Voting for the right reasons. Voters, public reason and varieties of elections.

In democracies, citizens are legally permitted to vote on any reasons. Yet voting is not a moral free-zone and political morality may define reasons that voters should vote on. Following political liberalism, the ideal of public reason applies to decisions on constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice in a just and democratic society. Public reasons are publicly justifiable reasons that lend support from all reasonable citizens. If the ideal of public reason applies to voters, they should accordingly vote on reasons that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens. Theories of public reason are ambiguous as to whether they apply to voters, however. Rawls (1997) argues that public reason applies only to government officials and candidates for public office. Yet, he also claims that voters should never vote on the basis of “comprehensive views”. Rawls also insists that voters have duties to repudiate public officials and candidates who violate public reason. The relationship between voting and public reason has attracted surprisingly little attention in the literature. The aim of this paper is thus to clarify the reasons that voters should vote on according to the idea of public reason. This is accomplished by considering how different kinds of elections relate to the requirements of public reason. There are many distinct elections in democracies – national, local, referendums. The extent to which constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake in them differ. The argument is that the normative demands placed on voters by the ideal of public reason are conditioned by the nature of the elections and the issues at stake in them. When voters directly participate in constitutional decisions (e.g. in constitutional referendums) public reason applies fully to them. Citizens must accordingly vote only on reasons that can be reasonably accepted by other citizens. In elections where constitutional issues are neither directly nor indirectly at stake, public reason does not apply in, for example, local elections voters may not have duties to vote on public reasons. In electing the members of national legislatures and executives, the voter indirectly participates in decisions of constitutional import and decisions on basic justice. Matters of basic justice are also salient in the electoral platforms of candidates and parties (Bonotti 2016). Yet, public reason applies only to agents that decide these issues, and voters of legislative and executive bodies clearly do not. The argument developed is that voters in national elections are morally permitted to vote on any reasons subject to the constraint that they only support candidates that are sincerely committed to the basic ideas and values of political liberalism. Voters need not vote on reasons that can be reciprocally justified to one another. But they must not support candidates that either reject the ideal of reciprocal justification or that promote policies undermining the institutions that are necessary for the realization of this ideal.