Relational Equality and the Institutional Conditions of Democracy

Across contemporary democracies, equality is widely – and rightly – invoked as a foundational democratic value. Yet far less attention is paid to what kind of equality is envisaged when it is conceived of as a pillar of the modern representative democratic order, and even less to the possibility that democracy and certain interpretations of equality may stand in tension with one another. Since Rawls’s influential work on justice, equality has predominantly been theorised through justice-based frameworks that conceive it as a distributive ideal or as a moral baseline, what Jeremy Waldron refers to as metaphysical or “deep” equality. This paper argues that such approaches, while philosophically sophisticated, detach equality from the political practices and institutional settings through which it operates in democratic life. In doing so, they obscure a crucial dimension of democracy: equality as a political and relational practice that structures how democratic actors perceive one another and how conflicts are mediated. To better understand the present crisis of liberal representative democracies, this paper proposes a shift from justice-based conceptions of equality toward a political focus on relational equality. Relational equality has been developed by a range of political theorists over recent decades, most prominently by Elisabeth Anderson and Anne Phillips. At the centre of this approach to equality is that it should be understood as an everyday practice, institutional as well as extra-institutional. As such, it operates in the space between formal equality before the law and persistent material inequality, shaping how individuals relate to one another as political equals despite enduring asymmetries of power, status, and resources. This paper identifies an overlooked tension within this concept of relational equality. Like other modern accounts of equality, relational equality presupposes a modern notion of the individual: equality is justified by the assumption that all individuals are equals. Within this framework, relational equality can be interpreted in two competing ways. One views relational equality as an institutionally mediated practice. Here, institutions function as an infrastructure that stabilises social conflicts by canalising relations of status, property, and mutual recognition. They do so in part by reinforcing respect for the autonomy of professional groups that safeguard the independence of mediating institutions. The other interprets relational equality as an unconditional defence of the individual’s voice in each situation, implying that institutional authorities should carry no greater weight than any other individual. Traces of this view can be found in a wide range of political questions, such as educational policies, the health care system, demands for “democratising science”, but to give some noteworthy examples. By highlighting this distinction, the paper showcases how certain influential practices of equality throughout the last decades in representative democracies have contributed to an undermining of key institutions in democratic societies by sapping the ground for professionals such as medics, teachers, and similar groups. Thereby, it has undermined the institutional authority required to mediate democratic conflict and sustain relations of political equality under conditions of pluralism and disagreement.