The Negative and the Positive Side of Democratic Institutional Design

By what standard does one measure the success of democratic institutions? This question is of critical importance to democratic theory. On the one hand, assessments of democratic performance purely in terms of citizen preference satisfaction seem inadequate; the “tyranny of the majority,” for example, is only a problem because popular majorities may acquiesce—or even enthusiastically support—violations of minority rights. On the other hand, assessments of democratic performance in terms of criteria external to citizen preference—objective measures such as economic growth—are often criticized as undemocratic. At the very least, it is a matter of contingency whether democracies satisfy such criteria better than non-democracies. (Perhaps a non-democratic, technocratic system of expert rule could generate higher economic growth than a democracy.) The development of a standard of assessment that assigns a special place to democracy, but without merely devolving into citizen preference satisfaction, remains a work in progress. Drawing upon the work of Jeremy Bentham, the political theorist Jon Elster has forcefully argued that democratic institutional design should be negative, not positive. It should aim to keep baneful influences out of the political process, instead of trying to ensure that the process produces high-quality decisions. In doing so, he hopes to develop an effective measure of democratic institutional performance. Elster stresses very effectively the limits of our current knowledge of how democratic institutions work. He also defends some useful "negative" institutional mechanisms that are compatible with those limits. But his emphasis upon negative institutional design is overstated; such design cannot be coherently carried out without some positive vision of the democratic process, however minimal.