Why Should Citizens Support their Democracy? Advocating for an Epistemic Variant to the Institutional Duty to Vote

Kevin Elliott has recently developed a novel argument for establishing a duty to vote grounded in the idea that individuals endorsing the role of democratic citizens have a moral obligation to safeguard the value or legitimacy of their own democratic institutions. This ‘institutional’ duty to vote is justified because maximal electoral turnout is seen as an ordinarily necessary condition to safeguard the fairness of the representation process, and corollary ensures that representative democracies maintain their ‘normative attractiveness’ by ‘functioning excellently’. While sympathetic to Elliott’s approach to political obligations, this paper nevertheless highlights the theoretical and pragmatic limitations of his argument and, furthermore, advocates for an alternative justification for the institutional duty to vote. It is structured as follows. The first section presents Elliott’s theoretical framework and innovative argument for a duty to vote, while the second section examines its perceived limits. Theoretically, I highlight, with the case of persistent minorities (i.e. systematic losers of the democratic decisional process), that it is unclear whether the ‘excellent functioning of the political system’ and procedurally ‘fair representation’ are sufficient to ground the normative attractiveness of representative democracies. Pragmatically, I argue that Elliott’s argument might plausibly appear unsatisfying not only to those who perceive themselves (whether rightly or wrongly) as persistent minorities, but also to individuals dissatisfied with the quality of representative democracies’ governance. Since these individuals might have good reasons to reject the ‘fairness’ of the representation process as a sufficient condition for democracy to be valuable or legitimate, the institutional duty to vote risks lacking sufficient motivational power to drive these individuals to the polls. The third section suggests that, alternatively, the ‘institutional’ duty to vote can be grounded in an epistemic justification of democracy if such justification assesses the moral rightness of a ‘good’ political decision and defines such moral rightness as ‘substantive impartiality'. From this perspective, an institutional duty to vote can be justified because maximal turnout constitutes an ordinarily necessary condition to minimize the risks that the democratic process generates morally biased decisions, thus safeguarding the epistemic potential of electoral democracies. I argue that, if valid, such an ‘epistemic’ formulation does better at answering both theoretical and pragmatic challenges present in Elliott’s formulation of the institutional duty to vote. In the fourth and final section, I discuss the implications of this variant for the ethics of electoral participation. First, I argue it can maintain Elliott’s commitment to establishing a duty to vote over a duty to vote ‘well’, provided that the same empirical premises which underline his reasoning are endorsed. Compared to the existing literature tying a duty to vote to the ‘epistemic’ value of democracy, this argument thus illustrates the potential contribution of mere electoral turnout in realizing the normative dimension of the epistemic value of contemporary electoral democracies. Secondly, I highlight how this argument allows to conceive ‘reflective apathy’ as a form of legitimate justification for electoral abstentionism, thus contributing to nuance the relationship between a duty to vote and democratically legitimate reasons for abstentionism.