The Social Selectivity of Political Procedures

The fairly high degree of social inequality in today's democracies is well known and has been broadly analyzed in the social sciences. Social selectivities can be understood as causal effects that are anchored in the basic elements of political institutions and therefore can occur under diverse external conditions. Any theory of social selectivities of political structures is based on a non-contextualist understanding of the functioning of institutions and procedures. It assumes a context-transcending structure that has negative effects on social equality under almost all conditions. It is important to distinguish between input-dependent and input-independent selectivity: Input-dependency implies that political institutions mirror, reproduce, or amplify inequalities given in society. In contrast, input independence means that a specific political procedure generates inequalities by means of its very own elementary structure. These institutions have an inherent selectivity. Both forms of selectivity can coexist in contemporary political structures. This paper studies the existing literature on inequalities and political structures from a systematic perspective. First, contributions from political sociology, democracy research, state theory, comparative politics, as well as feminist and post-colonial theory that posit generalized social selectivities are examined to determine which element of a political procedure exactly is responsible for the selective effects. Second, the major contributions from normative political theory and their attempts to construct non-selective procedures (under such terms as neutrality or pure procedural justice) are analyzed. Which arrangements in the construction of ideal political orders are made to thwart social selectivity? The critical analyses of current procedures and the normative construction of potentially non-selective procedures are finally brought together to develop a typology of selectivity generation and avoidance. This paper focuses on the selectivity of procedures. In contrast to the concept of institutions, to which the topic of selectivity often refers, the concept of a procedure can be defined more clearly. The advantage of the concept of procedure concerns the temporal nature of procedures. Procedures assign time according to phases of before and after. Procedures are also complexes of actors, objects, and operations. Procedural steps contain their own constellations of actors, objects, and operations; through their connection and succession, they constitute complex forms of procedures. An analytic version of the concept of procedure allows one to account for (observed or assumed) selectivities more precisely: Are they arranged in the actor constellations of individual procedural steps, in the permitted or required operations, in the respective objects, or in the sequence of procedural steps? As a result, the systematic attribution of selectivities to individual elements of procedures could provide a solid basis for an attempt at a more general theory of social selectivity.