Democratic Innovations and the Boundary Problem: The Boundary Assembly

The question who should belong to the political community is one of the most hotly debated topics in political theory today. For a long time, scholars have focused on substantive proposals when it came to the question of the boundaries of the democratic state. The all-affected or the all-subjected principles are presented as the most promising normative guidelines to determine who should belong to political communities. However, it seems increasingly unsatisfying to merely present a substantive philosophical answer to such a politically contested issue. My paper focuses on existing institutional proposals for legitimate boundary-making (Abizadeh 2008, Fraser 2010, Benhabib 2011) and outlines a new institution that should have the right to draw membership boundaries: the Boundary Assembly. I engage with recent literatures on democratic innovations and deliberative systems to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such a political approach to the boundary problem.