Conscripting Citizens? Public Obligation and Democratic Theory

Conscription is back on the democratic agenda. Most visibly, it has returned in debates about military service across Europe. Less obviously, it has reappeared in democratic institutions themselves. Jury duty, mandatory schooling, and compulsory taxation have long relied on conscription-like logics. More recently, deliberative democrats have turned to randomly selected citizen bodies—such as citizens’ assemblies and other mini-publics—that require strong incentives, and sometimes mandatory participation, to avoid reproducing familiar inequalities in political voice and turnout. Yet democratic theory remains ill-equipped to assess these practices. Liberal accounts of democracy continue to frame political participation and common institutions as voluntary, treating conscription as a narrow and exceptional measure reserved for emergencies. This paper argues that this picture is no longer adequate. Conscription, I suggest, is a neglected shortcut to democratic action. Rather than relying exclusively on voluntary contributions, democracies sometimes enlist citizens directly. The central question is not whether conscription is ever permissible, but when and how it can be justified on democratic grounds. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, I diagnose the core normative objections to conscription. I distinguish two democratic wrongs that arise when people are compelled to act without their consent. The first is domination. Citizens are dominated when they are pressed into service arbitrarily, undermining their ability to plan their lives as free agents. The second is usurpation. Citizens are usurped when they are forced to cooperate in advancing collective ends set by others, as if those ends were their own. Distinguishing these wrongs clarifies why conscription is usually thought to be incompatible with democratic self-government, even when invoked for valuable public purposes. Second, I show why standard democratic responses to problems of large-scale collective action struggle under conditions of inequality. Voluntarism and deliberation alone cannot reliably secure the fair provision of public goods in societies marked by deep socioeconomic divisions. When cooperation is optional, the burdens of sustaining democratic institutions predictably fall on those with fewer resources and fewer exit options, while others free ride or withdraw. In these contexts, the refusal to cooperate can itself function as a form of domination over fellow citizens, placing access to basic public goods at the discretion of the advantaged. Finally, I develop a positive democratic case for conscription. Conscription is democratically justified, I argue, when it is used as a remedial mechanism to secure goods that are necessary for citizens to stand as free and equal, and when voluntary cooperation has failed to distribute burdens fairly. Properly constrained, conscription does not dictate substantive ends or suppress dissent. Instead, it establishes a baseline of mandatory participation that can deepen accountability, stimulate voice, and support more inclusive forms of collective self-rule. I illustrate the argument by revisiting jury duty and by extending it to contemporary proposals for sortition-based deliberative institutions. A democratic theory of conscription, I conclude, helps explain when democracies may permissibly compel citizens to fulfill their standing obligations to one another—and why, in some cases, one cannot work for others without also working for oneself.