Disagreement among philosophers around the proper justification of political institutions is not a new phenomenon. So it might not come as a surprise that within democratic theory a large room is still left for dissent concerning the best justification of democracy. +On the other hand, so-called procedural accounts view democracy as legitimate regardless of its products, but due to some special features that the procedure itself possesses. Both approaches have merits and flaws. Butt I will explore the distinction between instrumentalism and proceduralism in order to focus on the latter. +
The paper is organised as follows. First, I introduce the two accounts of democratic legitimacy and offer a set of three criteria to draw a line between them, concerning the reference, the modality and the validity of justification. The first criterion draws a line between justifications focusing on procedures directly and those which focus on procedures indirectly, through reference to outcomes, while showing how also instrumentalism is interested in procedures and does not qualify as a ‘correctness theory’ (Estlund 2008). The second criterion pertains the kind of relationship that is envisaged between the justifying value, like freedom or equality, and democracy and identifies most instrumental justifications as tracing a contingent kind of relationship and proceduralist justification a necessary one (Rostbøll 2015). The validity criterion concerns the amount of conditions that ought to be true for the justification of democracy to achieve its aim, political legitimacy. While all instrumental justifications are conditional, procedural justifications further split up in two: some of them are conditional on citizens’ disposition (Rawls 2005, Waldron 1999, Rousseau 2002), whereas some others are not (Christiano 2008, Peter 2008, Kolodny 2014a, 2014b).
Second, I dig into the proceduralist side and characterize the two above-mentioned strands. If disposition-dependent accounts take democracy to be legitimate only insofar as citizens show a certain disposition towards the common good or justice, while engaging in political activities, disposition-insensitive approaches justify democracy as an instantiation of procedural justice and as a morally correct way to treat people. As a result, the former strand qualifies as exclusive, because it requires citizens to be reasonable or in good faith, while the latter thread incurs in the following disadvantages: 1) it requires an account of political obligation grounded on a natural duty of justice to achieve democratic legitimacy; 2) it establishes an asymmetry between the objective way democracy is justified and the democratic principle of responsiveness to what people think; 3) it fails to justify democracy as a procedure for taking collectively binding decisions and where citizens ought to manifest their political agency, rather than a set of political rights everyone is endowed with; and 4) it overlooks the problem of democratic stability, i.e. dealing with the possibility of citizens’ ending democracy democratically. Finally, I conclude by sketching the silhouette of a justification of democracy that is disposition-dependent and inclusive at the same time.
