make institutions more and more democratically legitimate, while recognizing the good that can be accomplished by democratic coercion that is, at best, only imperfectly legitimate. Let me clarify my use of the terms “legitimate,” “power,” and “coercion.” By “legitimate” and “legitimacy” I mean normative democratic legitimacy, that is, the legitimacy of acting rightly according to democratic ideals. I do not mean sociological legitimacy, that is, legitimacy in the eyes of a public. By “power” I mean, in general, the actual or potential causal relation between the preferences or interests of an actor or set of actors and the probability of an outcome.9 This causal relation can work through the simple capacity to act (I turn on the light switch—my preferences cause the outcome). When the outcome requires other human beings, the causal relation can work through genuine persuasion on the merits. Neither of these is coercive power. By “coercion” or “coercive power” I mean the threat of sanction or the use of force. I do not view the words “coercion” or “coercive” as inherently negative. It is true that both coercion and the threat of sanction will always have a negative valence. Punishment would not be punishment if those being punished did not want to avoid it. But a relationship, for example between two people, may be better when the partners have equal capacity to sanction each other than when

198   Legitimate coercion neither has that capacity. When you care for someone, you give that person the capacity to sanction you and to threaten sanctions. Deeply interdependent social relations are, I believe, all built in part on mutual coercion. In short, by coercive power I mean “power over,” not the nicer forms of power such as “power to” (that is, capacity) or “power with” (cooperative power). Although Arendt (1970) described power as the human ability to act in concert, this is not what I mean. Those forms of power are admirable in their place. But to solve collective action problems we also need coercive power, based on the threat of sanction or the actual use of force.10 Why is this the case? The answer has to do with the nature of goods that are non-­excludable. Their character is such that everyone can use them without in any way contributing to providing them. Examples include law and order, common defense, roads without tolls, an educated workforce, clean rivers, and breathable air. Collective action problems arise whenever we want to produce such goods. All of these things, and thousands of other desirable collective outcomes, are non-­excludable, or largely so. By their nature, goods like these cannot be parceled out only to those who work or pay to bring them into being. It is only goods like these—non-­excludable goods—that produce the collective action problem, which is, at bottom, a problem of non-­contribution. Coercion is not always necessary to solve collective action problems and get people to contribute to producing a non-­excludable good. Sometimes we can produce such goods through voluntary acts of solidarity. Everyone can voluntarily chip in to build a road, defend the country, produce schooling for the poor, or abstain from overfishing. But in most cases we also need coercion around the edges to give those who are tempted to free ride on the contributions of others an external incentive to contribute. The need for coercion to solve collective action problems is, in my view, the primary reason for government. Coercion also helps human beings achieve justice together through government. My second premise is that no actual instance of coercion can fully meet the criteria of democratic legitimacy. Over the years, democratic theorists have worked out democratic criteria for moments of both genuine commonality and genuine conflict. The criteria for moments of commonality specify, among other things, that deliberations leading to consensus should ideally take place in conditions free from coercive power (free, that is, from the threat of sanction and the use of force).11 In reality, however, the conditions for deliberation are never fully free from coercive power. As for conflict, the democratic criteria for moments of conflict specify, among other things, that ideally, decisions should be based on the equal power of each participant.12 In reality, however, power is never fully equal in democratic negotiation or even in majority rule, where the agenda always derives from an unequal process. Therefore the coercion that actually existing democracies deploy to implement their decisions will never be completely legitimate. In short, a political theory of democratic action demands a corresponding theory of imperfect legitimacy. Legitimacy is not a dichotomy—a thing you either have or do not have. It is a continuum from more to less.

On the importance of getting things done   199 A political theory of democratic action should not neglect the goals of resistance theory. Every means of approximating relatively legitimate coercion has its underside. Every exercise of coercive power puts those on the receiving end of that power at risk. But simply blocking the exercise of power is often a bad solution. One version of resistance theory, attractive to the framers of the Amer­ican constitution and to many since then, holds that if you put enough institutional veto points in place, the little that gets through is bound to promote the common good.13 This approach privileges stopping the work of the government. It may have been appropriate in a simpler world, where it might reasonably be said that the government is best which governs least, and in a more decentralized world, where the scope of government action did not need to be as great. In a more heavily interdependent world, a democracy needs more collective power to solve the growing number of collective action problems. It can safely allow more collective power through the grid if it reduces the worst effects of that power in other ways. Starting with the aims of the power itself, a democracy can organize itself to make the power that surges through the system more likely to promote the common good—for example, by reforming campaign finance, reducing corruption, attracting more public-­spirited individuals to office, and bringing stakeholders into constructive negotiation with one another. Democracies can also devise targeted safeguards for the vulnerable—for example, by legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Democracies can encourage both constructive and critical organization in civil society—for example, by facilitating unionization, subsidizing investigative journalism, and protecting internet access—so that new ideas feed into state power and people can organize effectively when resistance is necessary. More generally, when a good has mixed positive and negative features—and I consider coercion such a mixed good—one should not always block or automatically resist the good, but rather look for practices and institutions that reduce its undesirable effects, protect the vulnerable, compensate the losers, and facilitate ongoing changes for the better. In the tension between resistance and action, context is critical. Tyrannical regimes demand resistance. Deeply corrupt regimes cannot justly claim legitimacy. But when the threat of tyranny is relatively weak and corruption relatively limited, the need for collective action is often greater than the need for resistance. I do not pretend here to offer guidance to political movements on their choice of tactics, many of which are appropriately aimed at resisting particular injustices or at drawing attention to unsolved problems, such as rising inequality or global warming, even when the protesters do not agree on a plan of action (think “Occupy Wall Street”). I am arguing instead for something deeper: a shift in emphasis within democratic theory, from a long-­standing promotion of resistance to the greater embrace of coercion, even while recognizing that the coercion can never be more than partially legitimate.

200   Legitimate coercion

Negotiation and delegation Where might a democratic theory that recognizes the central role of coercive action turn its analytic gaze? Two promising and underexplored areas are negotiation and uncorrupt delegation supplemented by citizen deliberation. Theorists trying to make headway on these problems could benefit from working closely with empirical scholars of conflict resolution, comparative government, and perhaps other fields. To explore the normative complexity of negotiations, we could begin with Denmark. In 2002, two development economists coined the phrase “getting to ‘Denmark’ ” to describe the goal of helping impoverished countries deliver key public services.14 Francis Fukuyama adopted “getting to Denmark” to describe the historical paths for acquiring an effectively functioning, accountable state under the rule of law (Fukuyama 2011,14ff., 431ff.). Denmark is small, homogeneous, and defended primarily by the armies of others. Like many Nordic states it has a culture that may not be duplicable. Its social welfare model has the inevitable imperfection of requiring significant barriers to entry. Yet Denmark could nevertheless serve as one model in an exploration of negotiation—specifically the contribution of different forms of democratic negotiation to relatively legitimate coercion. The outcomes of the Danish political process match what its citizens want relatively closely, and the process itself, although not based on the majority rule of alternating parties, has strong claims to democratic legitimacy. Regarding outcomes, Denmark has the most equal income distribution of any advanced industrialized country. Robert Kuttner reported in 2008 that Denmark’s financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD. (Kuttner, 2008, 78) In its Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation gives Denmark a score of 78.6 out of 100, or eighth place in the world, better than the United States in ninth place. Denmark has universal health insurance, good child-­care and generous unemployment compensation. It has the world’s second highest tax rate and spends 50% of its GDP on public services.15 How did Denmark’s democracy become capable of such effective action? First, after a series of reforms in the early and mid-­nineteenth century, Denmark is now tied with New Zealand and Singapore for the distinction of being the least corrupt country on earth in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.16 Second, because its list system of proportional representation currently produces eight parties in parliament and no single party has had a parliamentary majority since 1909, passing laws requires negotiation and compromise among parties. This system generates a more cooperative form of negotiation than in the US Congress. Third, Danish democracy has little separation of powers on the

On the importance of getting things done   201 national level (although we cannot be sure this is related to its effectiveness). It has a parliamentary system with a unicameral legislature and extremely limited judicial review. Finally, Denmark has evolved a form of effective and far-­ reaching decentralization in which local elected bodies serve as responsive service-­deliverers but not powerful veto points.17 The result of this noncorrupt and negotiated system? Denmark’s citizens have, according to the Eurobarometer, greater trust in their national parliament and their national parties than the citizens of any other country in Europe. They are more “satisfied with the way democracy works” in their country than the citizens of any other country in Europe. Staggeringly, 94% of the Danish citizens are at least “fairly satisfied” with the way democracy works in their country.18 To this sociological legitimacy, add some normative legitimacy from two features. First, Denmark’s citizens are actively engaged in their politics. Without any compulsory voting, the turnout in the general elections since 1960 has averaged 85%. In The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, Denmark has the third highest score in the world, after Norway and Iceland.19 Second, the very process of negotiation adds democratic value by drawing out the reasons and justifications advanced by the different parties.20 Danes have also shown their capacity for resistance when needed. In 1943, when the German army occupied Denmark, the public denunciation of the German plan for deporting the Jews involved the King, the universities, students, the Danish state church, the Supreme Court, the trade unions, the employers’ confederation, the farmers’ organizations, the heads of ministries, and all of the political parties except the small pro-­Nazi National Socialist Workers’ Party of Denmark (Kirchhoff 1995). Denmark’s corporate entities were actually the foci for resistance. I am not saying that the United States can model itself on Denmark. That would be absurd. Nor am I saying that Denmark is a perfect polity. Its protections for its own citizens are arguably related to its relative homogeneity and its barriers to immigration. Finally, I do not have sufficient empirical data to judge the relative merits of the different systems that are less prone to deadlock, whether majority-­rule Westminster systems or well-­structured systems of negotiation, or the roles of different kinds of veto points, which in some contexts may promote, rather than hinder, common democratic action (Birchfield and Crepaz 1998). I am saying that these questions need entwined empirical and normative attention. In the future I hope that comparativists will read more democratic theory and theorists more comparative work, to the point where each can, with the help of their colleagues, contribute productively to the development of both fields. In particular, I am urging here that political theorists can profitably ally with comparativists and other empirical political scientists to investigate the sources of democratic legitimacy in countries other than our own and Great Britain. In Denmark, we might concentrate on the strengths and weaknesses of their forms of negotiation. These forms of negotiation, developed historically not only by Denmark but also by other relatively neocorporatist states in Europe, have heavily influenced the relatively successful

202   Legitimate coercion processes of the EU bureaucracies, which unlike Denmark have highly heterogeneous constituencies. Just as one size does not fit all in economic development, so too one size does not fit all in the building of legitimate democratic action. The new field of comparative political theory is investigating, among other things, the sources for democratically legitimate action in the cultures and philosophies of nonwestern countries. My point is that as this work goes forward, the focus should be as much on the sources of coordinated, intelligent action—and relatively legitimate coercion—as on resistance. If we think about problems of global scale, like climate change and weapons of mass destruction, the focus on action becomes even more necessary. Decisions at the global level cannot be as democratically legitimate as those at a national scale. In the foreseeable future, decisions at the global level will be even less likely than those at the national level to be discussed, much less resolved, in an arena governed only by the “forceless force of the better argument.” Nor will decisions be made in a way that even approximates the equal power of each individual or the proportionate power of those affected. To achieve action capable of addressing collective action problems on a global level, we will have to accept ongoing coercion that is far less democratically legitimate than the coercion we accept at the level of the nation-­state. Yet we must take action, as soon as is humanly possible, for the sake of unborn generations. Elections are only the starting point of democracy at the global level. Elections produce representatives, who make appointments, and those appointees make appointments and those appointees make further appointments. As the lines of delegation get longer, they get farther and farther from their source of legitimacy in the will of the people. But the lines themselves can also be more or less legitimate. One major requirement for their legitimacy is being relatively clean—as free as possible from both illegal corruption and legal, institutional corruption.21 In addition, we need to think harder about the deliberative criteria for democratic legitimacy when delegated appointees make decisions. If, as I believe, democratic legitimacy inheres not only in aggregative forms such as elections but also in deliberative forms, greater democratic legitimacy could derive from structures that embed the delegated decision makers in networks of public-­spirited peers and epistemic communities, surface relevant criteria for decision, and thus improve the quality of consideration of available options. Greater legitimacy would certainly inhere in structures that encourage deliberation in a context of mutual respect and attention to the public interest, as observers report seems to be the case in at least some parts of the EU bureaucracy (Naurin 2007). Greater deliberative legitimacy could also derive, when time permits, from supplementing long lines of delegation with mechanisms that generate citizen input in the decisions through deliberative initiatives, stakeholder groups, or random selection. Such groups must be consultative, not empowered, until such time as empowered groups, chosen by normatively legitimate processes of lot or election, can command sociological legitimacy. Inserting empowered citizen groups into the end of the process now would short-­circuit legitimate lines of delegation.

On the importance of getting things done   203 In this dual vision of delegated legitimacy, clean lines of delegation provide the formal legitimacy, while a variety of other mechanisms enhance the legitimacy that derives from taking into consideration the interests of all affected. Judgments about the legitimacy of decisions that emerge from these long lines of delegation should be based not only on the formal legitimacy of their mandate and the legitimacy of the specific forums in which the decisions are made, but also on the legitimating elements of the deliberative and representative systems that feed into those forums.22 At the global level, a commitment to only modest interference with capital also poses a threat to humankind. An unregulated market of corporate capitalists, pursuing the best deal and responding to (or creating) demand, will inevitably generate global financial busts, global warming, arms escalation, and nuclear proliferation. The market, with its many virtues, requires regulation, as does the power of capital to intervene in and illegitimately skew political decisions. At present we are almost unimaginably far from getting to Denmark on a global level. But if we are to approach that goal, democratic governments need to find a way to interfere more than modestly with capital.

A theory for our times Dahl’s two impediments to democracy in the United States are thus impediments to progress not only at the national level but at the global level as well. On both levels we must innovate both institutionally and in the realm of democratic theory. We need theory that can focus on action—and coercion—as well as resistance, on negotiation as well as deliberation, on systems as well as specific forums, on delegated power as well as direct democracy or representative elections, on new forms of representation as well as old, and on new ways of engaging citizens in conceiving of and acting for the good of unborn generations as well as our own. In short, we need a democratic theory for our times, both at the state and the global level. Madison’s theory of democracy will no longer work. The plethora of veto points that the framers recommended and that the state legislatures accepted will not allow enough positive action. At the global level, we need delegates of nations who can negotiate and coordinate with one another to produce action. That action will require coercion, which should be as legitimate as possible. Ironically, collective action at the global level may need to look more like the negotiations leading to collective action in the tiny state of Denmark than like the negotiations leading to collective inaction in the huge two-­party United States. As we try to bring the actions of both our own nation and the globe closer to the ideals of democracy, I assume that the regulative ideals will remain, at base, equality, freedom, the common good, and the protection of basic interests, particularly those of the most vulnerable. But how we interpret the normative and institutional implications of those ideals will have to evolve as we think harder about our ideals and learn from experience.

204   Legitimate coercion

Notes   * I would like to thank the many colleagues I consulted in the process of formulating this lecture and later, including Albena Azmanova, Fred Block, Dario Castaglioni, Roxanne Euben, Kristin Goss, Paul Gutierrez, Jeffrey Isaac, Ira Katznelson, Robert Kuttner, George Marcus, Quinton Mayne, Kirstie McClure, John McCormick, Benjamin Page, Pippa Norris, Ben Reilly, Bo Rothstein, Graham Smith, Cass Sunstein, and Mark Warren.   † This chapter was originally published as Jane Mansbridge, “On the Importance of Getting Things Done,” PS: Political Science and Politics 45(1): 1–8.   1 Atkinson, Piketty and Saez 2011, 6, 8.   2 Calculated from Campaign Finance Institute, www.cfinst.org/pdf/vital/VitalStats_ t2.pdf; see Hacker and Pierson 2010, 171.   3 Hacker and Pierson 2010, 118, 119, 121.   4 Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, 2012, chapter 12.4, using organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directory as having either Washington-­based representation or hiring outside firms to handle government relations. The authors advise caution in interpreting the numbers from the mid-­1990s, as more stringent reporting requirements produced an increase of 12% from 1995 to 1996. Nevertheless, on the basis of data that include interviews with lobbyists, Drutman 2010 reports that both the 1970s and the 1990s saw major increases in lobbying (see esp. 133).   5 Hacker and Pierson 2010, 174, 227, 246–247; for quotation, 227 (emphasis in original).   6 Vogel 1989, chapter 8; Hacker and Pierson 2010, 128–131.   7 In “Amer­ican Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” the 2004 APSA Task Force on Inequality reports on some of these inequalities and their political effects. www.apsanet.org/imgtext/taskforcereport.pdf, accessed November 14, 2011.   8 Sinclair 2002, 243 reports that the number of filibusters on major bills in the Senate grew from 4.6 per Congress in 1961–70 to 29 in 1997–1998. For all bills, see Koger 2010, Figure 6.3, “Senate Filibusters per Congress 1901–2004,” reporting 18 filibusters in 1973 and 34 in 2004. Filibusters are only one form of obstruction. Almost all of the others have also increased, sometimes dramatically, since 1975.   9 Adapted from Nagel 1975. 10 For an extended discussion, see Mansbridge 1996. 11 Dryzek 2010; Habermas [1981] 1984, 25; Mansbridge et al. 2010. 12 Dahl 1989; Lively, 1975; Mansbridge 1980; Pateman 1970. 13 Goodin 1996. The convictions supporting this approach are not nearly as strong in Europe today as in the United States. 14 Pritchett and Woolcock 2002, esp. p.  23; Fukuyama (2011, 14, n.  25) reports that “Getting to ‘Denmark’ ” was the original title of their paper. 15 Heritage Foundation 2011, from www.heritage.org/index/ranking, accessed August 18, 2011; other data from Kuttner 2008, 79. Kuttner also reports that in 2008 the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index ranked Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. 16 For the reforms, see Mungiu-­Pippidi 2011. Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, 2010 results, from www.transparency.org/ policy_research/ surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results, accessed August 18, 2011. 17 On the possible effects of this decentralization on political satisfaction, see Mayne 2010; on governments controlling the power of local veto points by accessing alternative routes to action, see Blom-­Hansen 1999. 18 Eurobarometer data from Denmark, 2007, in Norris 2011, tables 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4 (pp.  24–26); http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/cf/showchart_column. cfm?keyID=3 &nationID=2,&startdate=2004.04&enddate=2004.04, accessed Aug. 18, 2011. 19 IDEA turnout data from Denmark, 1960–2007, www.idea.int/vt/ country_view. cfm?country=DK, accessed Aug. 18, 2011; The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of

On the importance of getting things done   205 Democracy 2010, www.eiu.com/public/topical_ report.aspx?campaignid=demo2010, accessed August 11, 2011. 20 See Applbaum 1992 on democratic value, Mansbridge et al. 2010 on negotiation under the constraint of fairness. 21 “Institutional corruption” refers to “influence, financial or otherwise, within an economy of influence, that weakens the effectiveness of an institution, especially by weakening public trust in that institution” (Lessig 2010, 11). Kaufmann and Vicente (2011) call the phenomenon “legal corruption.” These authors all give as an example the corrupting but legal influence of private money over US state policy. 22 On deliberative systems, see Dryzek 2010; Mansbridge 1999; Mansbridge et al. 2012; Neblo 2015. On representative systems, see Disch 2011; Mansbridge 2003, 2011.

References Applbaum, Arthur Isak. 1992. “Democratic Legitimacy and Official Discretion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 21 (3): 240–274. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Atkinson, Anthony B., Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. 2011. “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History.” Journal of Economic Literature 49 (1): 3–71. Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bartels, Larry. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Birchfield, Vicki, and Markus M.L. Crepaz. 1998. “The Impact of Constitutional Structures and Collective and Competitive Veto Points on Income Inequality in Industrialized Democracies.” European Journal of Political Research 34 (2): 175–200. Blom-­Hansen, Jens. 1999. “Avoiding the ‘Joint-­decision Trap’: Lessons from Intergovernmental Relations in Scandinavia.” European Journal of Political Research 35 (1): 35–67. Dahl, Robert A. 1977. “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States.” Political Science Quarterly 92 (1): 1–20. Dahl, Robert A. 1989. Democracy and its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Disch, Lisa. 2011. “Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 105 (1): 100–114. Drutman, Lee Jared. 2010. “The Business of America is Lobbying: The Expansion of Corporate Political Activity and the Future of Amer­ican Pluralism.” PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley. Dryzek, John. 2010. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Goodin, Robert E. 1996. “Institutionalizing the Public Interest: The Defense of Deadlock and Beyond.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 90 (2): 331–343. Habermas, Jürgen. [1981] 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-­Take-All Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kateb, George. 1995. Emerson and Self-­Reliance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Kaufmann, Daniel, and Pedro C. Vicente. 2011. “Legal Corruption.” Economics & Politics 23 (2): 195–219.

206   Legitimate coercion Kirchhoff, Hans. 1995. “Denmark: A Light in the Darkness of the Holocaust?” Journal of Contemporary History 30 (3): 465–479. Koger, Gregory. 2010. Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kuttner, Robert. 2008. “The Copenhagen Consensus; Reading Adam Smith in Denmark.” Foreign Affairs 87 (2): 78–95. Lautenbach, Manegold of. [1085] 1954. Ad Gebehardum Liber. In Medieval Political Ideas, ed. Ewart Lewis, 164–165. London: Routledge and Paul. Lessig, Lawrence. 2010. “Democracy after Citizens United.” Boston Review 35 (5): 11–29. Lively, Jack. 1975. Democracy. Oxford: Blackwell. Mansbridge, Jane. 1980. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Mansbridge, Jane. 1996. “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity.” In Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib, 46–56. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System.” In Deliberative Politics, ed. Steven Macedo, 211–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansbridge, Jane. 2003. “Rethinking Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 97 (4): 515–528. Mansbridge, Jane. 2011. “Clarifying Representation.” Amer­ican Political Science Review 105 (3): 621–630. Mansbridge, Jane, with James Bohman, Simone Chambers, David Estlund, Andreas Follesdal, Archon Fung, Cristina Lafont, Bernard Manin, and José Luis Martí. 2010. “The Place of Self-­Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy.” Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (1): 64–100. Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Tom Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis Thompson, and Mark Warren. 2012. “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy.” In Deliberative Systems, ed. John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayne, Quinton. 2010. “The Satisfied Citizen: Participation, Influence, and Public Perceptions of Democratic Performance.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University. Mungiu-­Pippidi, Alina. 2011. “Becoming Denmark: Understanding Good Governance Historical Achievers.” In Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption, ed. Alina Mungiu-­Pippidi et al. Oslo: Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation (also on www.againstcorruption.eu). Nagel, Jack. 1975. A Descriptive Analysis of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Naurin, Daniel. 2007. Deliberation behind Closed Doors: Transparency and Lobbying in the European Union. Colchester: ECPR Press. Neblo, Michael. 2015. Deliberative Democracy between Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, Pippa. 2011. Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritchett, Lant, and Michael Woolcock. 2002. “Solutions When the Solution Is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development.” Working Paper #10, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Reich, Robert B. 2007. Supercapitalism. New York: Knopf.

On the importance of getting things done   207 Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of Amer­ican Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sinclair, Barbara. 2002. The “60-vote Senate.” In U.S. Senate Exceptionalism, ed. Bruce I. Oppenheimer, 241–61. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Vogel, David. 1989. Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books. Wawro, Gregory J., and Eric Schickler. 2010. “Legislative Obstructionism.” Annual Review of Political Science 13: 297–319. Wolin, Sheldon S. 1994. “Fugitive Democracy.” Constellations 1 (1): 11–25.

10 “Deliberative negotiation” (2014)*† Co-­author Mark E. Warren, with André Bächtiger, Maxwell A. Cameron, Simone Chambers, John Ferejohn, Alan Jacobs, Jack Knight, Daniel Naurin, Melissa Schwartzberg, Yael Tamir, Dennis F. Thompson, and Melissa Williams* Introduction The capacity to act is built into the very meaning of democracy, or rule (kratos) of the people (demos). Whereas much normative political theory to date has explored what it might mean to say that the people rule, we focus on what it might mean to say that they rule—that is, they have the capacity to act and implement decisions.1 [We argue that to act, pluralist polities often need to, and ought to, negotiate. The alternatives—deliberating to genuinely common agreement, which is often not possible if we respect the interests of the individuals in the polity; staying at the status quo, which benefits some unequally; or voting by majority rule, which often neglects the interests of the minority – do not meet as well our ideals for democratic practice.] Deliberative negotiation The following table arrays five types of agreement-­seeking procedures on a spectrum from pure deliberation to pure bargaining, with three types of deliberative negotiation in between. Most actual political negotiations include interactions of several of these types; a few include all five types. Note that the table and the analysis apply only when a problem is “tractable.” That is, either a “zone of possible agreement” among the parties already exists (i.e., various positions along a spectrum of existing possibilities are better for all parties than the status quo), or other issues can be brought into the negotiation to create a package from which all could benefit compared to the status quo.2 An exhaustive table covering all actual negotiations would also include intractable problems where there is no zone of possible agreement but the parties are simply using the vehicle of negotiation to buy time, demonstrate commitment to others, or in other ways improve the current facts on the ground. The analysis uses “agreement-­seeking procedures” as an umbrella term to include all of the processes in this table and “negotiation” to include all of the processes ranging from pure deliberation within a larger negotiation through the three forms of deliberative negotiation to pure bargaining.

Common interests, in which all gain, with identical or overlapping benefits, e.g., in greater understanding

Informed consensus or clarified and structured conflict

Background

Outcomes

Pure deliberation

Table 10.1  Agreement-seeking procedures

Power-based compromise, in which each loses something of value or capitulation, in which one side appropriates all the surplus

Fair compromise, in which each has sacrificed something of value

Fully integrative agreement, in which no party loses

No mutual creation of value, with strategic demands, in which each aims at maximum No mutual creation of value, with fair offers, based on reasonableness, in which each gains, each loses

Partially integrative agreement, in which parties have traded lower for higher values; at least one bears some loss

Partial mutual advantage, in which each gains but with trades to add value

Full mutual advantage, in which each party gains but with distinct benefits; no losses

III. Distributive

II.

Pure bargaining

Integrative

I.

Deliberative negotiation

Agreement-seeking procedures

210   Legitimate coercion We divide the columns of the table in two ways. First, we distinguish between pure deliberation, the three forms of deliberative negotiation, and pure bargaining. The first column in the table identifies pure deliberation—that is, deliberation aimed at both substantive consensus and clarifying conflicts.3 Such deliberation is traditionally conceived outside of any negotiation, in circumstances of relatively common interests, when participants are trying to ascertain facts about the world or to forge or discover instances of a common good. Yet moments of pure deliberation may also occur within a larger interaction that legislators and analysts call a negotiation. In those moments, one or more of the parties, coming into the interaction with a willingness to be persuaded, may change their minds through reasoning on principles, through coming to embrace the goods of others as their own, or more prosaically through seeing that new means better achieve their ultimate ends than the means they had originally promoted. The next three columns identify three forms of deliberative negotiation. These columns distinguish, following the standard negotiation literature, between integrative and distributive negotiations. In the integrative moments in negotiation, participants discover or create joint gains beyond those demarcated by the original zone of possible agreement. In the contrasting distributive moments, all joint gains have been captured and only zero-­sum distributions remain. The first of these three columns introduces what we call fully integrative solutions. Such solutions are rare, in both commercial and legislative negotiations.4 Mary Parker Follett, who in 1925 developed the concept of an integrative solution and coined the term, used as an example an incident in which she wanted the window in a Harvard library closed to avoid a draft but another patron wanted it open to get more air in the room. Her solution, opening the window in the next room, gave both parties what they wanted.5 With a fully integrative solution, the parties have no need to compromise; neither loses. One could say that such a solution “dissolved” a conflict or revealed a perceived conflict to be only apparent. Like the partially integrative solutions in the next column, a fully integrative solution is possible only when the parties have differing valuations of the different aspects of the good or goods about which they are negotiating.6 (Follett placed a high value on no draft but was indifferent to the room’s temperature; the other placed a high value on a cool room but was indifferent to the presence of a draft.) Column three of the table identifies what we call partially integrative solutions. When the vast majority of negotiation scholars use the terms “integrative,” “joint gains,” “creating value,” and “expanding the pie,” they mean these partially integrative instances. Like fully integrative solutions, these far more common solutions are possible only when the parties have differing valuations of the different aspects of the negotiation and can discover a way of exploiting those differing valuations for joint gain. Unlike fully integrative solutions, significant distributive (zero-­sum) issues remain. Nevertheless the parties are able to achieve joint gains by prioritizing their desires and trading on items that are low priority for one party and high priority for the other, often by bringing in issues not originally on the table. The gains from integration often build on taking the

“Deliberative negotiation”   211 perspective of the others, a process that in turn tends to require “trust and a supportive climate,” where the parties listen actively to the others, experiment with attitudes and ideas, and do not try to control information.7 A problem can arise because the conditions and techniques useful for integrative negotiation are often antithetical to those useful for the form of distributive negotiation that we call “pure bargaining.”8 Columns four and five of the table identify two forms of “distributive” negotiation, neither of which, in contrast to forms of integrative negotiation, allows for bringing other issues in and “expanding the pie.” The issues are in these instances only zero-­sum: whatever one party gains, the other loses. Note, however, that in this table the term zero-­sum refers only to the division of the surplus in a situation that is already positive-­sum. The table is defined to include only “tractable” situations in which both parties and those they represent would be better off with a negotiated agreement than with the status quo. So in both distributive columns, a zone of possible agreement makes both parties better off, but within that zone the parties’ losses and gains are zero-­sum. We make a strong distinction between the two forms of distributive negotiation that we identify, calling only the first “deliberative.” In the fourth column of the table, under the larger heading of “deliberative negotiation,” the parties look for a fair compromise within the zone of possible agreement. They make claims that require their adversaries to give up something of value but offer concessions that involve sacrificing something of value themselves. The claims are “deliberative” when the parties are relatively open with one another in their interactions, do not take unfair advantage of their opponents, signal their understanding of fairness as part of their claims, and come to an understanding about the fairness of the terms in ways that motivate and legitimize agreement.9 We define a “compromise” as an agreement in which all sides sacrifice something of value (i.e., make concessions) to improve on the status quo from the perspective of each.10 We define a “fair compromise” as one that both (or all) sides in the negotiation perceive as fair.11 These kinds of compromises are particularly necessary and possible when the parties expect to have repeated interactions that would be disrupted by a series of outcomes that some considered unfair. The final and fifth column of the table represents what we call pure bargaining. It, too, typically produces a compromise, although in some cases one party can through greater power or bluffing succeed in getting the entire surplus within the zone of agreement. In the case of pure bargaining, the negotiation lacks deliberative elements. Instead of disclosing information to discover joint gains, the parties will take full advantage of information asymmetries to reveal only what is strategically useful. They will make fair offers only when their opponent will reject anything else.12 In this mode, the parties seek only to exercise power, exploit institutional advantages, and gain as much as possible at the expense of the other. [The rest of the chapter identifies the three negotiation-­facilitating practices of long incumbencies, closed doors, and side-­payments, each of which democrats have typically resisted, and, after bringing together the relevant literature for the

212   Legitimate coercion first time, suggests conditions in which those practices can meet democratic norms. This summary presents only the conclusions to the three sections.] Long incumbencies are democratically acceptable to the degree that: • • • •

•

The representative, by and large, promotes policies and a broad political direction that the majority of constituents approve; Most constituents consider themselves relatively satisfied with their representative; The minority of constituents is not deeply unsatisfied with the representative; The existing media system, interest-­group system, and party system (through either an opposing party or internal-­party dynamics) is healthy, able to present alternative policies, and able to publicize departures from citizen preferences or interests; and The citizens are active in other forms of politics and therefore able to inform themselves easily and take action skillfully if their current representative no longer seems appropriate.

Closed-­door interactions are democratically acceptable to the degree that: • • • •

Citizens have the opportunity to deliberate about the rationales for closed-­ door negotiations; Citizens have a warranted trust in their representatives; The interests of those affected (or potentially affected) are effectively represented in the negotiation; and The negotiators are transparent in their rationales for their decisions, providing enough information and reasoning that citizens can engage in informed debate and judgment.

Side payments are democratically acceptable to the degree that: • • • • •

The side payments are transparent; The side payments survive cost-­benefit scrutiny on the allocation itself, providing an overall benefit to the collectivity served as measured against the cost of providing that benefit; The rationale of the benefit provided by the side payment is justifiable to those affected (e.g., taxpayers) who were not involved in the trade (i.e., transparency in rationale); The side payments are needed to negotiate an agreement; and The side payments are elements of a fair compromise or partially integrative solution.

Notes   * This chapter was written primarily by Mark Warren and Jane Mansbridge in a process of deliberative co-­authorship drawing from the ideas of their co-­authors. Although each scholar would, if writing independently, put things in his or her own way, the chapter represents a direction of thought the members collectively endorse.

“Deliberative negotiation”   213   † This chapter is a very heavily edited version of Mark Warren and Jane Mansbridge, et al., “Deliberative Negotiation,” in Jane Mansbridge and Cathie Jo Martin, eds., Negotiating Agreement in Politics (Washington, DC: Amer­ican Political Science Association, 2014), pp.  86–120. A revised version of the piece was published as Mark E. Warren and Jane Mansbridge, et al., “Deliberative Negotiation,” in Jane Mansbridge and Cathie Jo Martin, eds., Political Negotiation: A Handbook (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2016), pp. 141–196.   1 See Ober (2008, 7).   2 We use the status quo as our normative baseline rather than a party’s Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA—the traditional baseline in negotiation theory—because of the normative problems in one party attempting to change the other’s best alternative to a position less desirable for the other party than the status quo.   3 For �� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ definitions of deliberation, see, inter alia, Gutmann and Thompson (2004); Chambers (2003); Goodin (2008); Fishkin (2005); Stokes (1998); Przeworski (1998); Knight and Johnson (1994); Dryzek (2000); and Manin (2005).   4 See Walton and McKersie (1965, 129) for the distinction between fully integrative (which they called “absolutely integrative”) and partially integrative solutions. For the rarity of fully integrative solutions, see Wetlaufer (1996).   5 Follett ([1925]1942).   6 For a high-­stakes actual example of a solution that comes close to being fully integrative, see the 1979 settlement after the Egypt–Israel war, when Egypt most wanted to maintain its national pride and sovereignty, while Israel most wanted security, and a demilitarized zone under Egyptian sovereignty gave each most of what they wanted (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991, 41–42).   7 Walton and McKersie (1965, 141–143).   8 Walton and McKersie (1965, 166) and subsequent theorists raise this problem for the whole arena of “distributive bargaining,” while we restrict it to the realm of “pure bargaining.” Neither Walton and McKersie nor subsequent negotiation theorists have conceptualized our third form of deliberative negotiation, which is distributive but uses deliberative methods and results in what we call “fair compromise” (see also Raiffa 1982 on “fully cooperative negotiation”).   9 Gutmann and Thompson (2012). They recommended in such interactions that parties adopt “mindsets of compromise” that include principled prudence and mutual respect, avoiding “principled tenacity” and mutual mistrust (2012, 16–24). 10 Gutmann and Thompson (2012, 10–16); see also Van Parijs (2012). 11 Conceptions of fairness are notoriously open to self-­serving bias, yet when third parties also agree that a compromise is relatively fair, representatives can use this fact to convince their constituents that the compromise as a whole should be accepted. 12 The distinction we draw between fair offers and strategic demands in some respects tracks Rawls’s distinction between the reasonable and the rational (Rawls 2001, 6–7, 81, 191).

References Chambers, Simone. 2003. “Deliberative Democratic Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science 6: 307–326. Dryzek, John. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. 1991. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Fishkin, James. 2005. “Defending Deliberation.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8: 71–78.

214   Legitimate coercion Follett, Mary Parker. [1925]1942. “Constructive Conflict.” In Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, ed. H. C. Metcalf and L. Urwick. New York: Harper. Goodin, Robert E. 2008. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2012. The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Knight, Jack, and James Johnson. 1994. “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy.” Political Theory 22 (2): 277–296. Manin, Bernard. 2005. “Democratic Deliberation: Why We Should Promote Debate Rather Than Discussion.” Paper delivered at the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs Seminar, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Ober, Josiah. 2008. “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule.” Constellations 15 (1): 3–9. Przeworski, Adam. 1998. “Deliberation and Ideological Domination.” In Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raiffa, H. 1982. The Art and Science of Negotiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stokes, Susan. 1998. “Pathologies of Deliberation.” In Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Parijs, Philippe. 2012. “What Makes a Good Compromise?” Government and Opposition 47 (3): 466–480. Walton, Richard E. and Robert B. McKersie. 1965. A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wetlaufer, Gerald B. 1996. “The Limits of Integrative Bargaining.” Georgetown Law Journal 85 (2): 369–394.

An interview with Jane Mansbridge Questions from Melissa Williams

Ideals behind the ideals The purpose of the volume is to highlight some of your most innovative contributions to political theory, and the purpose of this interview is to solicit your thoughts on how those contributions came into being – what you were responding to in the world of politics, in your own experience, and in the academy when you pursued the questions that led to some of these insights.    In re-­reading your work I was struck by a repeated questioning of common binary distinctions that have long structured political inquiry and political theory, such as the distinctions between participatory and representative democracy, between trustee and delegate models of political representation, between civic republican and liberal understandings of democracy. These distinctions, you show, are often mapped onto the distinction of a democracy based on common interests – what you call “unitary democracy” – and set in opposition to democracy based on conflicting interests – what you call “adversary democracy.”    Usually when these binary oppositions are deployed in political thought and analysis, a value judgment is attached to each prong of the binary so that one column of related terms is the good column and the other is the bad column. Repeatedly in your work, I’ve seen you question both the solidity of the distinctions and the value judgments attached to them. You shake up the categories and make us realize that we haven’t actually understood what we thought we’d known all along, and that we’ve been too quick in our normative judgments. JM: I hope that I’ve been able to introduce contingency into these binaries, showing how different mixtures might be appropriate in different contexts. I’ve stressed contingency in my work (see Chapter 5, and Mansbridge, 2014a). How much flows from a common interest model, how much flows from a conflicting interest model, and why we need different mixtures of both in politics – that was for me an inductive discovery. I began with the sensibility that you can’t have everything. I ended with the sensibility that you probably can’t have everything all the time, but you ought to try hard MW:

216   An interview with Jane Mansbridge to get what you want, even when you want things that seem to be opposed or contradict one another, because you may be able to find a way to get both. This stance refuses the zero-­sum choice.    I began with a passionate desire to make participatory democracies work. That, too, has carried on through all my work – wanting democracy to succeed. But I didn’t know how to make the couple of participatory collectives that I was involved in work better, and I didn’t know how to help the other participatory democracies, these little collectives around Boston, that had fallen apart or were having trouble. Each one I knew was in turmoil over internal splits, and those splits often had to do with conflicts around unequal power.    I was in graduate school at the time, having switched from history to political science, and I thought, “Is there anything in political science, and also perhaps sociology and psychology, that could be useful here?” I observed [Robert Freed] Bales’s groups in his course on small group interaction through a one-­way mirror for a semester to see if I could learn anything. The answer was: not much. I thought then, “Let’s go to some places where some people are making it work. If I can find any place that makes genuinely equal democracy work even a little bit, I can try to figure out how they do it.” I spent quite a bit of time trying to find a participatory democracy that worked reasonably well, and finally found one – a workplace. I looked for both a workplace and a territorially based democracy, because a lot of democracy is territorially based, and I wanted to try to find something as close as possible to our participatory ideal in that realm.    At the time, we had the fantasy, which we didn’t realize was quite a fantasy, that we could decentralize a lot of government to neighborhood levels and make participatory democracy work on a territorial basis. That’s still a direction I want to go.    We were also committed to direct democracy, and one of the few places where direct face-­to-face democracy existed on a territorial basis was the New England town meeting. So I spent more time trying to find a town meeting that wasn’t just governed by the middle class but instead by working classes of the town.    I was hoping for two things. One was clues to success. If I could find small towns that worked as fairly egalitarian democracies, they might give clues to how to do it. The second was clues to understanding. When even the best democracies I could find weren’t successful, their “best case” examples might reveal clues to the difficulty, perhaps intractability, of the problem. It might not be so much that these particular power-­hungry people in this particular collective were out to dominate or that these insufficiently socialist, lazy people in this particular collective were not taking enough responsibility, but that the forces that led some to be more active and others less had common, perhaps universal, roots.    My parents had a book called Child Development by [Arnold] Gesell and [Frances] Ilg (1949) that helped make “going through a stage” part of

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   217 the language. They showed that two-­year-olds have tantrums. Before Gesell and Ilg, when kids had tantrums, parents would tend to think there was something wrong with the kids or wrong with their parenting. After Gesell and Ilg, they just thought, “Kids this age have tantrums.” That’s one of the things I wanted to do for participatory democracies. I wanted to show that democracies have structural problems, built into the situation, and that we were all struggling with these things collectively. I didn’t go into my case studies or my analysis with the expectation of basing an analysis on common interests or conflicting interests. Those were constructs I came out with ten years later, after doing the interviews and thinking about what people had told me. MW: How did that process work? JM: Well, my thinking evolved a lot over the course of the two cases. In the town meeting case, Selby, I interviewed a French-­Canadian farmer who said he didn’t go to town meetings, had never gone to town meetings, but that’s okay, because “We’re all friends.” I’m ashamed to say that at the time I chalked that conclusion up to something like false consciousness, because he was of French-­Canadian ancestry. After his brother married a local girl, the brother’s barn was burned down – that’s how anti-­FrenchCanadian the town was. I assumed that the “real” reason he didn’t go to the meeting was that he would not be welcome there. Still, his own interpretation was, “We’re all friends.” I had those words on tape. I had them in my interview notes. And I remembered those words but I had my own interpretation: “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”    Then I went to Helpline, where I was much more immersed in the daily life of the collective. And there I found the same explanation for not going to a meeting and leaving greater power to others: we’re all friends. But this time I believed it. So I began to rethink my analysis of what was going on in Selby. MW: Did this changed interpretation derive just from your greater immersion in Helpline? JM: Immersion helped. Of course, I had done a lot to understand Selby. I had gone to several town meetings, had worked in the town archives to get historical data on voting records and property values, and had interviewed one of every five adults in the town. But at Helpline, I spent more time, the people I was interviewing were more like me, and their collective was more like the ones I wanted to help. I became far more entwined in their meetings, their conflicts, and their hopes than I had been in Selby. And – this is also important – I was working with them as colleagues in the search. They knew why I was there, to figure out how to make participatory democracies work, and they wanted that too. They each had given up a lot to try to make their democracy highly participatory, and that commitment motivated them to help me.    The other major difference was the extraordinary degree to which everyone in Helpline had done almost everything they could think of to

218   An interview with Jane Mansbridge equalize power. They had instituted more mechanisms to make power equal than I had seen in any other collective. They spent more than seven hours a week at meetings. No member ever formally delegated power to any other; there was no formal hierarchy. All the salaries were equal, whether you had a law degree or hadn’t graduated from high school. They even did collective exercises to make themselves more aware of the unequal power in the organization so they could fight that inequality. So I took their conclusions very seriously.    The “ah-­ha!” experience took a long time. It began with something that happened at the end of my interviews with the Helpline members. It had started out innocuously. I’d wanted to measure each person’s estimates of their own and others’ power in the organization. So I had drawn a set of concentric circles on a piece of typewriter paper – a sort of bullseye – to represent the “center” of power and the concentric circles of power in Helpline. At the end of the interview, I gave the person I was interviewing that bullseye sheet and 41 tiny slips of paper, each with the name of one of the 41 members of Helpline, and asked them to place each slip around the bullseye to show where they thought that member stood in relation to the center of power in the organization. The very first time I did the exercise, I saw how distressing it was. Maybe not distressing – that’s a little strong – but how disjunctive it was for the people I was talking with to depict the inequalities in their organization so graphically. Especially after having spent more than an hour with me, telling me how important equality was at Helpline and all the things they’d done to make power more equal. Almost everyone distributed the bits of paper unequally around the bullseye circle. Then came the moment when I scotch-­taped the slips of paper down. That gesture reified what they had just done. Then we looked down at it. And I asked, “Are you comfortable with that?” They thought about it. Weirdly – to them and to me – almost all of them said they were comfortable with it. I had intended this exercise to come at the end of the interview, but it usually launched us into another discussion – in which I asked them, and they told me, how they could feel comfortable with the inequality of power they had just made so vivid on that piece of paper.    Then I went off to teach at the University of Chicago. One day in a faculty seminar I was presenting these interviews, trying to make sense of them. Right at the end of the discussion, Lloyd Rudolph said, “You’re talking about acceptable inequalities.” That’s exactly what I was talking about. What makes these inequalities acceptable? (Mansbridge, 1977). That’s collective thinking. I could not have crystallized my thought without Lloyd’s comment, and he couldn’t have had his thought without my bringing this problem to the seminar and struggling with it.    What made these inequalities acceptable? In those last minutes at the end of the interview, person after person at Helpline who was not at the center of organizational power told me in one way or another, “I can trust the people at the center.” After puzzling over it for five or so years, I

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   219 c­ oncluded that this trust was not a psychological matter. It came closer to an underlying assessment that they, who had less power, had common interests with the people who had more. I had misunderstood that French-­ Canadian farmer. When he said, “We’re all friends here,” to some degree he really meant it. Friends have interests in common.    Now, that farmer was also probably making some attempt to avoid thinking about his position in the town. He was a relatively poor farmer. Even though working class people ran the town, gradations of inequality affected participation. I didn’t think it was all wonderful. But when I went back to my notes and interviews in Selby, I realized that there, too, as in Helpline, the town was trying to deal with many problems in which they had relatively common interests. MW: For example? JM: A lot of the issues were ones that many political theorists and empirical political scientists would consider “administration,” not “politics.” For instance, the town was building a new garage for its road equipment. So a man got up in the meeting and said something like, “Sears is having a sale on roofing materials,” and his new fact informed the decision. Several issues in town meeting were like that. Not everything was a conflicting matter settled by majority rule. It was also about trying to figure out how to build a new garage as cheaply and as well as possible. Everybody can give some useful information in regard to that. I consider that process “politics.” It’s part of our communal attempt to figure out what to do collectively. I oppose using the word “politics” to denote only conflict.    This all took me a very long time to figure out. It was not what I had gone into the project thinking about. Working through what the people at Helpline had told me, I began to realize that when you are close to the common interest end of the spectrum, you do not necessarily need equal power to protect your interests equally. That was a revelation to me. And it was inductive. It became an insight that I could use and take forward. It was orthogonal to the received analyses I had both from empirical work in political science and from political theory.    Later, when I was writing, I worked against those received frameworks. I called the book Beyond Adversary Democracy. The title was originally Participatory Democracy, but – working slowly and thinking slowly – by the time I got it ready for publication, nobody was interested in participatory democracy anymore. That moment in the world, in the US, had come and gone, while the importance of the theoretical point had grown on me. So what had originally started out to be a manual for participatory democracies ended up criticizing the adversary tradition. But at the same time I was also criticizing the communal tradition – and for this I got a little flak from some of my political theorist friends.    The central question that I decided participatory democrats should be asking themselves is: On any given issue, how close are you to common interests, how close are you to conflicting interests? You need a different

220   An interview with Jane Mansbridge set of democratic mechanisms, and even a different set of democratic ideals, for situations of underlying commonality and situations of conflict. Granted, no situation is ever one of pure commonality or pure conflict. Granted also that we construct together what we mean by commonality and conflict. But in practice we depend on these distinctions, contested as they may be. In the end I concluded that the ideal of equal power had behind it a set of other ideals, including the ideal of protecting our interests equally. If your interests were protected by your sharing them with everyone else, you would not need equal power for that purpose. The protection of interests was one of the ideals behind the ideal of equal power, and those behind-­ the-ideal ideals were what we were really striving toward. If you went directly to those ideals, you could in practice maybe get more of what really mattered to you. MW: Can you say more about this notion of the ideals behind the ideals? JM: One is the ideal of equal respect, a matter of how we want to treat one another and be treated in turn. If equal respect can be created without absolutely equal power, then we don’t need to make power more equal for that reason. A second is the ideal of full individual development. If we can develop fully without equal power, then that reason for making power more equal also withers.    So behind the ideal of equal power lie at least three other ideals – I identified three, but there might be more – which are what we really want when we set up equal power as an ideal. Equal respect, full individual development, and protecting interests equally. If these underlying ideals can be achieved by other means – such as having common interests – then we don’t need equal power as much. The overall argument is that equal power, which we have often thought of as simply constitutive of democracy, is a contingent and not an absolute ideal.    In the course of writing Beyond Adversary Democracy, I concluded that Athenian democracy was based on an assumption of common interests. In that context, majority rule, which was relatively common in other Greek cities as well, was a time-­saving approximation to the consensus that you would expect if you could discuss the issue for hours. Of course, Socrates and others argued that the best ought to make the decisions, not the demos. But there may be epistemic reasons to conclude that in good deliberative conditions the demos will not be far from the mark. And there are strong reasons for getting buy-­in to the decisions by the demos, because in Athens they were the ones who would have to pull the oars in the wars they decided to fight. If I am right in thinking that at that time – and later, in the medieval era – majority rule was no more than an approximation for consensus, then the use of the equal power in majority rule to protect one’s interests was a modern invention. I was shocked and excited at this thought.    Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, introducing to political thought the atomism and the assumption of conflict that had been evolving in economic

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   221 thought. To find that the English Parliament had moved from consensus to majority rule just around 1650 was also exciting. It seemed that in England the leading thinkers were deciding to live with conflict in the political realm, the religious realm, and the economic realm at about the same time, giving up on political consensus, one religion, and the “just price.”    For that reason I jumped on Locke’s phrase, “the contrariety of interests.” Yet I think it was not until after World War II that majority decision turned into majority rule, based on what Locke called “the greater force.” The theory is that if everyone has one equal unit of power and those units are aggregated equally, so be it. You win, because you’ve got 51% of the ergs of equal power, and we have only 49%. The outcome is legitimate because those ergs are equal. By the late 1960s, equal power had become our standard way of legitimizing outcomes in situations of irreconcilable conflict, where it was not possible to deliberate to consensus. We were not using the word “deliberation” much at the time. The reigning model was what I would call “adversary democracy,” based on an assumption of conflicting interests.    I thought then that in the participatory democracies to which I had belonged, we had been very upset about inequalities of power, small and large, without fully knowing why. But in obsessing about equal power, we were wrongly laying on our participatory democracies, in which the members had many common interests, a form of democracy that had been developed for the national level, in which citizens had many conflicting interests. That revelation influenced the rest of my intellectual and analytic career.    I shouldn’t overstress protecting interests. Equal respect is just as important – actually more important – as an ideal behind the ideal. Aristotle had mentioned that the Athenians considered friendship the basis of the state, and friendship required equality. An anthropological study I found on friendship argued that in every culture what we call “friendship” requires equal respect. It seemed to me that our participatory democracies were based on an implicit model of friendship, which demands a kind of equal respect. The value of equal respect has also always been important to me personally, perhaps because my dad, who came from England, hated the English class system.    As for the third ideal behind the ideal, around the same time, possibly from Carole Pateman (1970), I had picked up on “the development of the faculties,” in Rousseau’s words, as part of what we want from participation. The Port Huron Statement1 is anchored in that vision – that through the very processes of democracy you grew and became more of a human being, a better human being. That ideal was much in the air. So I asked, do you need equal power to get that? In Helpline and in the other participatory democracies in which I participated, you didn’t need equal power to get either equal respect or self-­development. Those were the ideals behind the ideal of equal power. If you could get those ends by other means, you didn’t need equal power.

222   An interview with Jane Mansbridge    Going through that intellectual process marked me for life. I began to look for the ideals behind the ideals whenever there was a seeming conflict between ideals. Rather than choosing one or the other, crafting a compromise between the two, or despairing, we can ask “Why are we for this?” MW: So you are arguing that the mechanism of one person, one vote initially appears in Athenian democracy as a device for approximating an ideal of democracy as the rule of a common good. Later, that same mechanism, which is clearly democratic, because of the way it operationalizes a principle of equality, takes on a different democratic meaning in the postwar period, where it is no longer an instrument for approximating a politics of the common good, but is instead a mechanism for legitimately handling the problem of conflicting interests. Conflict arises both in the Athenian case and in the postwar case, but in Athens it’s seen as a conflict in judgments about the content of the common good, whereas in the postwar context, it’s seen as a conflict of interests and the abandonment of a goal of a common good that can bridge those conflicts. JM: Right. The political science of my graduate years assumed that in political life there was no common good. Anyone who talked about the common good was just either pulling the wool over someone’s eyes or taking advantage of the disadvantaged. The reigning idea in the empirical part of our discipline had firmly become what I called “adversary” democracy. Others might have called it “liberal” democracy, but I rejected that term as too capacious. I wanted to pull out and draw attention to one strand in that evolution, the concept of permeating conflicting interests. At the same time, however, in political theory commonality had a thriving constituency. So it was peculiar to insist on both. MW: I’d like to take you back to the beginnings of your feminist activism. What is the relationship between feminism and your commitments as a democratic theorist? JM: That relationship is strong. I took from feminism a strong sensitivity to hegemonic power, the ways that that power seeps into your lives, into your heads, into the structures in which you act and formally and informally, into the inclusions and exclusions all around you. The feminist movement made us all extremely aware of those subtle and unsubtle processes, before any of us had read Foucault. That’s why we wanted participatory democracy. That’s why the radical feminist movement was very, very participatory, indeed anarchist in its orientation. It’s why we were so sensitive to any hint of hierarchy, any hint of unequal power. That sensitivity has always been there. It was there then and it’s there now. My deepest community is the feminist community, and I talk to women all the time. What they say informs what I think. That’s why I can talk to you so easily. MW: I can see that! JM: These days, many women of color are involved in that feminist conversation. It’s the best conversation I’ve ever had in my life. It’s constantly

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   223 integrating, constantly illuminating, particularly around issues of subtle and not so subtle exclusion and inclusion. MW: I do think that contemporary democratic theory would not be what it is without the insights that arose from the women’s movement and the theory that built from the years, particularly through the late 70s, 80s and 90s. JM: Right, particularly after women of color got heavily involved in theory-­ making. MW: Yes. So are there identifiable features of democratic theory that we can’t imagine having been achieved without the feminist movement? JM: I’m not sure. I began my life as an historian. You become attuned to the accidents of life as an historian. So I can completely imagine our having achieved a lot of those insights through the work of people of color, or through the work of indigenous people, or through the work of other marginalized groups. I don’t think it would necessarily have to be women, but it would have to be a group with the experience of marginalization.    Women do have a huge advantage in being not a separate caste or class, but being married to, giving birth to, and being the daughters of members of the oppressing group. So we are woven into the fabric of society in a way that a lot of marginalized groups aren’t. And we’ve had the advantage of being able to draw attention to our thinking in ways that most members of marginalized groups can’t, because men love us as spouses, or children or parents, and we speak much the same language because we are in the same class. Those things all let us talk more easily with the dominant group, men, and be understood by them. Women can have these links to the dominant group and at the same time also feel and understand and be able to probe some of the subtleties of oppression – which all subordinate groups feel, but I think women were in a particularly good structural position to explore. Power MW:

JM:

Your involvement in the feminist movement generated a lot of your insights into power – what it is, when to use it, when to fight it. I’m thinking especially of your piece, “Using Power/Fighting Power.” What can you tell us about how those ideas were rooted in your activism? In the more internal-­power part of “Using Power/Fighting Power,” I was thinking of some words in Beyond Adversary Democracy. I had written that “in the first flush of discovering their common history, women in the radical women’s movement felt a tremendous sense of ‘sisterhood.’ To feel that all women were sisters meant that all other differences faded into insignificance beside the overwhelming understanding that they had, so to speak, grown up together – shared the same fears, troubles, ways of coping humiliations, and joys” (Mansbridge, 1980, p. 29). I was arguing then that shared experience created a kind of equal respect that could in some circumstances substitute for equal power.

224   An interview with Jane Mansbridge    Those sentences came out of my first consciousness-­raising group. That group was all white and all middle class. But it cut across other subtle social lines. Many, if not most, of the people in that group were not people with whom I would otherwise have been friends. I was still in that part of my life where I defined myself in part by who I was not, and here in this women’s group were several people that I would have defined myself against: homemakers, pretty straight people. I found a real joy, an amazing bond, in crossing the small boundaries we had in the group, in finding that so many of us had gone through so many of the same things, oppressing ourselves and being oppressed in the same ways, and now talking about it together. We were in the incredible process of discovery as well as connection.    It was out of that experience that I wrote those sentences in Beyond Adversary Democracy about sisterhood. But many women of color in the women’s movement were already saying, “What? A lot of these things you’re talking about are not things that we feel. These are not our typical experiences. And every time you talk about how ‘all women blah, blah,’ boy oh boy, does that wipe the ground with us. It’s a bad analysis, and it’s not easy for us to read.”    So you become aware that literally pretty much every word that comes out of your mouth has some oppressive force. Among English speakers alone it may not be literally every word, but in the world at large it is literally every word that comes out of your mouth, because we’re speaking English, which is now the hegemonic, dominant language. If we go to conferences, we native English speakers are often able to just rattle along, talking, talking, talking in our native language while everybody else is translating. When they come to speak, they’re translating from their language, and they have to think twice and they might not be able to reach the right word. If their mental search does not come across the English word, it’s hard to formulate what they want to say.    You’re interviewing me in English; this interview is going to come out in English. I often stop to try to figure out what word I want to use, but when I do, I can reach into a repertoire of English words. So literally every word that comes out of our mouths is festooned with injustice. It’s permeated with injustice.    I think that the women of color critique, particularly the African Amer­ican critique, of those easy early words in the women’s movement got to me and undergirded what I said in that part of “Using Power/Fighting Power.” That part came out of a deep place in my experience, in my relationships with other women and the women’s movement, and the struggle to try to make it better. We could make it better, but we couldn’t make it right. Racism, for example. All you can do is try to make it better. You cannot make it right. MW: You mentioned earlier that when you gave this paper originally at Seyla Benhabib’s conference, Terrell Carver told you that you were writing about tragedy.

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   225 JM:

When he said that, I almost kissed him. I thought it’s wonderful to be understood by somebody as sensitive as Terrell. It’s funny; I actually have tears in my eyes right now, and I don’t know quite why. I think it’s because of the chasm between what we would like to have be and what is. That’s all.    Except for that one paper, I don’t think I tune in much to the tragedy. I think my primary tone is: “Let’s get to work.” Or: “That’s true; that’s the way it is, but let’s try to figure out how to do the best we can.” I always thought about my mother, that if she had been on the Titanic, she would not have been up on the deck singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” She would have been down in the dining room seeing if she could find a dining room table she could turn upside down to use as a raft. MW: Is there something distinctively Amer­ican about that, that can-­do spirit? JM: It may not be just Amer­ican. It would be interesting to know if it were true, for example, of Africans, because at least traditionally there was so much movement from one place to another in Africa. I don’t know. In any case, in my work I think the tone of tragedy is rarely there. The consciousness of the tragedy is always there for me. But I think the tone is often more, “Let’s try and do the best we can.” Legitimate coercion In your lecture on the occasion of your Amer­ican Political Science Association presidency (Mansbridge 2014b), you argue that helping us understand how to best meet the challenge of legitimate coercion is the key task of political science. You argue that collective action problems lie at the heart of many political challenges, that coercive power is necessary to solve those collective action problems, and that the most important thing political science can do is to generate knowledge about how we can generate legitimate coercion. How did you arrive at that view? JM: When did I first start to think about collective action? Hard to say. [Mancur] Olson ([1965] 1971) wrote in 1965. I was in graduate school then, but I’m sure I was not among the first to read Olson. When I did read it, I doubt if I thought of it as much more than an extremely interesting insight.    Still, the concept must have already played a significant role in my thinking by 1974, because when [Robert] Nozick’s ([1974] 2013) book [Anarchy, State, and Utopia] came out that year, I got it eagerly – because I was influenced by anarchist thinking – and I opened to its first pages, and as I skimmed through, I said to myself, “Okay, okay, okay – what about the collective action problem?” I went to the index to see – what did he say about the collective action problem? He said nothing. So I thought, “Well then, I don’t have much use for this book.” That turned out not to be the case (because I thought he was right about “manna”), but the fact that he said nothing about the collective action problem made me take him far less MW:

226   An interview with Jane Mansbridge seriously as a thinker. So I must have been struggling and thinking about the collective action problem a fair amount by then.    I could date my more serious interest in the collective action problem to my perplexity with why the Equal Rights Amendment was beginning to falter in gaining state ratifications, particularly in Illinois. The ERA went before the states in 1972 and failed in ’82. One of my freshmen students at the University of Chicago used the General Social Survey to show that many people who favored the ERA did not favor other things that the women’s movement wanted. With that as a base, over time it became clear to me that in the women’s movement we were saying the ERA was going to bring about a number of things that a majority of people did not want.    In the most egregious example, why were we saying that the ERA would take women into combat, when it wouldn’t? Only a quarter of the people in the United States at that time – things have changed now, but then only a quarter of the people – wanted women in combat. Why were we saying things like this? Well, look at my own motivations. How could I take my time to work on this damn thing [the ERA] if I didn’t think it was going to be really important? So we stressed how much the amendment would do – even though the Amer­ican public didn’t want it to do much at all; they wanted equal rights in the abstract.    Then I saw that the motivation to work for the ERA had to be ideological, in the sense of ideal-­based, because the ERA was what I now call a “free-­use good” – a good that is open to everyone to use (or benefit from) whether or not they have contributed to bringing it into being. Free-­use goods almost automatically produce a collective action problem, a “free-­ rider problem”: people will try to use the good without contributing to producing it. Olson had stressed the importance of selective incentives for solving the free-­rider problem because selective incentives have the potential to turn a free-­use good into a restricted-­use good. You get the selective incentive only if you contribute to bringing the good about. There were very few selective incentives for working to promote the ERA. So the main reason for working in that social movement had to be some sort of internal, as opposed to external, motivation. And that internal motivation rested in part in thinking you were going to change the world.    At that point I realized that all social movements had this problem. A social movement is almost always trying to bring about a free-­use good. So it automatically creates a free-­rider problem.    The dynamics of collective action and the free-­rider problem played a central role in the ERA book. But after that I didn’t stress it very much and did not connect it in my writing to legitimate coercion. I mentioned the free-­rider problem in passing in “Using Power/Fighting Power,” but I didn’t make it central the way I did in my presidential address.    Global warming made me change my emphasis – looking at the increasing peril to the planet and recognizing that legitimate coercion, while not the only key to solving the problem, is very important in doing so. When

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   227 Al Gore came out with the movie, An Inconvenient Truth, at the end he gave a long list of things you can do. Almost everything in that list is individual action. MW: Reduce, re-­use, recycle. JM: Yes. Perhaps it was inevitable in the sense that people didn’t then – and they don’t now – have the logic of the collective action problem, so for them coercion would be only negative. No one likes coercion. So I can see why Gore avoided mentioning it. “Avoided” isn’t the right word; I’m sure he didn’t go through a conscious process of saying, “I could say this, but I’m not going to.” But this very influential work never said, “we are going to need a carbon tax” (or other laws that will keep people from doing what they want to do). It did not, of course, even touch the dynamic of a free-­use good requiring legitimate coercion. If we don’t understand this dynamic, I’m convinced that we will never muster the collective will to do what we need to do to stop global warming. The planet’s future has made the logic of the collective action problem – the free-­rider problem – more and more important over time. MW: Are there other reasons why we might think that this is a moment in which we must be particularly attuned to collective action problems? In your address you also emphasized the stasis we see in our democracies – even the democracies that have been around for a while. The US is the most striking case. To what extent are the factors of political polarization and legislative paralysis part of your analysis? This was a driving issue behind your APSA Presidential Task Force on “Negotiating Agreement in Politics” (see Chapter 11). JM: Yes, my co-­authors on that project and I – you were one of those co-­ authors, so you remember – came to realize that demokratia isn’t just about the demos, it’s also about kratia, being able to rule ourselves, to act. Even earlier, though, as I was preparing for the Madison lecture (see Chapter 10), my worries around global warming led me to focus more on the problems of stasis. That worry is not new to me. For more than a decade the first lecture in my course on democratic theory at the Kennedy School has begun with the question, “What’s the course about?” Its second sentence answers: “Trying to prevent the annihilation of the human race.” I always give a kind of laugh when I say that, but it’s laughter through tears. That’s what it’s about. In tracing the course of democracy, I show how extremely important the resistance tradition has been to our understanding of democracy and how relatively little effort we have spent thinking about creating legitimate coercion. Believe me, I give more than a tip of the hat to the resistance tradition. It’s anti-­tyranny, and good for it. Now I say we need to spend as much time creating coercion as we have spent fighting coercion.    That doesn’t mean stop resisting. Right now, in addition to old-­fashioned tyranny, which we still have to worry about a lot, we have to worry about modern plutocracy. We have to worry about subtle forms of tyranny. The main tyranny now, I think, is not the tyranny of the king, the kind of

228   An interview with Jane Mansbridge tyranny the resistance tradition was designed to stop; it’s the subterranean tyranny that tyrannizes through stopping action. [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted in 2014; at the time of publication Mansbridge, with many others, is concerned with the potential for more direct tyranny in the rise of authoritarian governments and tendencies within democracy.]    It’s a bit like the kinds of things we were discovering in feminism. Power isn’t just somebody with a big club. Power is in the enemy who has an outpost in your head. Power is in the language we use that says “his” instead of “his or hers” or “theirs.” Power is in the interstices of which we’re not aware. The strengths of the old resistance tradition, in which you stop government action to protect the liberty of the individual, are not so effective when government is not where the main tyranny is coming from.    The fact of global warming, the fact of nuclear proliferation, seeing how difficult it is for us globally to figure out how to deal with our conflicting interests and our common interests and how to manage those in a way that handles the conflicting interests in ways that were relatively legitimate – those issues became more and more important to me. MW: When you were talking about the resistance tradition’s understanding of power as something exercised from the top down in contrast to a more horizontal view of power …. JM: You can see the Foucault here. MW: Exactly. I wanted to just ask you to say a little about whether Foucault has been an explicit influence on your work. JM: Yes, explicit. We all breathe Foucault, really. I mean, just as we’re all Keynesians now, so we are all Foucauldians. How could we not be? My class on Foucault is one that I like most to teach. I stop three or four times in the course of the class and say, “Well, what’s going on now?” and invite people who have just finished reading Power/Knowledge (Foucault 1980) to think about what’s going on right this second. First, obvious things come up, like me standing at the front of the class. But that’s not much of a Foucauldian insight. Pretty soon we get into speaking English, because more than half of the people in the class are not native English speakers. And on from there. The Foucault class is a terrifically easy class to teach in some ways. The hard part is teaching how we’re constituted by power.    When I wrote “Using Power/Fighting Power” I hadn’t done a lot of heavy reading in Foucault. I only lived in a world informed by Foucault. Now that I’ve done more reading in Foucault, it hasn’t changed much what I think; it’s just that I now know the catch phrases a little bit better. I’m fond of the phrases, “there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gambol in” and “no spaces of primal liberty” (Foucault, 1980, pp.  141, 142). He was learning that hard truth when we were learning it. He was an early, formative, part of the gay movement. At the same time we were learning it in the feminist movement. It wasn’t that he invented the concept and we learned it. We were all learning it. He came up with some wonderful ways of talking about it. The issue of being constituted by

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   229 power – that’s harder for students to get. They can get the subtle power part pretty easily. What’s harder is that even as we exert agency, even as we do what’s the very best in us, the most admirable in us, we both constitute and are also constituted by power. MW: Certainly, Foucault gives a different twist to the idea of resistance: thinking about power as circulating, and resistance, not as resistance to something outside, but as what enables the flow of power, like liquid or electricity. JM: Right. There is no power without resistance. In every vein, in every point in the capillary network. I was reading Foucault when I wrote “Using Power/ Fighting Power.” And I have a footnote in that piece criticizing Foucault’s use of the word “power,” which exploits the double meaning in English, French and German of both capacity to act and coercive power as the threat of sanction or the use of force. Foucault gives us a frisson as we realize that power is all around us, in us and through us. He exploits the combination of our negative reactions to coercive power and our positive feelings about ability – capacity to act. For many purposes I don’t think that move is analytically helpful. It’s emotionally satisfying as well as satisfying rhetorically, but analytically, once you start to pull it apart, I think you find you can tell a more nuanced story by separating power as ability from coercive power. We’re all for power as ability – power to and power with. Ability is, as [Jack] Nagel said, “Preferences causing outcomes” (Nagel, 1976, p. 24). But I make the argument that we also need coercive power – power over, the threat of sanction and the use of force. We need coercive power to solve free­rider problems, and they are all around us. Coercive state power is far more crude than the kinds of subtle power to which Foucault was drawing our attention. It’s crude; it’s a “bad” in itself; it’s old fashioned; and we need it. Democracy as a work in progress The last question is two questions, really. Where is democracy heading and where should democratic theory be heading? JM: I don’t know where democracy is heading. Without any doubt it is empirically heading in a direction that makes it harder and harder for average citizens to make the laws that govern their lives. That’s something we’re going to have to exercise huge amount of ingenuity and thoughtfulness to try to not simply oppose, because the reasons it’s going that way have to do with the need for legitimate coercion on a broader and broader scale.    At the same time, I think because of the 60s, or perhaps what [Ronald] Inglehart ([1977] 2015) calls a post-­materialist society, we’re now more attuned to what we want from our democracies in a way that people weren’t necessarily in the 50s. We are now poised to make greater demands. Maybe there will be some openings for institutional innovation, for conceptual innovation, and even for normative innovation. But at the moment we face an increasingly scary collision between our need for state coercion in broader and broader arenas and our declining ability to produce MW:

230   An interview with Jane Mansbridge coercion that is perceived as legitimate. After hearing my presidential lecture, Claus Offe gave me the words “supply and demand.” Just as our demand for legitimate coercion is increasing, our supply is decreasing. Each ounce of legitimacy is becoming more and more precious. We need to do all we can to increase the supply of legitimacy that rests on good normative grounds.    What should democratic theory be doing? I think that the effort that you’re involved in – comparative political theory – is extremely important. It lets us take insights from past and present constellations of power and attempts to create legitimate coercion, make better sense of them, and use some of the insights from one arena to illuminate another. It lets us put our heads together to do some collective thinking.    I think of Ajume Wingo’s article, “Living Legitimacy” about his Fondom [kingdom], in Cameroon. The groups that make up the Fondom change. They used to change more rapidly when the peoples in Africa were more mobile – before colonialism and agriculture for export. Even today, however, his Fondom has seen new lineages moving in (Wingo, 2001). How do they accommodate those lineages? They give one person or more from each lineage some role in the communal enterprise. Schematically speaking, the most populous lineage will produce the chief, the next most populous the chief ’s first wife, the next one the head of the council, the next the head of the religious association. That’s one form of representation – descriptive representation. Can we learn from that? I think we have to be so inventive now. We have to try so hard. We have to draw intelligence and experience from everywhere we can get it – from the experience of all peoples with all forms of representation, even with forms that may be non-­democratic, or democratic in ways that we don’t recognize as democratic at the moment but that looked at in a different light might be filled out, elaborated, in democratic ways.    We need it all. Let’s not look only at our own histories; let’s see if there’s anything else. It’s a scary century coming up. If we manage to survive, we will need all the imagination, inventiveness, mutual concern, and understanding of the ideals behind the ideals that we can get. MW: One final follow-­up. How do you see that activity, democratic theory, linking up with the deliberative systems framework? JM: In a sense I’ve just been talking about the whole world as a deliberative system. If I’m right in thinking that legitimate coercion is what stands between us and annihilation, the legitimacy is the hard part. Anybody can do coercion. We’ve seen coercion from the beginning of time. Legitimate coercion is much more difficult. It’s fragile, it’s not easy to achieve, and it’s easy to destroy. It’s particularly hard to achieve if you don’t know what you’re trying to do. So we’re deliberating about that across the globe. We’re just not doing it very well.    Just as political science is the one group of people in the universe with the not yet fully self-­accepted task of figuring out how to do legitimate

An interview with Jane Mansbridge   231 coercion, so within political science normative theorists are the one group of people in the universe tasked with figuring out how to make the coercion legitimate, genuinely legitimate, not just perceived to be legitimate. We don’t know a lot about that yet. It’s pretty important going forward.    At one point I thought I should do some sort of collection of my work, and I thought I might give it the title, “Democracy as a Work in Progress”. MW: What is the progress in that phrase? JM: Well, a work in change. It’s perhaps less progress than it is a race against time, a race against destruction. It’s a race in which we have to run as fast as we can. A work in progress doesn’t necessarily mean progress to some wonderful at-­the-end-­of-the-­yellow-brick-­road-rising-­sun. It means just figuring out how to do it a little bit better. Fewer bad consequences. More genuine legitimacy. More ideas and institutions you can believe in, so that you can say, at rock bottom, “Yes, this is a fair way of handling things.” MW: Are we getting better at that or are we getting worse at it? JM: The circumstances are building up against us.    If you can believe [Steven] Pinker (2011), which I more or less do, people seem to have become less violent over time, and perhaps more sensitive to one another’s feelings. But although people have probably not gotten more evil, the capacity of a few to make evil decisions – or decisions in their own benefit that will have disastrous consequences for others – has grown. It’s inevitable that the scope of human decisions will grow and that makes it inevitable that the potential power of a few will grow exponentially. So we’ve got to figure out some way of dealing with it. MW: Learn how to democratize the power that needs to be concentrated in order to cope with the increase of scale of the problems? JM: Right. So, we’re running to stay in place. Actually, we’re not running. We’re not staying in place. We’re slipping backwards. Thank you. MW: Thank you, Jenny. Wonderful. JM: What shall we do now? Shall we go for a walk?

Note 1 The Port Huron Statement was a North Amer­ican “New Left” political manifesto of 1962 issued by Students for Democratic Society (SDS); it helped to inaugurate a decade of broadly democratic activism on national and international fronts.

References Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Gesell, Arnold and Frances L. Ilg. 1946. Child Development: An Introduction to the Study of Human Growth. New York: Harper. Inglehart, Ronald. 2015 Legacy Library edn. [1977]. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

232   An interview with Jane Mansbridge Mansbridge, Jane. 1977. “Acceptable Inequalities,” British Journal of Political Science, 7: 321–336. Mansbridge, Jane. 1980. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Mansbridge, Jane. 2014a. “A Contingency Theory of Accountability.” In The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability, ed. Mark Bowens, Robert E. Goodin, and Thomas Schillemans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–68. Mansbridge, Jane. 2014b. “What Is Political Science For?” Perspectives on Politics 12(1): 8–17. Nagel, Jack. 1976. The Descriptive Analysis of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nozick, Robert. [1974] 2013. Repr. Edn. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic. Olson, Mancur. [1965] 1971. Rev. edn. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Wingo, Ajume. 2001. “Living Legitimacy: A New Approach to Good Government in Africa,” New England Journal of Public Policy 16(2): 49–71.

Index

accountability: and anticipatory representation 126–7, 130, 140; and descriptive representation 76, 80, 132; of elected politicians 45, 76, 83, 126, 130, 132, 135–7; and gyroscopic representation 130–3, 137, 140; and participatory democracy 20–1, 23; and promissory representation 121–3, 132; as standard of deliberation 102, 109; and surrogate representation 135, 140; traditional idea of 127, 132–4, 137–40, 142n2 accretion, decisions by 6, 180 activists 113–4n3, 185; and Equal Rights Act 82; interactions with non-activists 101, 103, 108, 109, 113–4n3; as motivated by principles 6, 35n45; participatory 29; transformation into 167n40 activism 9, 231n1; enclaves of 108–9, 179; and everyday talk 106–14; feminist 222–3; scholarship 1–2, 11; social movements 6 Adams, John 73 adversary democracy 2, 3, 4, 8, 115, 162n6, 215, 219, 221 African Americans: black colleges 58; black feminist critique 111, 224; conviction rates compared to white men 95n23; identity 61; political representation of 71–91, 93n11, 95n20, 95n22, 95n27, 135, 143n16; shared experience 17; women 62, 95n23, 106, 114n10 agonism 164n17, 197 Allport, Gordon 32 altruism 7 anticipatory see representation American politics 6, 194

American political science 39, 194 American political theory 196 anarchist thought 222, 225 Arafat, Yasir 77 Arendt, Hannah: on action and the political 54, 64n5, 65n6, 66n17, 105, 198; on democracy and coercion 53–4, 64n5, 65n7; on violence 54, 64n5, 105 Aristotle 18, 38, 196; on friendship and unanimity 4, 15, 16, 22, 23, 221 Arnold, Douglas 125–6 Augustine 195 autonomy: see democracy, direct Bachrach, Peter 30n4, 63n2, 124, 142n8m 164n16, 167n44, 168n45, 168n46 Bales, Robert Freed 216 Baratz, Morton 30n4, 63n2, 124, 142n8m 164n16, 167n44, 168n45, 168n46 Barber, Benjamin 40, 105, 114n8, 165n28, 196 bargaining 8, 112, 164n22; and common good 112; and deliberative negotiation 11, 208–9; and justice 51; negative evaluation of 8, 9, 54, 162n6, 168n46; pure 208–11; and self-interest 148 Barker, Ernest 38, 40, 41 Bartels, Larry 193 Bayh, Birch 82 Beiner, Ronald 105 Beitz, Charles 56 Bellamy, Edward 41 Benhabib, Seyla 114n4, 164n24, 165n28, 224 Benn, Stanley 31n9, 32n16 Bennis, Warren 20 Bentham, Jeremy 115n14, 166n34 Bentley, Arthur 3, 38 Berlin, Isaiah 20

234   Index Bernstein, Robert 94n18, 130, 132 Bianco, William 84, 95, 129, 142–3n10 Bohman, John 116n18, 164n20, 116n36, 186n1 Burke, Edmund 10, 94n16, 132–3, 134, 143n14 Burnheim, John 74, 92n4 Burns, James McGregor 194 Bush, George 123 Butler, Judith 197 carbon tax 227 conflict 44; and adversary democracy 215; and appeals to justice 107; between competing claims 44; between constituency and representative 132; between interest groups 65n7, 75; between functions of a deliberative system 182; between models of representation 141; as central to politics 38, 149, 151–2, 221; and consensus in traditional societies 23; clarification of through deliberation 111–12, 155, 158, 161, 210; of desires 15, 156; in direct democracy 25–8; of goals 101; of ideals 162n3, 222; irreconcilable 53, 150, 155, 221; organizational 3; political 178, 216, 219; of preferences 39, 158; resolution 200; resolution through the democratic process 37, 39, 53, 136–40, 152–3, 198, 210, 219–20 Calhoun, J.C. 24, 32n13 Canadian Royal Commission on Electoral Reform 90 capitalism: corporate 191–2, 194; and inequality 57, 58 care ethic 43; and listening 44 Carver, Terrell 224 Chodorow, Nancy 43 citizens 2, 6, 59, 75, 95n27, 101, 108, 109, 113n3, 114n4, 129, 197, 203, 229; and anticipatory representation 125–6, 139; coercion of 53, 57–8; consent 92; concern for common good 39, 112, 117n24; and deliberative systems 101–2, 175, 177–8, 181–5, 200, 212; in Denmark 201–2; and descriptive representation 80, 88, 93n12; development of 18; equal power 32n19, 41, 196; equal respect for 8; equal standing of 10, 156, 161, 166n32, 185; equality of interest 50, 66n17, 156; everyday talk 101–2, 112–3; experience 22, 25; first-class 88; fraternity 31n10;

gay and lesbian 135–6; and gyroscopic representation 139; informal talk 10; interests of 37, 39, 82, 112, 126, 212, 221; juries 40, 92n5, 185; nonparticipation 25; and promissory representation 123; reasoning 4, 54, 112, 149, 212; representative assembly of 74, 185; second-class 87–8; and surrogate representation 134, 136; trust in representatives 212 Citizens United v. FEC 193 climate change 202; see also global warming coercion: as always contestable 50; and collective decisions; communication free from 54–5; and consensus 22; as constitutive of the self 51–2, 60–1; definition 30n4, 50, 52, 63n2; deliberative eschewal of 8, 9, 53–4, 65n12, 128; direct democracy and 25; enclaves of resistance 50; equal power and legitimacy of 41, 55–6; free-riders 27; illegitimate exercise of 11, 62; labour unions 28; in large polities 28, 57; legitimate 8, 9, 11, 55–6, 57; majority rule 24, 50; participatory democracy as protection against 25, 26–7; as power 8, 9, 11, 30n4, 50, 51, 52, 60, 64n5, 128–9, 136, 139, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 158–62, 167n42, 168n45, 197–9, 225, 229; procedurally fair 60; produced by inequalities 58; role in democracy 1, 8, 9, 51, 53, 55, 58–9; serving common interests 11; in small polities 27; solving collective action problems 11, 53; unfairness 50, 55; veto 24; violence 54, 64n5, 65n7; women’s access to means of 59; see also power Cohen, Joshua 40, 110–12, 115n14, 116n18, 164–5n26, 165n30, 166n32 collective action problem 1, 11, 3, 13–4n31, 55, 169n51, 180, 198, 199, 203, 225–7; coercion 53, 160–1, 191, 197, 198, 202, 225–7; free-rider problem 11, 198 collective decisions 1, 11, 66n17, 102, 114n4, 131 Commission on the Status of Women 86, 95n3 common good 4, 7–8, 38–41, 65n13, 111–12, 116–7n24, 148, 149–52, 154–8, 161, 167n39, 199, 203, 210, 222 communication: among legislators 83; between dominant and subordinate

Index   235 groups 81; between men and women 81; between representative and constituent 71, 77, 80–1, 88, 125–30, 133, 139; deliberation 148, 156; deliberative systems 181; face-to-face 25; free from coercion 54, 64n3, 167n42; impaired by mistrust 71, 81, 90, 93n12; noncognitive forms of 150, 163n13; social 10 communicative agreement 10, 149, 151 comparative political theory 202, 230 competition: among boy children 43; between claims 44; between enclaves 108; between goals 20; between representatives 80; between understandings of fairness 157; for deliberative space 45; electoral 73; glorification of 41; institutionalized 54; interests 19, 38, 149; for political power 4; for power 54; rational outcomes 56; in society 28 compromise: between competing interests 149; between conflicting ideals 222; definition 211; deliberation 133, 149, 164n18, 209, 210; fair 211, 212, 213n8, 213n9, 213n11; friends 27; with injustice 51–2, 61–2; political 19, 92–3n6, 152, 179, 200; power-based 209; with reality 60; as sacrifice 42; veto 93n9 Connolly, William 52 conformity: deviance and 78; of policy to voter preferences 139; pressures in unitary democracy 5; of world situations to democratic norms 139 Conover, Pamela 86 consensus: blocking 115–6n17; coercion 57; common good 7, 8, 149, 153; compromise 149; conventional and unreflective 57; councils 185; decisionmaking 5, 23, 160; as deliberative goal 111, 150–1, 164n17, 198, 210; direct democracy 24; informed 209; involves bullying 24; and majority rule 23–4, 162–3n6, 220–1; oral 24; -oriented talk 9; radical women’s movement’s commitment to 46–7; rationally motivated 111, 164n20; as regulative ideal of deliberative democracy 148–9, 164n17; as unanimity 22, 23; see also: decision-making, deliberation, unanimity consent: direct vs. through representation 35n39, 92n4; liberal theory of 25; verbal vs. non-verbal 46

contingency 71–96; contingency theory 33n20 convergence 151 corruption: institutional 205n21; reducing 199; regimes 199, 200–2; of republican virtue 39 Crocker, Hannah Mather 41 Crockett, George 77 Dahl, Robert 32n19, 55–6, 67n22, 92n5, 112, 123–4, 167n44; on impediments to democracy 191–6, 203 decision-making: action 50–1, 65n7, 105, 114n8, 208; affected interest 114–5n17; agonism 197; anticipatory representation 126; balance of interests 39; binding 102, 104–5, 112, 116n23, 117n25, 148–9, 157, 162n2, 166n31, 180; capitalism 57, 203; coercion 57–60, 142n9, 148–9, 160–1, 167n42, 198; coercion-minimizing 10; common interests discovered through 6, 8; consensus (unanimity) 5, 22, 24, 34n31, 34n38, 47; decentralized 40; deliberative 38, 47, 76–7, 101–2, 110, 143n19, 148, 154–8, 162n2, 162n4, 166n31; deliberative systems 176–83; development of faculties 18, 40; direct face-to-face 24, 26, 34n38; effective 3; egalitarian 9, 183; equal power in 5, 19–22, 28, 56, 66n17, 196, 198, 202; equal worth and respect 9, 20; executive collective 1; global international 191, 202; growing scope of consequences 231; informed 181, 212; legitimating processes and procedures 8, 11, 50, 55–8, 76, 109, 112, 115n14, 117n25, 175, 178, 182, 185, 202–3; listening 44; majority rule 23, 34n35, 221; New England town meetings 23, 219; nondeliberative modes of 9, 150; outside the state 114, 154, 178; participatory democracy 15–16, 35n42; political parties 131; power’s distortion of 156–8, 161; proportional representation 136–7; quality of 113, 177, 220; representatives 29, 90, 153, 202–3; by representatives for their own interests 25; speech-centered forms of 5; through reasoning about the common good 4, 7; traditional societies 22; under conditions of conflict 3; U.S. Supreme Court 152, 193 decision by accretion 6, 180

236   Index deliberation: aimed at action 102; assemblies 102, 109, 110, 113, 149; in authoritarian regimes 180; between constituent and representative 71, 139; binding decision 157, 162n2, 166n31; civil disobedience 184; clarifying conflicting and common interests 7, 9, 53, 65n7, 142n6, 150, 155, 161, 210; classic 149–51, 154; and coercion 53–5, 65n12, 128–9, 136, 159–61, 168n45, 168n46, 198, 200; common good 38–40, 112, 155, 157; conflicting interests 8, 136–7, 153, 155; consent 46; consensus 150, 153, 198, 210; considerations 150; convergence 151–2; criteria for democracy as 38; descriptive representation 80, 93n10; direct democracy 40; as distinct from bargaining and negotiation 8; distrust 94n10; emotions 44–5, 111, 163n13; empathy 150, 163n13; enclave model 59; equality 111, 115n17, 116n18, 128–9, 148, 160, 182; face-to-face 5, 9, 175; formal 101, 110, 112; forms of democratic 149; freedom 115n14; gyroscopic representation 139; “hot” 164n25; internal group differences 86; juries 40, 185; justice 52; legitimacy 88, 110–12; listening 43; manipulation 116n19, 129, 130; as mask for domination 37–8; mutual justifiability 150, 157, 160; mutual respect 182, 202; and negotiation 151, 203, 210; parliamentary 175; partisanship 179; persuasion 47; political 2; power 45, 110; practices that undermine 47; promissory representation 139; proportional representation 76–7, 143n19; pure 208–10; quality of 40, 49, 71, 91, 101, 109, 112, 130, 134, 139, 175, 177; as reasoned exchange of arguments 7, 9, 39, 149; and representation 71–3, 77, 80, 88, 95n23, 112, 122, 133–4, 138–40, 149; selfdefense 160; self-interest 112, 148–51, 154–61, 164n24; shift from pluralist paradigm to 5; as theatre 45; transformation of participants 53, 149, 157–8; women 41, 45–6, 59, 94n15, 107; see also deliberative democracy deliberative democracy 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 42, 127, 177, 185; binding decision 148, 162n2; as democracy 38; empirical study of 185; feminist writing and 37;

forms of communicative agreement in 151; idea of legitimacy in 185; problem of scale 175; regulative ideals of 115n14, 148, 154; self-interest 148, 151, 154, 156, 166n36; see also deliberative system deliberative co-authorship 10, 11, 161n*, 186n*, 212n* deliberative negotiation 8, 11, 151–7, 161, 208–11, 213n8 deliberative system 10, 101, 113n1, 175–86, 186n1, 230; boundaries of 176; defects of 183–4; democratic function of 182; division of labour 176–9; divisions within 184; and everyday talk 101–13, 113–4n3; epistemic function of 181; ethical function of 181–2; nongovernmental parts of 102; opinion- and will-formation within 112–3; unfair advantage 110; see also deliberation; see also deliberative democracy democracy 11, 37–9, 52, 59, 63, 121, 160, 191, 196, 202–3, 208, 216; adversary 2, 3, 4, 8, 115, 162n6, 215, 219, 221; aggregative 39, 75–6, 115, 127, 128, 136, 149, 151; agonistic 164n17; AngloAmerican theory of 136; anticipatory representation 125; Athenian 4, 220–2; attenuation of 196; authoritarian governments 228; coercion 50, 52, 53, 56–7, 151; consensual egalitarian 29; contributions of feminist thinkers to 9; Danish 200–3; developmental 221; direct 1, 16, 19, 25–6, 34–5n38, 35n40, 35n44, 40, 76, 122, 136, 140, 203, 216; domination in America by business interests 191; equal power 55–6, 65n9, 66n17, 220; equality 1; face-to-face 4, 24, 28, 216; ideal of 55; impediments to 191–5, 203; independence from deliberative system 180; interest-based models of 149; large-scale 5, 56–7; liberal 196, 215; Madisonian 3, 203; majoritarian 55; mutual respect 181; neocorporatism 59; normative theories of 51; normative value of 55; obstacles to 11; participatory 1, 4, 8, 15, 18, 26, 29, 32n19, 35n42, 216, 217, 219, 222; power to solve collective action problems 199; public discussion 37; representative 25, 26, 29, 35n39, 73, 75, 125, 136; republican 215; resistance in 197, 227; small-scale 5, 35n44; territorially based 216; town meeting

Index   237 74; unitary 3, 4, 5, 215; as work in progress 229–31; see also deliberation; see also deliberative democracy democratic theory 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 56, 62, 76, 101, 116n18, 139, 199, 200, 201, 203, 223, 227, 229–31; see also deliberative democracy; see also deliberative system descriptive see representation Dewey, John 114n6, 116–7n24 Diamond, Irene 72 Dixon, Marlene 44 domination 3, 18, 26, 37, 38, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 60, 62, 104, 110, 182, 191, 196, 197; institutional 183–4; social 183 Dryzek, John 186n1 Durkheim, Émile 36 Dworkin, Andrea 37, 46 education 19, 58, 177, 198; political 20, 125–30, 137, 139; progressive 45 egalitarianism 46 elections 19, 25–6, 39, 72–6, 85–6, 92n5, 94n14, 121, 123–7, 130–41, 143–4n23, 193, 201–3; reform 40; see also representation Elshtain, Jean 105–6, 114n5 Elster, Jon 160, 162n6, 165n28, 169n51 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 196 emotion 17, 18, 23, 25–7, 40, 42, 44–9, 55, 64n3, 102, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114–5n11, 117, 140; see also: empathy empathy 17, 18, 31n9, 31n10, 42, 43, 44, 47, 107, 108, 111, 150, 163n13 empirical analysis 3, 5–8, 20, 49, 72–3, 88, 121–8, 130, 137–8, 175, 184–6, 200, 201, 219, 222 enclaves: see activism, coercion, competition, deliberation, resistance Equal Rights Amendment 1972 1, 5–6, 12n2, 82, 83, 226 equality: between men and women 46–7; of citizens 10, 16–21, 41, 50, 105, 110, 156, 161, 185; compared to mutual respect 30n7; in deliberation 102, 148–9, 152–3, 156, 160, 182; of dignity 89; economic 192, 200; in friendship 15; of opportunity to exercise power or influence 32n19, 66n17, 129; political (see also equality of power) 15, 16–21, 26, 29, 67n22, 105, 110, 197, 203; in protection of interests 4, 9, 19–20, 220; of capacity 116n18; of power 2, 4, 5, 16–22, 28, 32n19, 41, 53, 55–6, 60,

66n17, 111, 123, 128–30, 136, 151, 198, 202, 219, 220–1, 223; and representation 139–41; of respect 5, 8, 9, 16–21, 28, 31n9, 31n11, 32n16, 220–1, 223; social 88; of voice 116n18; of vote 32n18; see also inequality essentialism 47, 78–9 Eulau, Heinz 34n31 European Union 176, 202 everyday talk 2, 10, 101–3, 109–13; and everyday activism 106–8 exploded diagram 1, 12 face-to-face: assembly 4, 5, 15; communication 5, 24–5; conflict 44; decision-making 24; democracy 9, 26, 28, 29; meetings 24–5; participation 4, 26 faculties, development of 18, 29, 31n13, 32n15, 40–1, 221 fairness: adversary 137; definition of 157, 213n11; in deliberation 8, 152, 153, 156, 161, 166n31, 211; procedural 50, 53, 56, 136; see also equality Fearon, James 131, 132, 143n13 feminism: black feminism 79, 95n23, 111, 114n10, 223; contributions in thought and writing 1, 9, 37, 38, 41, 47, 49, 105, 222–3; on deliberation 44; organizations 1, 79, 222–3; personal is political idea 1, 105; on power and domination 42, 46, 52, 95n23, 222–4 Fenno, Richard 84, 143n10 Ferguson, Kathy 43 Feuerbach, Ludwig 31 Fishkin, James 92n5, 162–3n6 Follett, Mary Parker 41–2, 52, 152, 164n21, 210 force, as component of coercive power 10, 30n4, 50, 52–3, 63n1–63n2, 65n8; see also power Ford, Gerald 84 Foucault, Michel 46, 60, 61, 110, 158, 167n43, 197, 222, 228–9 Frank, Barney 95n24, 135–6 fraternity 31n10 Fraser, Nancy 115n16, 115n17, 116n23, 162n2 free speech 59, 137, 180 free-use good 226–7 freedom 18, 102, 110, 115n14, 141, 163n10, 168n46, 196, 203 Freud, Sigmund 38 Friedrich, Carl 124

238   Index friendship 4, 9, 221; civic 43; limits of 15–29, 36n51 Fromm, Erich 32 Fung, Archon 158, 164n25 Gay, Claudine 81 gay and lesbian people 24, 62, 87, 93n12, 135–6, 228 gender 2, 6, 42, 45, 46–9, 72–3, 75, 78, 83–6, 92–3n6, 94n15, 95n23, 107; see also: feminism; see also: gay and lesbian people; see also: women Gesell, Arnold 216–17 Gilligan, Carol 48–9 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 41 global warming 11, 184, 191, 194, 199, 203, 226–8 Goodin, Robert 186n1 Gore, Al 227 Gray III, William 77 Great Britain 113n2, 201, 221 Green, T.H. 18 Griffiths, A. Phillips 92n1 Grofman, Bernard 93n8 Guinier, Lani 93n12, 94n14, 168n48 Gutmann, Amy 111, 112, 117n25, 162n2, 165n28 gyroscopic see representation Hainisch, Carol 104 Habermas, Jürgen 7, 39, 53, 54, 65n11, 65n12, 103, 110, 112, 113n2, 114n4, 115n14, 116n23, 116–7n24, 149, 151, 166n34, 166n36, 167n42, 180, 186n1, 197 Hacker, Jacob 192–3, 194 Hartsock, Nancy 42 Haynes, Elizabeth 81 Hegel, G.W.F 18 Heilig, Peggy 95n27 Held, Virginia 43 Helpline 4, 217–19, 220 Henley, Nancy 105 Hendriks, Carolyn 186n1 Heritage Foundation 200 Hill, Anita 86 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 53, 220 Homans, George 36n51 homophobia 108 Honig, Bonnie 143n20, 197 Hyde, Janet Shibley 94n15 ideals: behind ideals 219–23; deliberative 116n18, 150, 161, 162n3, 176; democratic 65n12, 71, 129, 161, 197,

203, 208; of equality 15; of good government 26; of human interaction 107; maternal 42; moral theory 166n34; normative 79; and practice 2, 11, 108–9; regulative (or unachievable) 65n12, 93n9, 115n14, 116n18, 122, 148, 203; of representatives 131 identity 18, 44, 58, 72, 78–9, 88, 89, 112, 131, 158, 163n15, 167n40 Ilg, Frances 216–17 inaction 50, 52, 191, 203 incompletely theorized agreements 152 incumbencies 11, 80, 211–12 individualism 3, 39 inequality 16, 17, 199, 218–9: economic 192, 194; management of 3; as obstacle to democracy 11, 95n26; patterns of 2; political 19, 56, 57, 58, 104, 135–7, 194; of power 20–1, 38, 49, 160, 218, 221; social 10, 60; women 47; see also: equality; see also fairness influence 30n4; see also persuasion information: accurate 21, 154; adequacy of 84, 125, 129, 177, 182; in deliberation 152, 154–7, 178, 179, 212, 219; and experts 122, 136; persuasion through 55; on public opinion 125; representative advantages 77; self-interest as 155–7; sources of 21, 151; withholding of 168n45, 211 Inglehart, Ronald 229 institutional design 3, 89 institutional innovation 5, 229 interests: clarification of 7, 9, 53, 65n7, 111–12, 142n6, 150, 155, 158, 161, 210; common 5, 27, 128, 137, 158, 215, 219; conflicting 3, 4, 5, 7–11, 19, 23, 25, 30n4, 39, 40, 42, 50, 53–6, 58, 60, 65n14, 76, 78, 93n9, 105, 111, 128, 136–40, 143n22, 148, 150–6, 159, 161, 164n24, 167n44, 168n45, 215, 217, 219, 220, 222, 228; defined 64n3; uncrystallized 82–6 Jackson, John 94n16, 134 Johnson, James 116n18, 129 Jones, Mack 87 justice: and coercion 198; conception of 156; gender 104, 107; procedural 34–5n8, 50, 60; and reconsideration of public positions 184 justifications 112, 113, 117n25, 154–6, 164–5n26, 166n31, 166n36, 182, 185, 201; mutual 8, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156–7, 160–1

Index   239 Kant, Immanuel 30–1n7, 34n38, 115n14, 165n28 Kateb, George 196 Kaufman, Arnold 15, 18 Kempton, Sally 61 Keniston, Kenneth 18 Kim, Jae-on 2 King, David 134 Kingdon, John 94n19, 130, 132, 133 Knight, Jack 116n18, 129 Krause, Sharon 186n1 Kuttner, Robert 200 Kymlicka, Will 90, 95n26 labor unions 28, 39, 44, 134, 181, 193, 194, 199, 201 Lane, Robert 30n7, 31n9 Lautenbach, Manegold of 195 leadership 21, 74 League of Women Voters 40, 47 legislation 76, 196; citizens as authors of 182; on electoral reform 40; guided by public interest 39; as safeguard 199; and social movement pressures 103; societal decisions’ indirect impact on 180 legitimacy: concept of 34n38; de facto 71; of decisions 34n35; democratic 2, 3, 4, 5, 57; political 3, 65n12; standard of equality 4 legitimate coercion 8, 9, 11, 41, 54–7, 191, 197–9, 200, 202, 203, 225–7, 229–31 Leland, Mickey 81 liberty 112, 196, 228 listening 2, 23, 42, 43–5, 107, 111, 149, 152, 153, 160, 181, 183, 184, 211 lobbying 39, 65n7, 193, 194, 204n4 Locke, John 3, 19, 25, 35n39, 39, 221 lot, lottery: see random selection love 18, 46, 223 Lucas, J.R. 17 Lukes, Stephen 63n2, 124, 142n8 Machiavelli, Niccolò 39, 169n52, 196 MacKinnon, Catharine 46 Madison, James 3, 38, 73, 143n13, 191, 192, 193, 196, 203, 227 majority rule 3, 5, 15–16, 23, 24, 53, 56, 105, 150, 151, 179, 191, 198, 200, 208, 219, 220–1 Manin, Bernard 92n4, 166n36 manipulation 30n4, 116n19, 128–30; see also power Marmor, Theodore 75 Marx, Karl 38, 41

Maslow, Abraham 32 McKersie, Robert 164n22, 213n4 media 101–2, 125, 128, 129, 130, 175, 176–7, 179, 181, 184, 212 Mezey, Susan Gluck 95n23 Mill, J.S. 18, 38, 40, 41, 114n5, 166n34 Miller, Warren 143n12 Millet, Kate 105 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquet 73 Montesquieu, C.L. 196 morality: basis for mutual respect in democracy 181–2; behavior in deliberation 156, 160, 166n31; claims 42; control of representatives 122, 136, 141; development 48; force of argument 86; Kantian derivation from reason 43n38; vs. prudential relation between voters and representatives 127; worth 56 Morone, James 75 Moseley-Braun, Carol 85, 95n22 Mouffe, Chante 197 Mundt, Robert 95n27 Nagel, Jack 92n5, 124, 128, 142n3, 166n36, 167n44, 229 National Labor Relations Board 194 National Organization for Women 47 National Women’s Studies Association 46 Neblo, Michael 186n1 Nedelsky, Jennifer 37 negotiation 150, 153, 212; bargaining and 8, 148, 149, 164n18, 208–11, 213n8; between stakeholders 199; cooperative 155; deliberative 8, 11, 151, 156, 157, 161, 208–11; micro- 2, 103; integrative 42, 44, 149, 152–7, 210–12 New Left 15, 16, 25 Nie, Norman H. 2 Nozick, Robert 43, 53, 225 Nussbaum, Martha 111 Occupy Wall Street 199 Offe, Claus 65n14, 230 Okin, Susan 43 Olson, Mancur 225, 226 Page, Benjamin 125 participation hypothesis 33n20 Pateman, Carole 45, 55, 221 Payne, Donald 61 Pennock, Roland 72 persuasion 8, 38, 41, 42, 54, 55, 60, 65n9, 105, 108, 116n19, 150, 159

240   Index Pettit, Philip 165n27, 166n36, 167n44 Petty, William 35 Phillips, Anne 79, 92n1, 94n17 Pierson, Paul 192, 193, 194 Pinker, Steven 231 Pitkin, Hanna 72, 73, 74, 93n10, 131 Plamenatz, John 31n9 pluralism, affirmative 60 Pocock, J.G.A 39 political, concept of 65n11, 104–6, 114n4, 186n3 political equality 2, 5, 15–19, 26, 32n16, 56, 67n22 political legitimacy 3, 88, 175, 186, 203 political parties 41, 80, 82, 83, 85, 90, 91, 131, 132, 181, 184, 200, 201, 203, 212 political participation 1, 2, 18, 79, 93n12, 94n14; see also direct democracy; see also democracy, participatory political power 5, 21, 40, 54, 65n12 political preferences 17, 37, 84, 124–6, 129, 131: aggregation of 39, 127, 128, 139, 148, 149; as given 45; registering of 37, 126; weighing of 39, 181 political representation 1, 9, 10, 122, 196, 215; see also representation political theory 3, 5, 195, 222; of democratic action 191; normative 7, 103, 208, 230; social contract tradition 195, 196; see also comparative political theory political philosophy 37 political science 1, 3, 6–8, 37, 103, 216, 222, 225, 230–1: American 39; empirical 128, 219 politics of recognition 88 Popkin, Samuel 84 Port Huron Statement 15, 18, 25, 32n15, 221, 23n1 Powell, Colin 95n20 power, defined 30n4, 50, 52–3, 63n1–63n2, 124, 128; in Arendt 64n5; feminist theories of 42–3; see also citizens, coercion, competition, cooperation, decision-making, deliberation, equality, feminism, force, influence, inequality, manipulation, political power, sanction, state power promissory see representation public sphere 41, 112, 114n4, 116n23, 117n24, 162n2, 183, 197 publicity 102, 109, 115n14, 181 random selection 73–4, 202; see also: representation, microcosmic

rational egoism 3 rational choice theory 7 rationality 102 rationally motivated consensus 11, 164n20 Rawls, John 7, 32n19, 67n24, 115n16, 156, 166n34, 213n12 reason: and argument 7, 18, 54, 59, 106, 139, 149, 154, 183; and emotion 40, 102, 108, 109, 111–12 reason-giving 10, 148, 152 reasonableness 57, 59, 84, 112, 139, 154, 155, 209 reasonable consensus 57, 149 reciprocity 8, 16, 102, 109, 111, 152, 156, 161, 166n31 Redfield, Robert 28, 36n56 referenda 15, 24, 25, 40, 58, 65n9 regulative ideals see ideals remainders 143n20 reparations 88 representation: adversary 137; anticipatory 124–7, 130–3, 139–41, 142n5, 143n13; descriptive 10, 71–91, 92n1, 94n17, 95n26, 230; gladiatorial 139; gyroscopic 83, 122, 130–41; mandate 122–3; microcosmic 73–5; promissory 121–4, 127, 129, 132, 133, 139, 140–1; proportional 76, 90, 91, 96n29, 137, 200; sanction model of 4, 10; selection model of 4, 74, 75, 79, 83; substantive 71, 79, 83, 86, 89, 94n17; surrogate 89, 94n16, 121, 134–40; trustee 122–3; see also political representation; see also representative democracy representative democracy 25, 26, 29, 35n39, 75, 136; see also political representation; see also democracy, representative; representation Republican Party 80, 83, 193 resistance 184, 199, 202; enclaves of 50; Foucauldian theory of 61, 197, 228–9 resistance tradition 9, 11, 191, 195–6, 227–8 respect: in deliberation 40, 107, 150, 176, 181, 183–4; equal 5, 8, 9, 16–21, 28, 220–1, 223 (see also equality); mutual 16, 22, 28, 30n7, 107, 111, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 161, 166n31, 176, 181–3, 202 retrospective voting: see representation, anticipatory Rogers, Carl 32n15 Rorty, Amelie 111 Rousseau, J.J. 22, 25, 31n13, 33n30, 35n40, 45–6, 221

Index   241 Runciman, W.G. 30n7 Ruddick, Sara 42, 43 Rudolph, Lloyd 218 rule of law 50, 55, 200 de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri 41 Sapiro, Virginia 87, 92n2 Schaar, John 31n9 Schlafly, Phyllis 86 Schumpeter, Joseph 3, 38–9, 64n5 Selby 4, 217, 219 sanction, threat of, as component of coercive power 50, 52, 63n1–63n2; sanction model see representation; see also power selection model see representation self-censorship 19 self-development 9, 18–19, 29, 116n18, 221 self-interest 3, 6–8, 10, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 112, 133; role in deliberative democracy 148–61, 163n15, 164n24, 164–5n26, 165n28, 166n31, 166n34 self-respect 17 side-payments 11, 211–12 Slater, Philip 20 Socrates 220 social contract 195–6 social meaning 71, 86, 87–9 social movements 1, 6, 16, 58, 103, 108, 113n3, 117, 179, 181, 226; civil rights 58; gay rights 228; women’s 1, 3, 17, 21, 26, 46, 58, 79, 87, 104, 222–6, 228 sovereignty 25 surrogate see representation state power 199, 229 Stimson, James 126, 130, 132 Stokes, Susan C. 143n12 Students for a Democratic Society 15 Sunstein, Cass 39, 152, 162n6 Swain, Carol 73, 80, 81, 94n14 Taylor, Charles 89 taxation 44, 53, 57, 123, 133, 183, 192, 194, 200, 212 Tea Party Movement 6 technology 11, 193 Thoreau, Henry David 196 Thomas, Clarence 86 Thomas, Sue 95n23 Thompson, Dennis 111, 112, 117n25, 162n2, 165n28

Tönnies, Ferdinand 36n56 traditional societies 22, 23 trust: distrust or mistrust 16, 25, 71, 76, 90, 91, 93n12, 94n15; communicative distrust 80–2 unanimity 15–16, 22–4, 25, 26, 28, 33–4n31, 53; see also: consensus Unger, Roberto 114n4 United Daughters of the Confederacy 85 United States 6, 19, 20, 200–1; African Americans in 58, 77, 85; democracy in 139, 191–2, 194, 196–7, 203; labour unions in 28; representation in 27, 81, 83, 110, 129, 131–5, 137; women in 43, 46, 58, 62, 87, 226, 66, 74, 75 United States Constitution 32n18, 66n18, 72, 110, 194 United States Supreme Court 19, 39, 86, 152, 193 Verba, Sidney 2 veto 11, 23, 93n9, 194, 199, 201, 203; individual 16, 24 Vietnam Summer 16–18, 34n33 Vietnam War 25, 39, 154 violence: in Arendt 64n5 voluntary acts 6, 15, 27, 58, 181, 188 Voting Rights Act 1964 199 Walton, Richard E. 164n22, 213n4 Walzer, Michael 53, 54, 65n9 Weber, Max 54, 64n5, 66n17, 123, 124, 167n44 Weissberg, Robert 94n16, 134 Whyte, William Foote 22, 36n51 Williams, Bernard 30n7, 31n9, 32–3n19 Williams, Melissa 94n15, 95n20 Williams, Patricia 61 Wills, Garry 39 Wilson, James 73, 143n13 win/win 42, 44 Wingo, Ajume 230 Wolff, Robert Paul 34–5n38 Wolin, Sheldon 105, 196 Wollheim, Richard 92n1 women’s movement 1, 3, 17, 21, 26, 46, 58, 79, 87, 104, 108, 222–6, 228 World War II 38, 183, 221 Young, Iris Marion 72, 93n9, 114n4, 115n17, 149, 163n13, 168n28, 192