Democracy and power. Legal and causal conceptions of the powers conferred by the right to vote

By the democratic vote citizens are assumed to exercise power over electoral outcomes that in turn determine the composition of legislative and executive bodies. In particular, it is commonly argued that voting rights confer power both to individual voters and to the general body of the electorate. In this paper the plausibility of these claims is evaluated by appeal to two distinct conceptions of power: the causal view, according to which power equals the ability to exert causal effect, and the legal view, according to which power equals the legal ability to produce legal effects. One proposition defended in this paper is that causal conceptions are unable to provide an account of the powers possess by voters, whether individually or collectively, that is consistent with democratic aspirations. Another proposition defended is that legal understandings of the powers conferred by voting rights are better equipped to explicate the democratic expectation that the electorate exclusively control the outcome of elections. In contrast to other recent attempts to explain the legal powers of the vote as “joint powers” (Waldron), this paper defends the collective conception of legal power. Hence, truthful claims about the powers conferred by voting rights must refer exclusively to the collective legal powers of the electorate.