How Ideal Should a Justification of Democracy Be?

The debate on ideal vs. non-ideal theory has a prominent role among all the disputes that have engaged political theory in recent years. Despite the best efforts, however, a clear-cut and definitive answer is missing and at least one reason seems to be that “political theory” is actually a too broad umbrella term which includes various problems and topics that require diverse approaches. Hamlin and Stemplowska have this in mind when they claim that ideal and non-ideal theory, more than opponent and rival methodologies, are rather on a continuum, where the appropriate position theorists ought to take is determined by the problems they have to face (2012). Following their suggestion, this paper aims to apply this view to democratic theory and specifically asks: what level of idealisation is appropriate when we attempt to justify democracy? I will answer the question ex negativo, by laying out two ways in which democratic theory should not proceed. First of all, democracy itself is a concept with many specifications. It can be thought of as a way of life, as a procedure of decision-making or as an ideal we should strive for. Hereby I take democracy as a distinctive procedure that generates collectively binding decision. Among the things that any justification of democracy so understood has to specify, one concerns the relevant conditions under which the justification is thought to succeed. For instance, disagreement over justice has been considered a game-changing condition, as democracy can have an instrumental or intrinsic value depending on the type of disagreement taken into account (Valentini 2013). Here I want to focus on another condition that has been so far overlooked in democratic theory, despite playing a large role in some justifications of democracy: citizens’ dispositions. There are, I argue, two approaches to democratic legitimacy and I intend to show that both are problematic. One is disposition-dependent, meaning that it takes democracy to be legitimate insofar as citizens display a distinctive disposition (i.e. concern for the common good or reasonableness), while the other is disposition-insensitive, meaning that it justifies democracy regardless of the way citizens engage in the political process. According to the former, democratic decisions are legitimate insofar as they are the result of a deliberative process whereby reasonable citizens exchange their ideas on justice (Rawls 2005, Waldron 1999). According to the latter, democracy is justified because it treats human beings as they ought to be treated, regardless of how they take collectively binding decisions (Christiano 2008, Rostbøll 2015). The paper is organised as follows. I first introduce these two approaches to democratic legitimacy. Then, I offer two objections: disposition-dependent accounts rely on idealisations that run the risk of being self-defeating, whereas disposition-insensitive accounts abstract away one core issue in democratic theory, namely political agency (O’Neill 1988). As a result both approaches fail to identify the right level of idealisation that is appropriate for a theory of democratic legitimacy. I will conclude by arguing that the justification should be disposition-sensitive, without also being conditional on one distinctive disposition.