make democracy history

AT THE SMITHSONIAN

The real birth of american democracy.

This week, 215 years ago, the lofty ideals of the Constitution passed their first test

Joseph Stromberg

The dawn of American democracy didn’t come in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It didn’t come in 1788, when the Constitution was ratified by the states, or in 1789, when George Washington took office. According to Harry Rubenstein , chair and curator of the Division of Political History at the American History Museum , the symbolic birth of our system of government didn’t come until its noble ideals were actually put to the test. On September 19, 215 years ago, Washington published his farewell address , marking one the first peaceful transfers of power in American history and cementing the country’s status as a stable, democratic state.

This moment, Rubenstein says, “is crucial for creating the in-and-out system of government that we have. And this is unique. In that time and era, politicians would gain power, or kings would stay in office until they die.” At that nascent stage in American history, before precedents such as the two-term limit were even set, many were uncertain about what would happen after a galvanizing figure like Washington resigned office. But at this critical juncture, the leadership of Washington and others proved more than adequate to preserve the democracy. “Stepping down is unique,” says Rubenstein. “It’s a powerful statement about Washington and American democracy.”

In addition to the symbolic importance of voluntarily leaving office, the content of Washington’s farewell address—which was published in newspapers across the country and as a pamphlet—was important in establishing the values of the quickly maturing American democracy. The 51-paragraph document covered Washington’s decision to retire, the importance of a unified national government, the folly of getting involved in foreign affairs and other issues. “What the farewell address aims to do is call for national unity: an end to the squabbling between the parties, between Federalists and Republicans, and an end to the sectionalism of West, North and South,” Rubenstein says. “It’s a call for trying to form something larger than local interests.” For an infant nation that had resembled more of a loose association of independent states under the Articles of Confederation just years earlier, this message of unity was significant.

The candle holder Washington used in writing the address. Photo courtesy American History Museum

Of course, Washington’s lofty written standards weren’t always achieved in real life. “I think his desire for national unity, while hard for people to act on, was something that most aspired to,” says Rubenstein. “It’s just that everyone wanted everyone else to agree with their position.” Even during Washington’s presidency, the buildup of partisan politics that would characterize our government was beginning. “You start to have the birth of the parties, especially during his second administration: the squabbling between the two parties, between Hamilton and Jefferson,” Rubenstein says.

But Washington’s core message would remain at the heart of the public conception of the country as a unified nation. “His intention is to urge people to put aside their differences, and not get caught up in the squabbles of the international community,” says Rubenstein. “As an administrator, he was witnessing all these tugs and pulls, and so this is his last major statement. These are the beliefs that he’s hoping people will follow.” The importance of checks and balances, the danger of foreign alliances, the authority of the Constitution, and the need for national unity were adopted with conviction in the years to follow by legislators across the political spectrum.

The American History Museum is home to a critical relic of the farewell address. “According to family tradition,” Rubenstein says, “Washington worked on his farewell address by the light of this candle stand .” During the pre-electric era, candle stands with reflectors were often used to increase the light output of a candle at night, and were used on desks in a manner similar to a reading lamp. This brass stand was passed down among Washington’s descendants before being sold to the government in 1878.

In reflecting upon the farewell address, it hardly escapes notice that the very issues Washington focused on—political rivalry, entanglement in foreign affairs—are still in play. “These debates are still relevant today,” Rubenstein says.

But even from the nation’s infancy, it pays to remember, the high-minded standards of the Constitution haven’t always been universally achieved. Our democracy has always been a messy experiment. Nevertheless, the ideas in Washington’s farewell still help to guide lawmakers and ordinary citizens alike.  “At its core, I think that we still desire many of the aspirations that Washington professed in this document,” says Rubenstain. “Ultimately, we want people to think of the good of the nation.”

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Democracy (ancient greece).

Democracy in ancient Greece served as one of the first forms of self-rule government in the ancient world. The system and ideas employed by the ancient Greeks had profound influences on how democracy developed, and its impact on the formation of the U.S. government.

Social Studies, Ancient Civilizations

Loading ...

The ancient Greeks were the first to create a democracy . The word “ democracy ” comes from two Greek words that mean people ( demos ) and rule ( kratos ). Democracy is the idea that the citizens of a country should take an active role in the government of their country and manage it directly or through elected representatives . In addition, it supports the idea that the people can replace their government through peaceful transfers of power rather than violent uprising or revolution . Thus, a key part of democracy is that the people have a voice.

The first known democracy in the world was in Athens. Athenian democracy developed around the fifth century B.C.E. The Greek idea of democracy was different from present-day democracy because, in Athens, all adult citizens were required to take an active part in the government. If they did not fulfill their duty they would be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. The Athenian definition of “citizens” was also different from modern-day citizens: only free men were considered citizens in Athens. Women, children, and slaves were not considered citizens and therefore could not vote.

Each year 500 names were chosen from all the citizens of ancient Athens. Those 500 citizens had to actively serve in the government for one year. During that year, they were responsible for making new laws and controlled all parts of the political process. When a new law was proposed, all the citizens of Athens had the opportunity to vote on it. To vote, citizens had to attend the assembly on the day the vote took place. This form of government is called direct democracy.

The United States has a representative democracy. Representative democracy is a government in which citizens vote for representatives who create and change laws that govern the people rather than getting to vote directly on the laws themselves.

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Production Managers

Program specialists, last updated.

October 19, 2023

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Ancient Greek Democracy

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 5, 2023 | Original: August 23, 2018

In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos , “the people,” and kratos , or “power”). It was the first known democracy in the world. 

This system was comprised of three separate institutions: the ekklesia, a sovereign governing body that wrote laws and dictated foreign policy; the boule, a council of representatives from the ten Athenian tribes and the dikasteria, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of lottery-selected jurors. Although this Athenian democracy would survive for only two centuries, its invention by Cleisthenes, “The Father of Democracy,” was one of ancient Greece’s most enduring contributions to the modern world. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe.

Who Could Vote in Ancient Greece?

“In a democracy,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law.” It was true that Cleisthenes’ demokratia abolished the political distinctions between the Athenian aristocrats who had long monopolized the political decision-making process and the middle- and working-class people who made up the army and the navy (and whose incipient discontent was the reason Cleisthenes introduced his reforms in the first place). 

Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from Athens for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.

However, the “equality” Herodotus described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population in Ancient Greece . For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or “resident foreigners,” and 150,000 slaves. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process.

The Ekklesia

Athenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions. The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. Any member of the demos—any one of those 40,000 adult male citizens—was welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. (Only about 5,000 men attended each session of the Assembly; the rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.) 

At the meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved or condemned the conduct of public officials. (Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from the Athenian city-state for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.) The group made decisions by simple majority vote.

The second important institution was the boule, or Council of Five Hundred. The boule was a group of 500 men, 50 from each of ten Athenian tribes, who served on the Council for one year. Unlike the ekklesia, the boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance. It supervised government workers and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. It dealt with ambassadors and representatives from other city-states. Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the ekklesia. In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work.

Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election. This was because, in theory, a random lottery was more democratic than an election: pure chance, after all, could not be influenced by things like money or popularity. The lottery system also prevented the establishment of a permanent class of civil servants who might be tempted to use the government to advance or enrich themselves. However, historians argue that selection to the boule was not always just a matter of chance. They note that wealthy and influential people—and their relatives—served on the Council much more frequently than would be likely in a truly random lottery.

The Dikasteria

The third important institution was the popular courts, or dikasteria. Every day, more than 500 jurors were chosen by lot from a pool of male citizens older than 30. Of all the democratic institutions, Aristotle argued that the dikasteria “contributed most to the strength of democracy” because the jury had almost unlimited power. 

There were no police in Athens, so it was the demos themselves who brought court cases, argued for the prosecution and the defense and delivered verdicts and sentences by majority rule. (There were also no rules about what kinds of cases could be prosecuted or what could and could not be said at trial, and so Athenian citizens frequently used the dikasteria to punish or embarrass their enemies.)

Jurors were paid a wage for their work, so that the job could be accessible to everyone and not just the wealthy (but, since the wage was less than what the average worker earned in a day, the typical juror was an elderly retiree). Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi. The one exception to this rule was the leitourgia, or liturgy, which was a kind of tax that wealthy people volunteered to pay to sponsor major civic undertakings such as the maintenance of a navy ship (this liturgy was called the trierarchia) or the production of a play or choral performance at the city’s annual festival.

The End of Athenian Democracy

Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an aristocracy: the rule of what Herodotus called “the one man, the best.” Though democratic ideals and processes did not survive in ancient Greece, they have been influencing politicians and governments ever since.

Modern representative democracies, in contrast to direct democracies, have citizens who vote for representatives who create and enact laws on their behalf. Canada, The United States and South Africa are all examples of modern-day representative democracies.

HISTORY Vault: Ancient History

From the Sphinx of Egypt to the Kama Sutra, explore ancient history videos.

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Games & Quizzes
• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Where was democracy first practiced?
• How is democracy better than other forms of government?
• Why does democracy need education?
• Why is Pericles important?
• What was Pericles’ family like?
• Was Pericles married?
• What is Pericles remembered for?
• How did Pericles die?

What is democracy?

Democracy is a system of government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the “people,” a group historically constituted by only a minority of the population (e.g., all free adult males in ancient Athens or all sufficiently propertied adult males in 19th-century Britain) but generally understood since the mid-20th century to include all (or nearly all) adult citizens.

Related Questions

Lessons from the history of democracy

A book excerpt and interview with james miller, author of “can democracy work”.

DEMOCRACY IS THE most widely accepted form of governance, yet its flaws have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Gridlocked legislatures, low trust in the press, and judiciaries challenged by expansive executive power have all called attention to the many ways in which Western institutions can become dysfunctional. The rise of China, moreover, is held up by some as proof that democracy is neither inevitable nor necessary for countries seeking economic growth and political stability.

Yet crises of confidence in democracy are nothing new. Over the centuries, reality has never lived up to lofty ideals. Self-criticism gives democracies the ability to correct errors, but also makes them vulnerable to rival ideologies. It gives power to the people, but does not guarantee that they are sufficiently well informed or well intentioned to make good decisions. These concerns run through “Can Democracy Work?” by James Miller of the New School for Social Research in New York.

The book is a history of democracy as both idea and political practice, from ancient Athens to the Occupy Wall Street movement. How have conceptions of self-governance changed over time? What is the popular will, and what are the ways in which political leaders have sought to harness it?

Mr Miller has written about democracy throughout his career, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ideals of the Enlightenment to the American student movement in the 1960s. (A long-time music critic, he was also the original editor of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.) The Economist ’s Open Future initiative interviewed Mr Miller about democracy’s achievements and flaws, its chequered history and uncertain future. In particular, we asked if some of the pathologies of democracy are inherent to it as a form of government, or whether the right institutions can keep them in check. The interview is followed by an excerpt from the book about the press and the popular will.

The Economist: A central question you ask in the book is “What is democracy?” How has the concept changed from antiquity, through the American and French revolutions, to today?

James Miller: The answers range from the closed, self-governing community of ancient Athens, through the armed assertion of popular sovereignty in revolutionary Paris in 1792, to the rise in America of a commercial republic of free individuals, who shared a faith in the virtues of the common man.

The conviction of 19th century social democrats and democratic socialists that self-government required an egalitarian economy and society gave way in the 21st century to a vaguer belief that democracy merely required politicians to be responsive to “public opinion,” as ascertained via polling. Despite these vicissitudes, democracy at its core, even today, implies “people power”—just as it did in ancient Athens. That’s why democracy, when it’s taken seriously, still represents a potentially disruptive challenge to privileged elites.

The Economist: In tracing the history of democracy, what are some ideas associated with the term that we would find foreign or surprising today?

Mr Miller: In democratic Athens, almost all political offices were filled by random selection rather than rational choice. The use of lotteries nullified the corrupting advantages of wealth, status and fame. For this reason, Aristotle regarded lotteries as a quintessentially democratic device, whereas elections favored aristocrats and oligarchs. More disquieting were the preferences of early modern proponents of popular sovereignty: after toppling the king in 1792, Parisian democrats asserted a “right to insurrection” as an essential aspect of “people power.”

The Economist: What are some lessons we can learn from the failed democracies of the past?

Mr Miller: The revolutionary democrats in France weren’t able to implement the world’s first democratic constitution, drafted by Condorcet in 1793, in part because they never could reconcile the demands of the armed artisans in the big cities, for a republic of equals, with the wishes of the peasants in rural areas, who still recognised the hierarchical authority of the Catholic church. The suppression of dissent—a problem we see today closer to home, in both the left and the right—is a standing temptation for any group convinced that they alone represent the true will of a people.

The Economist: One timeless concern about democracy is that it gives power to ordinary people, but does not guarantee that they will make good decisions. Are there any ways we can tailor our institutions and norms to avoid this pitfall?

Mr Miller: In the 18th century, the great hope was that the spread of public education might lead to universal enlightenment, fulfilling the preconditions for wise self-government. As we know, these hopes have yet to be fulfilled. Enlightenment is an elusive goal in any case: modern psychology suggests that human beings all suffer from “bounded rationality,” and the unavoidable cognitive errors that come from what the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman call “heuristics and biases.” *

At the same time, the capacity of ordinary people to exercise political power in the past century has been sharply limited, not only in an avowed “Democratic People’s Republic” like North Korea, but even in a relatively open society like America.

This is a key irony of modern democracy as it has evolved. After the end of the Great War in 1919, Woodrow Wilson and Lenin both seemed eager to uphold popular sovereignty as a political principle; both affirmed a people’s political right to self-determination. Yet the extent of active political participation in both the liberal and communist contexts was carefully qualified.

Wilson’s administrative state transferred a great deal of power to the federal president and the unelected civil servants who reported to him, while Lenin’s conception of “democratic centralism” concentrated power in the hands of an apparatus controlled by the elite of one party, the Communist Party. In effect, both liberal and communist states have paradoxically tried to ensure sound democratic outcomes by empowering specially trained elites—this was the American writer Walter Lippmann’s solution to what he perceived as the pitfalls of modern democracies.

To put it mildly, the record of these elites has been mixed. In the past generation, both liberal and social democratic regimes have presided over a galloping growth in inequality, and, in more than one case, they have plunged their nations into reckless wars of choice.

Under the circumstances, it’s no wonder that our world has witnessed, in virtually every single country, both rich and poor, authoritarian or relatively free, a fitful, sometimes futile series of democratic revolts and protests, when crowds of ordinary people unite to demand a fairer share of the common wealth—and to claim for themselves a larger share in more truly democratic institutions.

I am thinking, for example, of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in America, but also of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Maidan revolt in Ukraine in 2013, the abortive umbrella revolution in Hong Kong in 2014, and the 2016 Brexit “leave” vote in Britain, mobilized under the democratic slogan “Take back control.”

The Economist: Your book asks, “Can democracy work?” Can it? Or is it instead, as you also write, “an elusive fantasy, forever out of reach”?

Mr Miller: With hard work and effort, and shared goodwill, yes, democracy can work. It worked for the ancient Athenians for almost two hundred years. A more modest and limited version of popular sovereignty has proved workable in the United States and other Western nations with constitutional safeguards. I also believe that modern institutions could do more to appeal to, and engage, people’s capacities for reflection and collective deliberation.

But democracy also matters as a “fantasy,” if you will—as a form of shared faith. As the Czech writer and former president, Vaclav Havel, remarked near the end of his life, “we will never build a democratic state based on the rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is—regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist—humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.”

Under a democratic government animated by such shared values, and with a justly regulated economy—the aspiration of most liberal democrats and social democrats—citizens would not only have equal civil and political rights; they would also know that those who are lucky enough to be born with greater natural talents are not going to get rich at the expense of those less fortunate. In such a democratic community, we agree to share one another’s fate, as did the citizens of ancient Athens.

The Economist: Around the world, some see “authoritarian capitalism” as preferable to democracy as a system of governance to meet people’s needs. Are they wrong? Is there some sacrosanct reason why democracy should be the apex of human governance for all peoples at all places?

There is obviously nothing sacrosanct, nor historically inevitable, about democracy as a form of popular self-government, or as a shared faith in the dignity and wisdom of ordinary people. Democracy before the French Revolution was generally held to be a fool’s paradise—or (even worse, in the eyes of the rich) a tyranny of the poor.

Even today, regimes and avowedly democratic movements that promote popular solidarity through shared lines of descent and a shared religious culture—I am thinking here of Hungary and Poland, but also of white supremacists in America—form a standing threat to other core values of a decent society, like pluralism and tolerance.

If a robust form of democracy is really to work in our own time, in a world of many cultures, I believe it will have to take a self-limiting, and properly “liberal” form. But at the end of the day, I am an American by birth and a small “d” democrat at heart, so I cannot help but uphold Abraham Lincoln’s characteristically American hope, even in the darkest of times, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

*The psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman explored a range of failures of reason and biases in making decisions. They demonstrated cases in which “cognitive illusions” affect judgement, and highlighted the conditions in which humans tend to make irrational decisions. (The “anchoring” bias, for example, is the tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information one hears when making a decision.)

A Hall of Mirrors Excerpt from “Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World” by James Miller (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

In a series of essays published in 1920 as a book, Liberty and the News , [Walter] Lippmann highlighted the increasingly critical role played by the news media in modern societies, by disseminating reliable information to ordinary citizens. As a veteran reporter, presidential memo writer, and propagandist for the U.S. military, Lippmann knew from the inside what it was like to filter, select, and simplify complicated facts in a form that people could quickly absorb. He had become a critic of Wilson after the president turned to censorship and the suppression of civil liberties, in conjunction with what Lippmann regarded as crudely jingoistic propaganda. Liberty and the News grew out of a lengthy analysis of The New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution, which led Lippmann to conclude that “the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see . . . The chief censor and the chief protagonist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.”

This was a disheartening conclusion for anyone who believed, as Lippmann still did in 1920, that “the reliability of the news is the premise on which democracy proceeds.” But reporters and editors were only human. As a consequence of the efforts of newsmen like Lippmann himself, who summarized and simplified the events of the day, “all news comes at second-hand.” At the same time, utterly uninformed opinions were circulated as well, in the media and in face-to-face conversations. As a result, “all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.”

Indeed, it was just as hard for America’s elected representatives to grasp “the realities themselves,” one reason Lippmann applauded the “establishment of more or less semi-official institutes of government research.” (The American Bureau of Labor Statistics founded in 1884, the National Institute of Standards and Technology created in 1901, the reorganized Public Health Services expanded under Wilson in 1912, and the National Science Foundation launched in 1950 are all good examples of what Lippmann envisioned.)

But to imply that a bevy of objective facts, if faithfully relayed to the general public, or even to its elected representatives, would solve the problem of public opinion was profoundly misleading—and Lippmann knew it.

For the defects of public opinion were caused not just by biased newspapers, or blinkered reporters, or a lack of government-sponsored research institutes, or even by the growing number of secrets being kept by the American administrative state—the deepest problems were caused by the way people, all people, selected what they wanted to see and hear, filtering information through unavoidable “stereotypes,” a word that Lippmann introduced into the lexicon of American social science. [...]

In Public Opinion, published in 1922, Lippmann explored the implications of these limits to human rationality for what Woodrow Wilson had called “government by popular opinion.” Unlike Robert Michels, who focused on the institutional limits of modern democracy, Lippmann analyzed its psychological limits. In a complex environment, where only disconnected bits of information are available to the average citizen, it was almost impossible for the public’s opinion on any matter of moment to be either cogent or coherent.

The book’s epigraph is Plato’s famous image, in the Republic , of inhabitants in a cave bewitched by shadows and unaware of the real world outside. What follows suggests that the great majority of modern men are inescapably prisoners of shadowy and unexamined assumptions, immersed in private lives involving the pursuit of various personal interests, with limited time, and even less attention to give to public affairs. This bleak account renders moot the dreams of Enlightenment democrats like Condorcet, who had hoped that citizens in the future would “approach a condition in which everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason, to preserve his mind free from prejudice, to understand his rights and to exercise them in accordance with his conscience and his creed.”

Lippmann concedes that in a simple, self-contained community it might be plausible to assume that one man was as competent as another to manage “simple and self-contained affairs”—he seems to have in mind New England towns with their annual town meetings. But the evolution of modern society turns that “democratic stereotype” into a dangerous cliché, insofar as men now “looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.” And insofar as modern American democracy under the direction of figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had evolved into a centralized administrative state designed, in part, to regulate and curtail the semi-sovereign powers of modern corporations and banks, the facts of governance had grown ever more remote from the simple interactions of a few individuals in a small rural community.

Lippmann’s conclusion is most bluntly stated in The Phantom Public , his sequel to the opinion book: “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs.” As a result, the common interests, he concludes, “can be managed only by a specialized class”—informed commentators like Lippmann himself, and trained civil servants with an in-depth knowledge of the facts pertinent to formulating reasonable public policies.

Excerpted from “Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World” by James Miller. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2018 by James Miller. All rights reserved.

More from Open Future

“Making real the ideals of our country”

Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, on racial justice, fixing racial income inequality—and optimism

How society can overcome covid-19

Countries can test, quarantine and prepare for the post-coronavirus world, says Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist

Telemedicine is essential amid the covid-19 crisis and after it

Online health care helps patients and medical workers—and will be a legacy of combating the novel coronavirus, says Eric Topol of Scripps Research

We can harness peer pressure to uphold social values

People are natural followers, so use “behavioural contagion” to improve lives, says Robert Frank of Cornell University

Even noxious ideas need airing—censorship only makes them stronger

Restricting free speech in the name of liberty fuels illiberalism, says Jacob Mchangama of Justitia, a Danish think-tank

Society doesn't think ahead but we can trick ourselves into doing better

There are mental techniques to bypass our natural short-termism—and to defend our liberty, says Steven Johnson, author of "Farsighted"

• LGBTQ+ History
• Civic Season
• Collections

American Democracy

A great leap of faith.

• Explore Online

What happens when a people decide to govern themselves? America’s national treasures come to life in this compelling exhibition that examines the bold experiment to create a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith explores the history of citizen participation, debate, and compromise from the nation’s formation to today. Through objects such as Thomas Jefferson’s portable desk, used to draft the Declaration of Independence; the inkstand Lincoln used to draft the Emancipation Proclamation; and the table on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, the exhibition focuses on the changing political ideals and principles of the nation, citizenship in a pluralistic society, and political participation and engagement.

Exhibition Website

Can't visit the museum to see American Democracy ? Explore the historic objects and dive into the history on the exhibition website (coming soon).

Companion Book

Explore the exhibition at home with a companion volume to the museum exhibition.

The Declaration of Independence Desk

A portable desk. The desk's single drawer is partialy open, and its top is a raised position, tilted slightly in order to facilitate holding a piece of paper.

Emancipation Proclamation Inkstand

The Declaration of Sentiments Table

Woman Suffrage Wagon, 1870s–1920

"Franklin" common press

Pamphlet, "Common Sense", 1776

Liberty Banner, 1790s

Constitutional Convention Box

15th Amendment Pen

19th Amendment Pen

Log Cabin Parade Prop, 1840

Cartoon, "Stranger Things Have Happened", 1879

Magnifying Glass, 2000

Kennedy Debate Chair, 1960

Poster, SCLC Poor People's Campaign, 1968

Susan B. Anthony’s Shawl

Statue of Liberty Hanukkah Menorah

The Great Historical Clock of America

Major support for this exhibition   is provided by Linda and Pete Claussen; the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation | Sue Van; the Theodore Craver Family, in memory of Frederick Craver; the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation; The Pew Charitable Trusts and many generous donors.

Biography Online

People who shaped and helped the growth of democracy

This is a selection of people in history, who have played an important role in the creation and growth of democracy.

Democracy means society is governed by the input and sanction of all members of society. Democracy means power does not rest in the hands of a few wealthy and privileged people, but people of all rank can have a say in the decision-making process.

Throughout history, democracy has been an evolution. Early democracies were limited to men, and people of certain status in society. But, these early democracies were still an important difference to the rule of absolute monarchs, dictators or oligarchs. Arguably, there are no ‘perfect democracies’ – But, some societies are more democratic than others.

In recent centuries, democracy has also come to include ideas such as liberty and individual freedom – treating everyone in an equal manner. Also given the rise in population size, direct democracy is rarely practised; instead democracy tends to involve elected representatives.

Key figures in the history of democracy

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan .   “People who shaped democracy”, Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net , 01/08/2013. Last updated 1 February 2018.

Democracy by Charles Tilly

Democracy by Charles Tilly at Amazon

Democracy in America

Democracy in America at Amazon

Related pages

• Quotes about democracy

1c. What Is a Democracy?

Nowhere is the word "democracy" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. How could that be? Our government is a democracy!

Well, for one, as we'll discuss later, the Founders actually feared democratic rule. James Madison expressed this attitude in Federalist #10 : "...instability, injustice, and confusion ...have in truth been the mortal disease under which popular governments everywhere perished..." In the late 18 th -century, rule by the people was thought to lead to disorder and disruption. Yet a democratically-based government was seen as superior to the monarchies of Europe.

Democracies did not originate with the founding of the United States. The term "democracy" comes from two Greek words: "demos" (the people) and ""kratia" (power or authority). So of course democracy is a form of government that gives power to the people. But how, when, and to which people? The answer to those questions changes through history.

Democracies are based on "rule of law." The ancient Greeks (particularly Aristotle ) valued natural law , the notion that human societies should be governed by ethical principles found in nature. The Greeks are famous for practicing direct democracy , a system in which citizens meet to discuss all policy, and then make decisions by majority rule. However, only free males were considered to be citizens. So their democracy was certainly limited. Today direct democracy is practiced in New England town meetings, where all citizens of voting age meet to decide important political decisions.

But how could direct democracy work in a large, diverse population spread over a geographical distance? Generally, the answer has been that it can't. In its place, the American Founders put "indirect" or "representative" democracy. In this system, representatives are chosen by the people to make decisions for them. The representative body, then, becomes a manageable size for doing the business of government. The Founders preferred the term " republic " to "democracy" because it described a system they generally preferred: the interests of the peopled were represented by more knowledgeable or wealthier citizens who were responsible to those that elected them. Today we tend to use the terms "republic" and "democracy" interchangeably. A widespread criticism of representative democracy is that the representatives become the "elites" that seldom consult ordinary citizens, so even though they are elected, a truly representative government doesn't really exist.

Another modern version of democracy is called " democratic centralism ," a term made famous by Vladimir Ulyinov Lenin . As the leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he established a communist government that allowed no private property to exist. All members of society were theoretically equal. However, Lenin considered a small "vanguard of the revolution" necessary to guide the people and establish order. So a small group of leaders make decisions in the name of the people, based on their perceptions of what the people want and need.

Democracies have come in many shapes and sizes as reflected by the different answers to questions of how, when, and to which people power is given. And although it is not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution, democracy clearly links to "rule of law" to form a basic principle that profoundly shapes American government.

Report broken link

If you like our content, please share it on social media!

Copyright ©2008-2022 ushistory.org , owned by the Independence Hall Association in Philadelphia, founded 1942.

THE TEXT ON THIS PAGE IS NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN AND HAS NOT BEEN SHARED VIA A CC LICENCE. UNAUTHORIZED REPUBLICATION IS A COPYRIGHT VIOLATION Content Usage Permissions

Athenian Democracy

Athenian Democracy refers to the system of democratic government used in Athens , Greece from the 5th to 4th century BCE. Under this system, all male citizens - the dēmos - had equal political rights, freedom of speech, and the opportunity to participate directly in the political arena.

In Athenian democracy, not only did citizens participate in a direct democracy whereby they themselves made the decisions by which they lived, but they also actively served in the institutions that governed them, and so they directly controlled all parts of the political process.

Ancient Sources

Other city -states had, at one time or another, systems of democracy, notably Argos , Syracuse , Rhodes , and Erythrai. In addition, sometimes even oligarchic systems could involve a high degree of political equality, but the Athenian version, starting from c. 460 BCE and ending c. 320 BCE and involving all male citizens, was certainly the most developed.

The contemporary sources which describe the workings of democracy typically relate to Athens and include such texts as the Constitution of the Athenians from the School of Aristotle ; the works of the Greek historians Herodotus , Thucydides , and Xenophon ; texts of over 150 speeches by such figures as Demosthenes ; inscriptions in stone of decrees, laws, contracts, public honours and more; and Greek Comedy plays such as those by Aristophanes . Unfortunately, sources on the other democratic governments in ancient Greece are few and far between. This being the case, the following remarks on democracy are focussed on the Athenians.

The Assembly & Council

The word democracy ( dēmokratia ) derives from dēmos , which refers to the entire citizen body, and kratos , meaning rule. Any male citizen could, then, participate in the main democratic body of Athens, the assembly ( ekklēsia ). In the 4th and 5th centuries BCE the male citizen population of Athens ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 depending on the period. The assembly met at least once a month, more likely two or three times, on the Pnyx hill in a dedicated space which could accommodate around 6000 citizens. Any citizen could speak to the assembly and vote on decisions by simply holding up their hands. The majority won the day and the decision was final. Nine presidents ( proedroi ), elected by lot and holding the office one time only, organised the proceedings and assessed the voting.

Specific issues discussed in the assembly included deciding military and financial magistracies, organising and maintaining food supplies, initiating legislation and political trials, deciding to send envoys, deciding whether or not to sign treaties, voting to raise or spend funds, and debating military matters. The assembly could also vote to ostracise from Athens any citizen who had become too powerful and dangerous for the polis . In this case there was a secret ballot where voters wrote a name on a piece of broken pottery ( ostrakon ). An important element in the debates was freedom of speech ( parrhēsia ) which became, perhaps, the citizen's most valued privilege. After suitable discussion, temporary or specific decrees ( psēphismata ) were adopted and laws ( nomoi ) defined. The assembly also ensured decisions were enforced and officials were carrying out their duties correctly.

There was in Athens (and also Elis, Tegea , and Thasos) a smaller body, the boulē , which decided or prioritised the topics which were discussed in the assembly. In addition, in times of crisis and war , this body could also take decisions without the assembly meeting. The boulē or council was composed of 500 citizens who were chosen by lot and who served for one year with the limitation that they could serve no more than two non-consecutive years. The boulē represented the 139 districts of Attica and acted as a kind of executive committee of the assembly. It was this body which supervised any administrative committees and officials on behalf of the assembly.

Then there was also an executive committee of the boulē which consisted of one tribe of the ten which participated in the boulē (i.e., 50 citizens, known as prytaneis ) elected on a rotation basis, so each tribe composed the executive once each year. This executive of the executive had a chairman ( epistates ) who was chosen by lot each day. The 50-man prytany met in the building known as the Bouleuterion in the Athenian agora and safe-guarded the sacred treasuries.

In tandem with all these political institutions were the law courts ( dikasteria ) which were composed of 6,000 jurors and a body of chief magistrates ( archai ) chosen annually by lot. Indeed, there was a specially designed machine of coloured tokens ( kleroterion ) to ensure those selected were chosen randomly, a process magistrates had to go through twice. It was here in the courts that laws made by the assembly could be challenged and decisions were made regarding ostracism, naturalization, and remission of debt.

This complex system was, no doubt, to ensure a suitable degree of checks and balances to any potential abuse of power, and to ensure each traditional region was equally represented and given equal powers. With people chosen at random to hold important positions and with terms of office strictly limited, it was difficult for any individual or small group to dominate or unduly influence the decision-making process either directly themselves or, because one never knew exactly who would be selected, indirectly by bribing those in power at any one time.

Participation in Government

As we have seen, only male citizens who were 18 years or over could speak (at least in theory) and vote in the assembly, whilst the positions such as magistrates and jurors were limited to those over 30 years of age. Therefore, women , slaves, and resident foreigners ( metoikoi ) were excluded from the political process.

The mass involvement of all male citizens and the expectation that they should participate actively in the running of the polis is clear in this quote from Thucydides:

We alone consider a citizen who does not partake in politics not only one who minds his own business but useless.

Illustrating the esteem in which democratic government was held, there was even a divine personification of the ideal of democracy, the goddess Demokratia. Direct involvement in the politics of the polis also meant that the Athenians developed a unique collective identity and probably too, a certain pride in their system, as shown in Pericles ' famous Funeral Oration for the Athenian dead in 431 BCE, the first year of the Peloponnesian War :

Athens' constitution is called a democracy because it respects the interests not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. (Thuc. 2.37)

Although active participation was encouraged, attendance in the assembly was paid for in certain periods, which was a measure to encourage citizens who lived far away and could not afford the time off to attend. This money was only to cover expenses though, as any attempt to profit from public positions was severely punished. Citizens probably accounted for 10-20% of the polis population, and of these it has been estimated that only 3,000 or so people actively participated in politics. Of this group, perhaps as few as 100 citizens - the wealthiest, most influential, and the best speakers - dominated the political arena both in front of the assembly and behind the scenes in private conspiratorial political meetings ( xynomosiai ) and groups ( hetaireiai ). These groups had to meet secretly because although there was freedom of speech, persistent criticism of individuals and institutions could lead to accusations of conspiring tyranny and so lead to ostracism.

Critics of democracy, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that not only were proceedings dominated by an elite, but that the dēmos could be too often swayed by a good orator or popular leaders (the demagogues), get carried away with their emotions, or lack the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most notoriously bad decisions taken by the Athenian dēmos were the execution of six generals after they had actually won the battle of Arginousai in 406 BCE and the death sentence given to the philosopher Socrates in 399 BCE.

Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter!

Democracy, which had prevailed during Athens' Golden Age, was replaced by a system of oligarchy in 411 BCE. The constitutional change, according to Thucydides, seemed the only way to win much-needed support from Persia against the old enemy Sparta and, further, it was thought that the change would not be a permanent one. Nevertheless, democracy in a slightly altered form did eventually return to Athens and, in any case, the Athenians had already done enough in creating their political system to eventually influence subsequent civilizations two millennia later.

In the words of historian K. A. Raaflaub, democracy in ancient Athens was

a unique and truly revolutionary system that realized its basic principle to an unprecedented and quite extreme extent: no polis had ever dared to give all its citizens equal political rights, regardless of their descent, wealth, social standing, education, personal qualities, and any other factors that usually determined status in a community.

Ideals such as these would form the cornerstones of all democracies in the modern world. The ancient Greeks have provided us with fine art, breath-taking temples, timeless theatre , and some of the greatest philosophers, but it is democracy which is, perhaps, their greatest and most enduring legacy.

Subscribe to topic Related Content Books Cite This Work License

Bibliography

• Ferguson J. et al. Political and Social Life in the Great Age of Athens. Ward Lock Educational Co Ltd, 1979.
• Herodotus. The Landmark Herodotus. Anchor Books, 2009.
• Hornblower, S. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Kinzl et al. A Companion to the Classical Greek World. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
• Nichols et al. The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides. Free Press, 1998.

About the Author

Translations

We want people all over the world to learn about history. Help us and translate this definition into another language!

Questions & Answers

What best describes athenian democracy, how did athenian democracy work, how did pericles define athenian democracy, how did cleisthenes reform athenian democracy, related content.

The Thirty Tyrants

Themistocles

Cleisthenes

Free for the World, Supported by You

World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organization. For only $5 per month you can become a member and support our mission to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide.

Recommended Books

External Links

Cite this work.

Cartwright, M. (2018, April 03). Athenian Democracy . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/

Chicago Style

Cartwright, Mark. " Athenian Democracy ." World History Encyclopedia . Last modified April 03, 2018. https://www.worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/.

Cartwright, Mark. " Athenian Democracy ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 03 Apr 2018. Web. 29 Jun 2024.

License & Copyright

Submitted by Mark Cartwright , published on 03 April 2018. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike . This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

This entry focuses on issues in contemporary democratic theory. Although it mentions authors in the history of philosophy where relevant, it does not attempt to give a history of democratic theory. Readers interested in more in-depth discussions of historical figures important to the development of democratic theory are advised to look at the entries listed in the “Historical Figures” section towards the end of this entry.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.1.4 economic justifications of democracy, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

• 4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.2.6 sortition, 4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, 8. historical figures, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues that

no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. (Sen 1999: 152)

The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

• each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
• voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
• votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. Modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Marsilius [DP]; Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

There are a number of economic justifications of democratic institutions. They proceed from the idea that preferences are given and that institutions are justified in terms of how citizens, given their preferences, would rationally want their society to be organized. The two accounts we mention here are in a broadly contractarian tradition, which seeks to determine what persons would agree to as a framework for collective decision making. Probably the most famous of these efforts and the one that has led to the highly fruitful research program of public choice theory is that of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their classic work The Calculus of Consent (1963). They argue that something like constitutional democracy could arise from a state of nature in which persons, with their basic natural and property rights protected, would agree to a collective decision procedure. The basic preference structure is self-interest in which persons attempt to maximize the stream of benefits to themselves. Individuals desire a collective decision-making apparatus in order to take care of problems that arise in the state of nature from uncontrolled external costs and public bads, which are costs that arise for everyone because no individual has incentive to limit them. External costs are costs that persons impose others without their consent. Hence, the purpose of the collective decision making is to take care of problems that arise when markets are inefficient because of externalities and public bads. The design of the decision procedure is meant to minimize two kinds of costs: external costs and decision costs. Decision costs are costs that arise from the difficulty of making collective decisions. Such decision making takes time and resources. Here is the basic calculation each person considers when choosing a collective decision procedure. On the one hand, they consider the external costs imposed on them if the decision procedure is not a unanimity procedure. Each person reflects that as the decision procedure approximates unanimity the chance of external costs imposed on them goes to zero. Taking the external costs of the procedure alone into account each prefers unanimity. On the other hand, each person considers the decision costs of a collective procedure. Here, as the decision procedure approaches unanimity the decision costs grow extremely large because of all the haggling such a procedure would generate. The procedure each person would choose under the circumstances would attempt to minimize the combination of these two costs. It would be a procedure that is close to majority rule, though there is no reason to suppose that majority rule itself would be chosen.

One objection is that the assumptions behind the argument are too strong. Buchanan and Tullock argue that this process would lead to unanimous agreement on a collective decision procedure under certain assumptions such as individuals cannot be divided into groups with strongly opposed interests and when individuals are sufficiently uncertain of their fates in the long term that their interests become more or less the same. They are in effect behind a veil of ignorance with regard to the future. These assumptions have been contested as descriptions of any plausible circumstances in which societies find themselves.

Another broadly economic approach can be found in Douglas Rae (1969). Rae argues that individuals with preferences over social states would generally prefer majority rule over the long run because majority rule maximizes the chances of the satisfaction of their preferences. The Rae-Taylor theorem states that if each individual has an equal prior probability of preferring each of the two alternatives, majority rule maximizes each individual’s expected utility (see the Section 2.4 of the entry on social choice theory ). Again the background assumption is that people don’t know how often they fall in the majority or minority and don’t have any special preference for the status quo. Under these circumstances, one gets what one wants more often from a collective decision procedure when it is majoritarian (see also Coleman [1989]).

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility—understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction—guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. The core objection is that no general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1982: 116). Ronald Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85; see also Marsilius [DP]). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision-making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of Cohen’s conception of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. Peter Singer argues that when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person’s point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973; Waldron 1999: chap. 5).

What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities, i.e., groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in coercively imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. Even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person’s interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and taxes levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690: sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience. Internal limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980: chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy’s embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one’s fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

• Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
• Others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?
• Since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena.

Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

On Schumpeter’s view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. To be sure, there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl’s early statement of the view is very powerful.

In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 69)

In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? One promising view is that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver’s seat in society and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

It has been argued that some of the core problems of electoral representative democracy can be solved by embracing the appointment of political officials by random selection, or sortition . Athenian democracy involved direct democracy for the making of laws and sortition for the choice of officials. Sortition is arguably consistent with the definition of democracy offered in section 1 because, in virtue of the fact that citizens have an equal chance of being selected, sortition is characterized by equality at a crucial stage of the decision-making process. Alex Guerrero (2014) argues that sortition can avoid the related problems of political ignorance, lack of representative accountability, and capture of the political process by elites. The problems are solved because the appointment of public officials does not depend on the input of ordinary citizens who are likely to be ignorant about political matters, nor does it leave space for the wealthy and powerful to influence official decision-making through funding electoral campaigns. One objection is that sortition ignores citizens’ interests in being part of the process of collective self-governance and rather than merely having an equal chance to be part of this process (Lafont 2019). Another objection is that the process of sortition does not allow for choosing representatives and political parties that have put together a conception of how all the interests in society are to fit together in a just and reasonable whole.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment.

In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

• Plato’s ethics and politics in The Republic
• Aristotle’s political theory
• Thomas Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy
• John Locke’s political philosophy
• Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Immanuel Kant’s social and political philosophy
• John Stuart Mill’s moral and political philosophy
• Hannah Arendt
• Jürgen Habermas
• Abizadeh, Arash, 2008, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders”, Political Theory , 36(1): 37–65. doi:10.1177/0090591707310090
• Acemoglu, Daron, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo, and James A. Robinson, 2019, “Democracy Does Cause Growth”, Journal of Political Economy , 127(1): 47–100. doi:10.1086/700936
• Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, 2016, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Altman, Andrew and Christopher Heath Wellman, 2009, A Liberal Theory of International Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199564415.001.0001
• Anderson, Elizabeth, 2006, “The Epistemology of Democracy”, Episteme , 3(1–2): 8–22. doi:10.3366/epi.2006.3.1-2.8
• Aristotle, Politics: Writings from the Complete Works , Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Arneson, Richard J., 1993 [2003], “Democratic Rights at National and Workplace Levels”, in The Idea of Democracy , David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John Roember, 118–138, 143–147; reprinted as “Democracy at the National Level” in Christiano 2003: 95–115.
• –––, 2003, “Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 11(1): 122–132. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00170
• –––, 2004, “Democracy Is Not Intrinsically Just”, in Justice and Democracy , Keith Dowding, Robert E. Goodin, and Carole Pateman (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40–58. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490217.003
• –––, 2009, “The Supposed Right to a Democratic Say”, in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy , Thomas Christiano and John Christman (eds.), Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 195–212. doi:10.1002/9781444310399.ch11
• Arrow, Kenneth J., 1951, Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Austen-Smith, David, 1992, “Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision Making”, International Political Science Review , 13(1): 45–58. doi:10.1177/019251219201300104
• Austen-Smith, David and Jeffrey S. Banks, 1996, “Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem”, American Political Science Review , 90(1): 34–45. doi:10.2307/2082796
• Bajaj, Sameer, 2014, “Review of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many , by Hélène Landemore”, Ethics , 124(2): 426–431. doi:10.1086/673507
• Barry, Brian, 1965, Political Argument , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Bartels, Larry M., 2002, “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions”, Political Behavior , 24(2): 117–150. doi:10.1023/A:1021226224601
• Bedau, Hugo A., 1961, “On Civil Disobedience”, Journal of Philosophy , 58(21): 653–665. doi:10.2307/2023542
• Beerbohm, Eric Anthony, 2012, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Beitz, Charles R., 1989, Political Equality: An Essay on Democratic Theory , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Black, Duncan, 1963, The Theory of Committees and Elections , second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brennan, Jason, 2011, The Ethics of Voting , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2014, “How Smart Is Democracy? You Can’t Answer That Question a Priori”, Critical Review , 26(1–2): 33–58. doi:10.1080/08913811.2014.907040
• –––, 2016, Against Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Brownlee, Kimberley, 2004, “Features of a Paradigm Case of Civil Disobedience”, Res Publica , 10(4): 337–351. doi:10.1007/s11158-004-2326-6
• –––, 2007, “The Communicative Aspects of Civil Disobedience and Lawful Punishment”, Criminal Law and Philosophy , 1(2): 179–192. doi:10.1007/s11572-006-9015-9
• –––, 2012, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592944.001.0001
• Buchanan, Allen, 1991, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania to Quebec , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Buchanan, James and Gordon Tullock, 1962, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
• Caplan, Bryan, 2007, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cassese, Antonio, 1995, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Christiano, Thomas, 1996, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2003, Philosophy and Democracy: An Anthology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2004, “The Authority of Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 12(3): 266–290. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2004.00200.x
• –––, 2006, “A Democratic Theory of Territory and Some Puzzles about Global Democracy”, Journal of Social Philosophy , 37(1): 81–107. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.2006.00304.x
• –––, 2008, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198297475.001.0001
• –––, 2009, “Must Democracy Be Reasonable?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 39(1): 1–34. doi:10.1353/cjp.0.0037
• –––, 2011, “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy: An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 39(2): 142–176. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01204.x
• –––, 2012, “Rational Deliberation among Experts and Citizens”, in Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012: 27–51. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914.003
• –––, 2015, “Self-Determination and the Human Right to Democracy”, in Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights , Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 459–480. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199688623.003.0026
• Cohen, Joshua, 1986, “An Epistemic Conception of Democracy”, Ethics , 97(1): 26–38. doi:10.1086/292815
• –––, 1989 [2009], “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy”, in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State , Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 17–34; reprinted in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 16–37.
• –––, 1996 [2003], “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy”, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 95–119; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 17–38.
• Coleman, Jules, 1989, “Rationality and the Justification of Democracy,” in Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky (eds.), Politics and Process: New Essays in Democratic Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 194–220.
• Condorcet, Marquis de, 1785, Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues àla pluralité des voix , Paris; reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139923972
• Dahl, Robert A., 1959, A Preface to Democratic Theory , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Delmas, Candice, 2018, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190872199.001.0001
• Dewey, John, 1927 [2012], The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt; reprinted, Melvin L. Rogers (ed.), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2012.
• Downs, Anthony, 1957, An Economic Theory of Democracy , New York: Harper and Row.
• Doyle, Michael W., 2011, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203804933
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1996, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2000, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Elster, Jon, 1986 [2003], “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory”, in Foundations of Scoial Choice Theory , Jon Elster and Aanund Hyllund (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103–132; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 138–158.
• Ely, John Hart, 1980, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Erikson, Robert S., 2015, “Income Inequality and Policy Responsiveness”, Annual Review of Political Science , 18: 11–29. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-020614-094706
• Estlund, David, 1997a [2003], “Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority”, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics , James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 173–204; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 69–91.
• –––, 1997b, “The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority”:, The Modern Schoolman , 74(4): 259–276. doi:10.5840/schoolman199774424
• –––, 2003, “Why Not Epistocracy”, in Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor of T.M. Penner , Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Kelowna, BC: Academic Printing and Publishing, 53–69.
• –––, 2006, “Democracy and the Real Speech Situation”, in Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents , Samantha Besson and José Luis Martí (eds.), London: Routledge, 75–92.
• –––, 2008, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Estlund, David M., Jeremy Waldron, Bernard Grofman, and Scott L. Feld, 1989, “Democratic Theory and the Public Interest: Condorcet and Rousseau Revisited”, American Political Science Review , 83(4): 1317–1340. doi:10.2307/1961672
• Farber, Henry S. and Joanne Gowa, 1995, “Polities and Peace”, International Security , 20(2): 123–146. doi:10.2307/2539231
• Forst, Rainer, 2016, “The Justification of Basic Rights: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach”, Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy , 45(3): 7–28. doi:10.5553/NJLP/221307132016045003002
• Gartzke, Erik, 2007, “The Capitalist Peace”, American Journal of Political Science , 51(1): 166–91.
• Gaus, Gerald F., 1996, Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511780844
• Goodin, Robert E., 2003, Reflective Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199256179.001.0001
• –––, 2007, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 35(1): 40–68. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00098.x
• Goodin, Robert E. and Kai Spiekermann, 2019, An Epistemic Theory of Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198823452.001.0001
• Gould, Carol C., 1988, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economics and Society , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Grofman, Bernard and Scott L. Feld, 1988, “Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective”, American Political Science Review , 82(2): 567–576. doi:10.2307/1957401
• Guerrero, Alexander A., 2010, “The Paradox of Voting and the Ethics of Political Representation”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 38(3): 272–306. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2010.01188.x
• –––, 2014, “Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative”, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 42(2): 135–178. doi:10.1111/papa.12029
• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson, 2004, Why Deliberative Democracy? , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2014, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diksurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• Hannon, Michael, 2020, “Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 101(3): 591–611. doi:10.1111/phpr.12624
• Hardin, Russell, 1999, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198290845.001.0001
• Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960, The Constitution of Liberty , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan , London; reprinted, C.B. MacPherson (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968.
• Hong, Lu and Scott E. Page, 2004, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 101(46): 16385–16389. doi:10.1073/pnas.0403723101
• Hume, David, 1748, “Of the Original Contract”; reprinted in Hume’s Ethical Writings: Selections from David Hume , Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965.
• Ingham, Sean, 2019, Rule by Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108683821
• Kahan, Dan M., 2013, “Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection”, Judgment and Decision Making , 8(4): 407–424
• Kant, Immanuel, 1795, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf , Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius. Translated as “Toward Perpetual Peace” in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy , Mary J. Gregor (trans./ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 311–352.
• Knight, Jack and James Johnson, 2011, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Kolodny, Niko, 2014a, “Rule Over None I: What Justifies Democracy?”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(3): 195–229. doi:10.1111/papa.12035
• –––, 2014b, “Rule Over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(4): 287–336. doi:10.1111/papa.12037
• Ladha, Krishna K., 1992, “The Condorcet Jury Theorem, Free Speech, and Correlated Votes”, American Journal of Political Science , 36(3): 617–634. doi:10.2307/2111584
• Lafont, Christina, 2019, Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lai, Ten-Herng., 2019, “Justifying Uncivil Disobedience”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 5 , David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 90–114. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198841425.003.0004
• Landa, Dimitri and Ryan Pevnick, 2020, “Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy”, American Political Science Review , 114(1): 1–13. doi:10.1017/S0003055419000509
• Landemore, Hélène, 2013, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Layne, Christopher, 1994, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace”, International Security , 19(2): 5–49. doi:10.2307/2539195
• Levy, Jack S. and William R. Thompson, 2010, Causes of War , Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell.
• List, Christian, 2013, “Social Choice Theory”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/social-choice/ >
• List, Christian and Robert E. Goodin, 2001, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 9(3): 277–306. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00128
• Locke, John, 1690, Second Treatise on Civil Government , London; reprinted C.B. MacPherson (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980.
• Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, 1979, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence.”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 37(11): 2098–2109. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098
• Lupia Arthur and Matthew D. McCubbins, 1998, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need To Know? , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mackie, Gerry, 2003, Democracy Defended , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490293
• Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, 1787–1788, The Federalist Papers , New York; reprinted Isaac Kramnick (ed.), Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987. [ Federalist Papers available online ]
• Mansbridge, Jane J. (ed.), 1990, Beyond Self-Interest , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson, and Mark E. Warren, 2012, “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy”, in Parkinson and Mansbridge2003: 1–26. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914.002
• Markovits, Daniel, 2005, “Democratic Disobedience”, Yale Law Journal , 114(8): 1897–1952.
• Marsilius of Padua, [DP], The Defender of the Peace , Discourse I, Annabelle Brett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Maskivker, Julia, 2019, The Duty to Vote , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190066062.001.0001
• May, Simon Cabulea, 2005, “Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 33(4): 317–348. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2005.00035.x
• Mill, John Stuart, 1861 [1991], Considerations on Representative Government , London: Parker, Son, and Bourn; reprinted Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.
• Miller, David, 1995, On Nationality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia , New York: Basic Books.
• Page, Scott E., 2007, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Parfit, Derek, 1984, Reasons and Persons , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019824908X.001.0001
• Parkinson, John and Jane Mansbridge (eds.), 2012, Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914
• Pasternak, Avia, 2018, “Political Rioting: A Moral Assessment”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 46(4): 384–418. doi:10.1111/papa.12132
• Peter, Fabienne, 2008, “Pure Epistemic Proceduralism”, Episteme , 5(1): 33–55. doi:10.3366/E1742360008000221
• –––, 2009, Democratic Legitimacy , New York: Routledge.
• Pevnick, Ryan, 2020, “The Failure of Instrumental Arguments for a Human Right to Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 28(1): 27–50. doi:10.1111/jopp.12197
• Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 1967, The Concept of Representation , Berkeley, CA: University of California.
• Plato, The Republic , revised/trans. by Lee, D., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, 2 nd edition.
• Quirk, Paul J., 2014, “Making It up on Volume: Are Larger Groups Really Smarter?”, Critical Review , 26(1–2): 129–150. doi:10.1080/08913811.2014.907046
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press, expanded edition.
• Rae, Douglas, 1969, “Decision Rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice”, American Political Science Review , 63: 40–56. doi:10.2307/1954283
• Ray, James Lee, 1995, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition , Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
• Raz, Joseph, 1979, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Riker, William H., 1982, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice , San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman.
• Rosenblum, Nancy L., 2008, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Rousseau, David L., Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth, 1996, “Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–88”, American Political Science Review , 90(3): 512–533. doi:10.2307/2082606
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, Du contrat social; ou Principes du droit politique , Amsterdam. Translated as The Social Contract , Charles Frankel (trans.), New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1947.
• Russett, Bruce M., 1993, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Russett, Bruce M. and Harvey Starr, 2003, “From Democratic Peace to Kantian Peace: Democracy and Conflict in the International System”, in Handbook of War Studies II , Manus I. Midlarsky (ed.), Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 93–128.
• Sabl, Andrew, 2001, “Looking Forward to Justice: Rawlsian Civil Disobedience and Its Non-Rawlsian Lessons”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 9(3): 307–330. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00129
• Scheffler, Samuel, 2010, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1942 [1950], Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , New York: Harper and Row; second edition 1947; third edition 1950.
• Sen, Amartya, 1999, Development as Freedom , New York: Knopf.
• Simmons, A. John, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625152
• –––, 2007, Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Singer, Peter, 1973, Democracy and Disobedience , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Smith, William, 2011, “Civil Disobedience and the Public Sphere”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 19(2): 145–166. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2010.00365.x
• Somin, Ilya, 2013, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Song, Sarah, 2012, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded by the State”, International Theory , 4(1): 39–68. doi:10.1017/S1752971911000248
• Stilz, Anna, 2009, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2016, “The Value of Self-Determination”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 2 , David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 8. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198759621.003.0005
• Thompson, Abigail, 2014, “Does Diversity Trump Ability?” Notices of the AMS , 61(9): 1024–1030. [ Thompson 2014 available online ]
• Valentini, Laura, 2013, “Justice, Disagreement and Democracy”, British Journal of Political Science , 43(1): 177–199. doi:10.1017/S0007123412000294
• Viehoff, Daniel, 2014, “Democratic Equality and Political Authority”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(4): 337–375. doi:10.1111/papa.12036
• Waldron, Jeremy, 1995, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s Politics ”, Political Theory , 23(4): 563–584. doi:10.1177/0090591795023004001
• –––, 1999, Law and Disagreement , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Wall, Steven, 2007, “Democracy and Equality”, The Philosophical Quarterly , 57(228): 416–438. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.495.x
• Weart, Spencer R., 1998, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Never Fight One Another , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Wendt, Fabian, 2016, Compromise, Peace and Public Justification: Political Morality Beyond Justice , London: Palgrave Macmillon. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28877-2
• Weinstock, Daniel, 2013, “On the Possibility of Principled Moral Compromise”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 16(4): 537–556. doi:10.1080/13698230.2013.810392
• Whelan, Frederick G., 1983, “Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem”, Nomos 25: Liberal Democracy , J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, 13–47.
• White, Jonathan and Lea Ypi, 2016, The Meaning of Partisanship , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684175.001.0001
• Williams, B., 1973, “A Critique of Utilitarianism”, in Utilitarianism: For and Against , with J.J.C. Smart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism , New York, NY: Harper and Row.
• Wright, Gavin, 2013, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Young, Iris Marion, 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Zakaras, Alex, 2018, “Complicity and Coercion: Toward and Ethics of Political Participation”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy (Volume 4), David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 8.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• [Please contact the author with suggestions]

authority | citizenship | civil disobedience | constitutionalism | egalitarianism | equality | justice | justification, political: public | legitimacy, political | liberty: positive and negative | -->pluralism --> | political obligation | publicity | public reason | representation, political | rights | rule of law and procedural fairness | voting

Acknowledgments

The SEP editors would like to thank Walter Horn for identifying some gaps in the coverage of this entry, leading to a revision in June 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by Tom Christiano < thomasc @ u . arizona . edu > Sameer Bajaj < sameer . bajaj1 @ gmail . com >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Jacksonian Democracy, 1820–1840

The Rise of American Democracy

OpenStaxCollege

[latexpage]

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the key points of the election of 1828
• Explain the scandals of Andrew Jackson’s first term in office

A turning point in American political history occurred in 1828, which witnessed the election of Andrew Jackson over the incumbent John Quincy Adams. While democratic practices had been in ascendance since 1800, the year also saw the further unfolding of a democratic spirit in the United States. Supporters of Jackson called themselves Democrats or the Democracy, giving birth to the Democratic Party. Political authority appeared to rest with the majority as never before.

THE CAMPAIGN AND ELECTION OF 1828

During the 1800s, democratic reforms made steady progress with the abolition of property qualifications for voting and the birth of new forms of political party organization. The 1828 campaign pushed new democratic practices even further and highlighted the difference between the Jacksonian expanded electorate and the older, exclusive Adams style. A slogan of the day, “Adams who can write/Jackson who can fight,” captured the contrast between Adams the aristocrat and Jackson the frontiersman.

The 1828 campaign differed significantly from earlier presidential contests because of the party organization that promoted Andrew Jackson. Jackson and his supporters reminded voters of the “corrupt bargain” of 1824. They framed it as the work of a small group of political elites deciding who would lead the nation, acting in a self-serving manner and ignoring the will of the majority ( [link] ). From Nashville, Tennessee, the Jackson campaign organized supporters around the nation through editorials in partisan newspapers and other publications. Pro-Jackson newspapers heralded the “hero of New Orleans” while denouncing Adams. Though he did not wage an election campaign filled with public appearances, Jackson did give one major campaign speech in New Orleans on January 8, the anniversary of the defeat of the British in 1815. He also engaged in rounds of discussion with politicians who came to his home, the Hermitage, in Nashville.

At the local level, Jackson’s supporters worked to bring in as many new voters as possible. Rallies, parades, and other rituals further broadcast the message that Jackson stood for the common man against the corrupt elite backing Adams and Clay. Democratic organizations called Hickory Clubs, a tribute to Jackson’s nickname, Old Hickory, also worked tirelessly to ensure his election.

In November 1828, Jackson won an overwhelming victory over Adams, capturing 56 percent of the popular vote and 68 percent of the electoral vote. As in 1800, when Jefferson had won over the Federalist incumbent John Adams, the presidency passed to a new political party, the Democrats. The election was the climax of several decades of expanding democracy in the United States and the end of the older politics of deference.

Visit The Hermitage to explore a timeline of Andrew Jackson’s life and career. How do you think the events of his younger life affected the trajectory of his political career?

SCANDAL IN THE PRESIDENCY

Amid revelations of widespread fraud, including the disclosure that some $300,000 was missing from the Treasury Department, Jackson removed almost 50 percent of appointed civil officers, which allowed him to handpick their replacements. This replacement of appointed federal officials is called rotation in office . Lucrative posts, such as postmaster and deputy postmaster, went to party loyalists, especially in places where Jackson’s support had been weakest, such as New England. Some Democratic newspaper editors who had supported Jackson during the campaign also gained public jobs.

Jackson’s opponents were angered and took to calling the practice the spoils system, after the policies of Van Buren’s Bucktail Republican Party. The rewarding of party loyalists with government jobs resulted in spectacular instances of corruption. Perhaps the most notorious occurred in New York City, where a Jackson appointee made off with over $1 million. Such examples seemed proof positive that the Democrats were disregarding merit, education, and respectability in decisions about the governing of the nation.

In addition to dealing with rancor over rotation in office, the Jackson administration became embroiled in a personal scandal known as the Petticoat affair . This incident exacerbated the division between the president’s team and the insider class in the nation’s capital, who found the new arrivals from Tennessee lacking in decorum and propriety. At the center of the storm was Margaret (“Peggy”) O’Neal, a well-known socialite in Washington, DC ( [link] ). O’Neal cut a striking figure and had connections to the republic’s most powerful men. She married John Timberlake, a naval officer, and they had three children. Rumors abounded, however, about her involvement with John Eaton, a U.S. senator from Tennessee who had come to Washington in 1818.

Timberlake committed suicide in 1828, setting off a flurry of rumors that he had been distraught over his wife’s reputed infidelities. Eaton and Mrs. Timberlake married soon after, with the full approval of President Jackson. The so-called Petticoat affair divided Washington society. Many Washington socialites snubbed the new Mrs. Eaton as a woman of low moral character. Among those who would have nothing to do with her was Vice President John C. Calhoun’s wife, Floride. Calhoun fell out of favor with President Jackson, who defended Peggy Eaton and derided those who would not socialize with her, declaring she was “as chaste as a virgin.” (Jackson had personal reasons for defending Eaton: he drew a parallel between Eaton’s treatment and that of his late wife, Rachel, who had been subjected to attacks on her reputation related to her first marriage, which had ended in divorce.) Martin Van Buren, who defended the Eatons and organized social gatherings with them, became close to Jackson, who came to rely on a group of informal advisers that included Van Buren and was dubbed the Kitchen Cabinet . This select group of presidential supporters highlights the importance of party loyalty to Jackson and the Democratic Party.

Section Summary

The Democratic-Republicans’ “corrupt bargain” that brought John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay to office in 1824 also helped to push them out of office in 1828. Jackson used it to highlight the cronyism of Washington politics. Supporters presented him as a true man of the people fighting against the elitism of Clay and Adams. Jackson rode a wave of populist fervor all the way to the White House, ushering in the ascendency of a new political party: the Democrats. Although Jackson ran on a platform of clearing the corruption out of Washington, he rewarded his own loyal followers with plum government jobs, thus continuing and intensifying the cycle of favoritism and corruption.

Review Questions

What was the actual result of Jackson’s policy of “rotation in office”?

The election of 1828 brought in the first presidency of which political party?

What were the planks of Andrew Jackson’s campaign platform in 1828?

Jackson campaigned as a man of the people, intent on sweeping away the corrupt elite by undoing the “corrupt bargain” of Adams’s election, making new federal appointments, and elevating officials whose election actually reflected the will of the majority of voters.

What was the significance of the Petticoat affair?

The Petticoat affair divided those loyal to President Jackson from Washington, DC, insiders. When Washington socialite Peggy O’Neal’s husband committed suicide and O’Neal then married John Eaton, a Tennessee senator with whom she was reportedly unfaithful to her husband, Jackson and those loyal to him defended Peggy Eaton against other Washington, DC, socialites and politicians. Martin Van Buren, in particular, supported the Eatons and became an important figure in Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet” of select supporters and advisers.

The Rise of American Democracy Copyright © 2014 by OpenStaxCollege is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

What Is Democracy? Definition and Examples

• B.S., Texas A&M University

A democracy is a form of government that empowers the people to exercise political control, limits the power of the head of state, provides for the separation of powers between governmental entities, and ensures the protection of natural rights and civil liberties . In practice, democracy takes many different forms. Along with the two most common types of democracies—direct and representative—variants such as participatory, liberal, parliamentary, pluralist, constitutional, and socialist democracies can be found in use today.

Key Takeaways: Democracy

• Democracy, literally meaning “rule by the people,” empowers individuals to exercise political control over the form and functions of their government.
• While democracies come in several forms, they all feature competitive elections, freedom of expression , and protection of individual civil liberties and human rights.
• In most democracies, the needs and wishes of the people are represented by elected lawmakers who are charged with writing and voting on laws and setting policy.
• When creating laws and policies, the elected representatives in a democracy strive to balance conflicting demands and obligations to maximize freedom and protect individual rights.

Despite the prominence in the headlines of non-democratic, authoritarian states like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, democracy remains the world’s most commonly practiced form of government. In 2018, for example, a total of 96 out of 167 countries (57%) with populations of at least 500,000 were democracies of some type. Statics show that the percentage of democracies among the world’s governments has been increasing since the mid-1970s, currently standing just short of its post- World War II high of 58% in 2016.

Democracy Definition

Meaning “rule by the people,” democracy is a system of government that not only allows but requires the participation of the people in the political process to function properly. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln , in his famed 1863 Gettysburg Address may have best-defined democracy as a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

Semantically, the term democracy comes from the Greek words for “people” (dēmos) and “rule” (karatos). However, achieving and preserving a government by the people—a “popular” government—is far more complicated than the concept’s semantic simplicity might imply. In creating the legal framework under which the democracy will function, typically a constitution, several crucial political and practical questions must be answered.

Is “rule by the people” even appropriate for the given state? Do the inherent freedoms of a democracy justify dealing with its complex bureaucracy and electoral processes, or would the streamlined predictability of a monarchy , for example, be preferable?

Assuming a preference for democracy, which residents of the country, state, or town should enjoy the political status of full citizenship? Simply stated, who are the “people” in the “government by the people” equation? In the United States, for example, the constitutionally established doctrine of birthright citizenship provides that any person born on U.S. soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Other democracies are more restrictive in bestowing full citizenship.

Which people within the democracy should be empowered to participate in it? Assuming that only adults are allowed to fully participate in the political process, should all adults be included? For example, until the enactment of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women in the United States were not allowed to vote in national elections. A democracy that excludes too many of the governed from taking part in what is supposed to be their government runs the risk of becoming an aristocracy—government by a small, privileged ruling class—or an oligarchy —government by an elite, typically wealthy, few.

If, as one of the foundational principles of democracy holds, the majority rules, what will a “proper” majority be? A majority of all citizens or a majority of citizens who vote only? When issues, as they inevitably will, divide the people, should the wishes of the majority always prevail, or should, as in the case of the American Civil Rights Movement , minorities be empowered to overcome majority rule? Most importantly, what legal or legislative mechanisms should be created to prevent the democracy from becoming a victim of what one of America’s Founding Fathers , James Madison , called “the tyranny of the majority?”

Finally, how likely is it that a majority of the people will continue to believe that democracy is the best form of government for them? For a democracy to survive it must retain the substantial support of both the people and the leaders they choose. History has shown that democracy is a particularly fragile institution. In fact, of the 120 new democracies that have emerged around the world since 1960, nearly half have resulted in failed states or have been replaced by other, typically more authoritarian forms of government. It is therefore essential that democracies be designed to respond quickly and appropriately to the internal and external factors that will inevitably threaten them.

Democratic Principles

While their opinions vary, a consensus of political scientists agree that most democracies are based on six foundational elements:

• Popular sovereignty: The principle that the government is created and maintained by the consent of the people through their elected representatives.
• An Electoral System: Since according to the principle of popular sovereignty, the people are the source of all political power, a clearly defined system of conducting free and fair elections is essential.
• Public Participation: Democracies rarely survive without the active participation of the people. Health democracies enable and encourage the people to take part in their political and civic processes. 
• Separation of Powers: Based on a suspicion of power concentrated in a single individual—like a king—or group, the constitutions of most democracies provide that political powers be separated and shared among the various governmental entities.
• Human Rights: Along with their constitutionally enumerated rights freedoms, democracies protect the human rights of all citizens. In this context, human rights are those rights considered inherent to all human beings, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other considerations.
• A Rule of Law: Also called due process of law , the rule of law is the principle that all citizens are accountable to laws that are publicly created and equitably enforced in a manner consistent with human rights by an independent judicial system.

Types of Democracy

Throughout history, more types of democracy have been identified than there are countries in the world. According to social and political philosopher Jean-Paul Gagnon, more than 2,234 adjectives have been used to describe democracy. While many scholars refer to direct and representative as the most common of these, several other types of democracies can be found around the world today. While direct democracy is unique, most other recognized types of democracy are variants of representative democracy. These various types of democracy are generally descriptive of the particular values emphasized by the representative democracies that employ them.

Originated in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE, direct democracy , sometimes called “pure democracy,” is considered the oldest non-authoritarian form of government. In a direct democracy, all laws and public policy decisions are made directly by a majority vote of the people, rather than by the votes of their elected representatives.

Functionally possible only in small states, Switzerland is the only example of a direct democracy applied on a national level today. While Switzerland is no longer a true direct democracy, any law passed by the popularly elected national parliament can be vetoed by a direct vote of the public. Citizens can also change the constitution through direct votes on amendments. In the United States, examples of direct democracy can be found in state-level recall elections and lawmaking ballot initiatives .

Representative

Also called indirect democracy, representative democracy is a system of government in which all eligible citizens elect officials to pass laws and formulate public policy on their behalf. These elected officials are expected to represent the needs and viewpoints of the people in deciding the best course of action for the nation, state, or other jurisdiction as a whole.

As the most commonly found type of democracy in use today, almost 60% of all countries employ some form of representative democracy including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

Participatory

In a participatory democracy, the people vote directly on policy while their elected representatives are responsible for implementing those policies. Participatory democracies rely on the citizens in setting the direction of the state and the operation of its political systems. While the two forms of government share similar ideals, participatory democracies tend to encourage a higher, more direct form of citizen participation than traditional representative democracies.

While there are no countries specifically classified as participatory democracies, most representative democracies employ citizen participation as a tool for social and political reform. In the United States, for example, so-called “grassroots” citizen participation causes such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s have led elected officials to enact laws implementing sweeping social, legal, and political policy changes.

Liberal democracy is loosely defined as a form of representative democracy that emphasizes the principles of classical liberalism —an ideology advocating the protection of individual civil liberties and economic freedom by limiting the power of the government. Liberal democracies employ a constitution, either statutorily codified, as in the United States or uncodified, as in the United Kingdom, to define the powers of the government, provide for a separation of those powers, and enshrine the social contract .

Liberal democracies may take the form of a constitutional republic , like the United States, or a constitutional monarchy , such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Parliamentary

In a parliamentary democracy, the people directly elect representatives to a legislative parliament . Similar to the U.S. Congress , the parliament directly represents the people in making necessary laws and policy decisions for the country.

In parliamentary democracies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, the head of government is a prime minister, who is first elected to parliament by the people, then elected prime minister by a vote of the parliament. However, the prime minister remains a member of the parliament and thus plays an active role in the legislative process of creating and passing laws. Parliamentary democracies are typically a feature of a constitutional monarch, a system of government in which the head of state is a queen or king whose power is limited by a constitution.

In a pluralist democracy, no single group dominates politics. Instead, organized groups within the people compete to influence public policy. In political science, the term pluralism expresses the ideology that influence should be spread among different interest groups, rather than held by a single elite group as in an aristocracy. Compared to participatory democracies, in which individuals take part in influencing political decisions, in a pluralist democracy, individuals work through groups formed around common causes hoping to win the support of elected leaders.

In this context, the pluralist democracy assumes that the government and the society as a whole benefit from a diversity of viewpoints. Examples of pluralist democracy can be seen in the impact special interest groups, such as the National Organization for Women , have had on American politics.

Constitutional

While the exact definition continues to be debated by political scientists, constitutional democracy is generally defined as a system of government based on popular sovereignty and a rule of law in which the structures, powers, and limits of government are established by a constitution. Constitutions are intended to restrict the power of the government, typically by separating those powers between the various branches of government, as in the United States’ constitution’s system of federalism . In a constitutional democracy, the constitution is considered to be the “ supreme law of the land .”

Democratic socialism is broadly defined as a system of government based on a socialist economy , in which most property and means of production are collectively, rather than individually, controlled by a constitutionally established political hierarchy—the government. Social democracy embraces government regulation of business and industry as a means of furthering economic growth while preventing income inequality .

While there are no purely socialist governments in the world today, elements of democratic socialism can be seen in Sweden’s provision of free universal health care, education, and sweeping social welfare programs. 

Is America a Democracy

While the word “democracy” does not appear in the United States Constitution, the document provides the basic elements of representative democracy: an electoral system based on majority rule, separation of powers, and a dependence on a rule of law. Also, America’s Founding Fathers used the word often when debating the form and function of the Constitution.  

However, a long-running debate over whether the United States is a democracy or a republic continues today. According to a growing number of political scientists and constitutional scholars, it is both—a “democratic republic.”

Similar to democracy, a republic is a form of government in which the country is governed by the elected representatives of the people. However, since the people do not govern the state themselves, but do so through their representatives, a republic is distinguished from direct democracy.

Professor Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law argues that the governments of democratic republics embrace the principles shared by both republics and democracies. To illustrate his point, Volokh notes that in the United States, many decisions on local and state levels are made by the people through the process of direct democracy, while as in a republic, most decisions at the national level are made by democratically elected representatives.

Brief History

Archeological evidence suggests that disorganized practices at least resembling democracy existed in some parts of the world during prehistoric times, However, the concept of democracy as a form of populist civic engagement emerged during the 5th century BCE in the form of the political system used in some of the city-states of Ancient Greece , most notably Athens . At that time, and for the next several centuries, tribes or city-states remained small enough that if democracy was practiced at all, it took the form of direct democracy. As city-states grew into larger, more heavily populated sovereign nation-states or countries, direct democracy became unwieldy and slowly gave way to representative democracy. This massive change necessitated an entirely new set of political institutions such as legislatures, parliaments, and political parties all designed according to the size and cultural character of the city or country to be governed.

Until the 17th century, most legislatures consisted only of the entire body of citizens, as in Greece, or representatives selected from among a tiny oligarchy or an elite hereditary aristocracy. This began to change during the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1651 when members of the radical Puritan reformation movement demanded expanded representation in Parliament and the universal right to vote for all male citizens. By the middle 1700s, as the power of the British Parliament grew, the first political parties—the Whigs and Tories—emerged. It soon became obvious that laws could not be passed or taxes levied without the support of the Whig or Tory party representatives in Parliament.

While the developments in the British Parliament showed the feasibility of a representative form of government, the first truly representative democracies emerged during the 1780s in the British colonies of North America and took its modern form with the formal adoption of the Constitution of the United States of America on March 4, 1789.

Sources and Further Reference

• Desilver, Drew. “Despite global concerns about democracy, more than half of countries are democratic.” Pew Research Center , May 14, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/.
• Kapstein, Ethan B., and Converse, Nathan. “The Fate of Young Democracies.” Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780511817809.
• Diamond, Larry. “Democracy in Decline?” Johns Hopkins University Press, October 1, 2015, ISBN-10 1421418185.
• Gagnon, Jean-Paul. “2,234 Descriptions of Democracy: An Update to Democracy's Ontological Pluralism.” Democratic Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018.
• Volokh, Eugene. “Is the United States of America a republic or a democracy?” The Washington Post , May 13, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/. 
• Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
• List of Current Communist Countries in the World
• Direct Democracy: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
• Representative Democracy: Definition, Pros, and Cons
• Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
• The Definition and Purpose of Political Institutions
• Key Election Terms for Students
• What Is Political Participation? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Constitutional Monarchy? Definition and Examples
• What Is Theocracy? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Unitary State?
• Understanding Types of Government
• Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy
• Major Parliamentary Governments and How They Work
• What Is Majoritarianism? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Constitutionally Limited Government?

• Skip to global NPS navigation
• Skip to the main content
• Skip to the footer section

Exiting nps.gov

Pathways through american history: making a democracy.

https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/view.htm?id=23BE4261-155D-451F-677D45EBFC665D34

A More Perfect Union

This Pathway, "Making A Democracy," highlights how people fought to access and expand civil and political rights, as well as how others have reacted to and resisted their efforts.

Find other Pathways .

Courtesy Library of Congress

Marker 1 of 4: How did people exercise their First Amendment rights to make their voices heard?

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition. Discover how some activists spoke out against inequality and advocated for rights expansions by exercising these rights.

When have you needed courage to use your voice ? What do you need from history to draw attention to a cause you care about?

Speaking Out

As a skilled speaker and journalist, Cary used the press and her voice to advocate for abolition & voting rights for Black Americans.

Trans activists Johnson & Rivera took to the streets during and after the Stonewall Uprisings to advance LGBTQ liberation.

During World War I, members of the National Woman's Party picketed the White House to demand women's suffrage, facing violence and arrest.

More to Explore

Below, you’ll find even more histories about how activists joined ranks and made their voices heard by exercising their First Amendment freedoms.

Stories of Standing Up and Speaking Out

Places of Zitkála-Šá Zitkála-Šá was a Yankton Sioux writer, musician, & lecturer who fought for Native American citizenship & women's equality. Frederick Douglass Due to his talents as a speaker and writer, Douglass captivated the public with autobiographical accounts of his experiences while enslaved. The 19th Amendment, Elizabeth Peratrovich, and the Ongoing Fight for Equal Rights Peratrovich led the charge to end discrimination against Alaska Natives, who paid taxes & fought wars for the US but lacked equal rights.

Stories of Protest and Petition

Curiosity Kit: Mabel Ping-Hua Lee As a Chinese immigrant and woman, Lee couldn't vote in 1912. She joined suffrage parades to advance women's education, independence, and vote. Yuri Kochiyama Experiencing Japanese incarceration inspired Kochiyama to protest injustice and pursue the liberation and empowerment of people of color.

Photo by Wally Gobetz, 2013

Marker 2 of 4: How is the fight for voting rights related to other civil rights struggles?

Battles for the ballot are often linked to other struggles for freedom, equality, and political recognition. Discover how the fight for voting rights relates to other aspects of the Black freedom struggle.

How can you make what matters to you about more than just yourself? What do you need from history to inspire others to join you?

Fighting for the Vote

In the United States, people have long fought to have their voices heard. One way of doing this is through voting.

The 15th & 19th Amendments moved the US closer to its ideals, but the fight against racism & sexism began much earlier.

Despite Black women's active role fighting for suffrage, Black men & white women often excluded them from organizations & activities.

The Modern Civil Rights Movement is one of several civil rights struggles that occurred during the 1900s. The histories below illustrate how different groups approached the fight for civil rights with inspiration from the tactics, messages, and leaders of other movements.

Stories of Civil Rights Struggles

Asian American Activism and Civic Participation: Battling for Political Rights and Citizenship, 1917 to the Present AAPI battles for equality span from inclusion in political & judicial processes to grassroots efforts to reform living & working conditions. American Latino Theme Study: Struggles for Inclusion This essay focuses on efforts by various American Latino groups for full political & civic inclusion as citizens of the US. LGBTQ Civil Rights in America This chapter explores battles for LGBTQ civil rights & touches on the role of LGBTQ Americans in other civil rights struggles. Disability History: The Disability Rights Movement Since the 1900s, treatment & perceptions of disability have transformed because people with disabilities demanded & created those changes.

World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico, courtesy Library of Congress.

Marker 3 of 4: What kind of challenges did activists encounter when they fought for rights expansions? How can conflict lead to change?

Voting rights and civil rights activists encountered many different obstacles in the struggle for equality. Discover some of the internal disagreements, ideological challenges, and violent backlash that they experienced.

How does democracy make room for disagreement? What do you need from history to respect opinions and ideas that are different than yours?

Overcoming Obstacles

Although anti-suffragists eventually lost their battle, their opposition delayed women’s suffrage for decades.

This lesson analyzes the roles played by local activists and national organizations in the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama.

Although Paul & Catt both fought for women's suffrage, they often fought each other as they worked for passage of the 19th Amendment.

These resources chronicle even more ways that activists turned obstacles into opportunities to advance their respective causes.

Stories of Overcoming Obstacles

Fighting for Suffrage: Comrades in Conflict The struggle for voting rights involved a split between abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Democracy Limited: The Suffrage "Prison Special" Tour of 1919 This series explores how the “Prison Special” aided the cause of women’s suffrage & helped secure the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The "Sip-In" at Julius' Bar in 1966 Inspired by sit-ins in the American South, discover how the LGBTQ community challenged New York's "drinking while gay" legal restrictions.

Photo by Carol Highsmith, courtesy Library of Congress.

Marker 4 of 4: How are civil and political rights contested?

One of the goals of the U.S. Constitution is to “form a more perfect union” that protects the rights and liberties of the American people. The resources below consider how the fight for equal rights is ongoing and incremental.

What do you need from history to ensure the United States lives up to its promise ?

Keeping Up the Fight

Not all women shared the same freedom to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Women of color were often kept from the polls.

Progress is rarely steady & comes about in fits & starts. Learn about the fight for voting rights after the passage of the 19th Amendment.

These lessons consider how engaged citizens tackled historical challenges & how these tactics compare to current struggles.

Keep Up the Pace

American democracy functions best when everyone’s voices are heard.

Get Off the Beaten Path

You might also like.

• pathways through american history
• voting rights
• civil rights
• 19th amendment
• 15th amendment
• 15th and 19th amendments
• constitution
• women's history
• suffrage movement
• shaping the political landscape
• women and politics
• citizenship

Last updated: July 12, 2022

• Teaching Resources
• Upcoming Events
• On-demand Events

Citizen Power Makes Democracy Work

Published: May 22, 2017

• facebook sharing
• email sharing

At a Glance

• Civics & Citizenship
• Democracy & Civic Engagement

About This Lesson

Most people would agree that engaged citizens are essential to a healthy democracy. But what does it mean to be a good citizen, and how do citizens learn to use their power to make change? This lesson invites students to reflect on those important questions using the work of Eric Liu, the founder and CEO of Citizen University. As a “civic entrepreneur,” Liu helps Americans cultivate the values, knowledge, and skills of effective citizenship.

In his book, You're More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen , Liu argues that literacy in power is essential to making democracy work. He writes, “the reimagining of civics as the teaching and learning of power is so necessary . . . If you don’t learn how to practice power, someone else will do it for you—in your name, on your turf, with your voice, and often against your interests.” In this lesson, we explore these ideas about citizenship, power, and responsibility by listening to and discussing an audio interview featuring an interview with Eric Liu. Then, students watch a short animated video that illustrates Liu’s ideas about the steps that turn protest into lasting change. Finally, students deepen their understanding of citizen power by creating images or, in an optional extension, applying Liu’s ideas to key moments in the US civil rights movement.

Essential Questions

• What does it mean to be a good citizen?
• How do citizens learn to use their power to make change?

What’s Included

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-minute class period and includes:

• 4 activities
• 1 audio 
• 1 extension activity

Save this resource for easy access later.

Lesson plan.

Activate Prior Knowledge

Tell students that you’re going to be talking about citizen power in democracies. Ask them what words and images come to mind when they hear the phrase citizen power ? What might be some examples of citizen power from the history or current events? What does citizen power look like and sound like? (Students may mention political campaigns, voting, protests, petitions, and other examples.)

Listen to the Audio Interview with Eric Liu

Play the audio recording Eric Liu on Citizen Power . In this interview with Liu, he discusses some of the essential qualities of citizenship and civic power. Tell students that as they listen, they should write down words and phrases that help them understand the meaning of several key terms Liu uses: citizenship , power , and responsibility . Then, discuss some or all of these of these questions:

How does Liu define what it means to be a citizen? How is his definition different from others that you have heard? (It’s important for students to understand that Liu’s definition of citizen is much broader than those who are born or naturalized in a country.) According to Liu, why is responsibility necessary in a democracy? What does it mean to be a responsible citizen? How does Liu use the story of Rosa Parks to illustrate the qualities of a responsible citizen? How does Liu define power ? What does it mean to be “literate” in power? How is literacy in power similar to literacy in reading and writing? Liu says that “power plus character equals citizenship.” Why are both power and character necessary to citizenship?

Related Materials

• Audio Eric Liu on Citizen Power

Watch the Animated Video

Show students the short animation from TED-Ed, How to Turn Protest into Powerful Change . In You're More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen , Liu identifies “the gap between making demands and making them happen . . . the gap between the rhetoric of revolution and the actual changes in values, systems, habits, and skills that add up to revolution.” The animation illustrates the steps necessary to bridge this gap.

Ask students to pay attention to these key things as they watch:

What are the three strategies? What images does the animation use to illustrate the three strategies?

In small groups, have students share the three strategies and the images used to illustrate them. (For example, the strategy “pushing boundaries and expanding the frame of the possible” is illustrated with a thought bubble saying “what if?” that becomes a balloon and floats out of the picture.) Ask students, how do the images help viewers to better understand Liu’s ideas about how to turn protest into change?

• Link How to Turn Protest into Powerful Change
• Link You're More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

Reflect and Create

Ask students to return to their notes from the audio interview with Eric Liu. How could they use the inspiration provided by the animation to create their own illustrations of key ideas about citizenship, power, and responsibility?

The Color-Symbol-Image strategy (adapted from a thinking routine developed by educators at Harvard University’s Project Zero) helps students to reflect on ideas in nonverbal ways and encourages them to think metaphorically. 1  

 First, ask students to think about the most important idea that surfaced for them in the interview—it could be about citizenship, power, responsibility, or something else that stood out to them. Once each student has selected an idea, ask them to think about how they can communicate the essence of that idea using a color, a symbol, and an image. Instruct students to:

Choose a color that they think best represents that big idea Choose a symbol that they think best represents that idea Choose an image that they think best represents that idea

Students can make their own drawing, use found materials to make a collage, or create their color-symbol-image on a computer. They can also write an artist’s statement explaining their choices and imagining what it could look like to use this strategy to make change on an issue they care about.

• 1 For more ideas about using Color-Symbol-Image, see Harvard University’s Project Zero .

Extension Activity

Apply Liu’s Ideas about Citizen Power to Analyze a Historical Moment

In the audio interview and in the animation, Eric Liu invokes several historical moments—the US civil rights movement, the Solidarity movement in Poland, Indian independence, and the Arab Spring—as examples of protest and citizen power. These and many other moments in history, including some that may be in your curriculum, can help students to see citizen power at work. Select a moment from a history you’ve taught, or use Facing History and Ourselves’ resources on the Civil Rights movement, such as Choices in Little Rock , and ask students how they see Liu’s ideas about citizen power operating in these historical moments. Where do they see citizens expanding the frame of the possible, choosing a defining fight, and finding an early win?

• Collection Choices in Little Rock

Materials and Downloads

Explore the materials, eric liu on citizen power, resources from other organizations, free press makes democracy work.

Insights on Democracy from South Africa

Additional Resources

Related resources, 10 questions for young changemakers, you might also be interested in…, 10 questions for the future: student action project, 10 questions for the present: parkland student activism, voting rights in the united states, how to read the news like a fact checker, confronting apartheid, what makes democracy work, mob violence, human behavior, and the capitol insurrection, resources for civic education in california, resources for civic education in massachusetts, civics for all resources for nyc public schools, the hope and fragility of democracy in the united states, what happened during the insurrection at the us capitol and why, unlimited access to learning. more added every month..

Facing History & Ourselves is designed for educators who want to help students explore identity, think critically, grow emotionally, act ethically, and participate in civic life. It’s hard work, so we’ve developed some go-to professional learning opportunities to help you along the way.

Exploring ELA Text Selection with Julia Torres

Working for justice, equity and civic agency in our schools: a conversation with clint smith, centering student voices to build community and agency, inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

• CEU Home Page

Democracy in History

Democracy in History will complement and enrich the work of the other groups of the Democracy Institute by creating a broad historical perspective and opening up the research field toward the humanities.  It seeks to focus both on the emergence of democracy as a sociocultural practice and as an ideational framework. Thus, it will engage both with the long-term roots of democratic patterns in pre-modern societies (from political philosophies of classical antiquity and political theology of medieval universities to the medieval communes and early modern noble republicanism) and their modern and contemporary manifestations and legacies (such as debates on the relationship of democracy to constitutionalism, liberalism, or republicanism).

By analyzing various patterns of democratization, our group is aware that this is not a “one-directional” teleological process. Therefore, it will pay special attention to the study of earlier and recent crises of “de-democratization.” Thus, we seek to put contemporary debates into a broad historical framework, but also look at previous instances of de-democratization and processes of democratic revival while having in mind our current problems. Thus, the historical study of the rise of autocratic/totalitarian regimes in past times is relevant to current political discussions and it allows for a critical examination of the dominant civilizationist discourse. In connection to studying patterns and processes of democratization and de-democratization, this research group will also explore the history of “thick” and “thin” ideologies, such as liberalism, socialism, anti-liberalism, nationalism, populism, fascism and their impact on social and political changes.  

We will explore questions such as: How to map comparatively national, meso-regional, and global patterns of democratization and de-democratization if we want to go beyond the Huntingtonian “waves,” and consider the backlash of the last decade? Can we use populism as a trans-historical category of internal challenges to democratic regimes going back in time, or is it a recent phenomenon? What is the role of history (politics of remembrance, populist reinterpretation of medieval and recent past, erecting and reinterpreting monuments, rewriting of schoolbooks) in this process?  How and when did civil society function as an agent of democratization or of democratic backsliding? How was the creation of autonomous communities instrumentalized by monarchical and state power for various purposes? In order to address these issues, we also plan to involve colleagues working at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) on the history of transition to team up with Democracy Institute researchers and run common projects.

Website: DI Democracy in History

Contact: [email protected]

Researchers

Tetiana Zemliakova Joins DI as Lead Researcher of Democracy in History Working Group

The Democracy in History workgroup has a new WG leader, Tetiana Zemliakova, who is an intellectual historian of modern disciplinary knowledge.

Agnes Kelemen: Next Year in Brno? Brno’s Significance for Hungarian Jews in the Age of the Numerus Clausus and Beyond

In a new book chapter, CEU DI Research Assistant Agnes Kelemen discusses Brno’s significance for Hungarian Jews in the age of the Numerus Clausus and beyond.

Utopia and Democracy Conference

The 24th Conference of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe will take place on 3-5 July, 2024 at the CEU Democracy Institute.

Opening: Junior Visiting Researcher - BENASTA ERC Project

The Democracy Institute (DI) of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest invites applications for a two-year long Junior Visiting Researcher position to study non-elite adherence to Polish nationalism in the Prussian partition (Poznań/Posen, West Prussia and possibly Warmia) between 1871 through 1914.

Opening: Post-doctoral Researcher - BENASTA ERC Project

The Democracy Institute (DI) of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest invites applications for a two-year long Postdoctoral Researcher position to study non-elite responses to South Slavic nationalism in the Habsburg Adriatic provinces in the period between 1867 and 1914.

Audiovisuals

History as Democracy

RevDem assistant editor Bence Bari interviews László Kontler, Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute’s Democracy in History workgroup and lead researcher of the project “History as Democracy.”

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins About Liberalism

Kasia Krzyzanowska interviews Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a faculty member in History Department at Dartmouth College, on the future of liberalism, especially post-Cold War liberalism as envisioned by American intellectuals.

Student political stunts of years gone by don't tell us everything about our politicians — but in Albanese's case, it taught him a valuable lesson

Analysis Student political stunts of years gone by don't tell us everything about our politicians — but in Albanese's case, it taught him a valuable lesson

Democracy — the world's most annoying system ever designed by human beings to regulate themselves, apart from all the other options — is built on the right of citizens to voice dissent.

In this particular democracy, in this particular week, notwithstanding the ever-escalating daily churn of events, two tableaux stick in the mind. And both tell us something about our own leaders.

The first is the nation's capital, comprehensively shut down by the largest security operation ever to greet a visiting world leader. Hundreds of law enforcement officers gathered to keep protesters at bay and preserve the "dignity" of visiting Chinese Premier Li Qiang.

Sadly, all the wallopers in Australia could not insulate Mr Li's dignity from the jab it received at Monday's Great Hall luncheon in his honour, at which our very own PM commenced his remarks by welcoming "Your Excellency Li Keqiang, the Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China".

Ouch, ouch, ouch . Li Keqiang was, of course, the last guy, who resigned from the premiership in March 2023, and died in October after a heart attack. Mr Li's features gave only the tiniest twitch at this moment. 

Presumably, after 41 years in the CCP, this man does not startle easily. Welcome to Australia, Mr Li! And welcome to one of the commonest workplace experiences of Chinese Australians; being mistaken for the other Chinese guy.

Mr Li's travelling posse of minders — in a terrible moment, and one that left a nasty stain on the Australian home of democracy — clumped themselves around the Australian journalist Cheng Lei so as to obscure her from the cameras. Questioned later that day at the National Press Club, Mr Albanese said he didn't know it had happened. Yesterday, he was firmer .

For all the upsides of normalising relations with our big-spending non-democratic neighbour (lobster sales!), there are certainly downsides, like having to remain polite when your citizens get menaced.

Anthony Albanese has been in politics for a long time too. And his own lessons in pragmatism go back just as far as Mr Li's.

Albanese has history when it comes to student political protests

Forty-one years ago, as a young Mr Li signed up to the Chinese Communist Party as a junior clerk in Rui'an, the 20-year-old Albanese was already well entrenched in the signature barney of his career in student politics.

His cause? The preservation of The University of Sydney's Political Economy course, a left-wing breakaway from the classical economics curriculum which was established in the 1970s and denounced in 1979 by then-SRC president Tony Abbott as a "thinly disguised attempt by unscrupulous academics to impose simplistic ideological solutions upon students, as it were; to make students the cannon fodder for their own private versions of the revolution".

By June 29 of that year, Mr Albanese — having climbed and defaced the campus clock tower in protest, as well as installing a caravan on the university's lawns and daubing it with the words "Faculty Of Political Economy" — found himself leading an occupation of the economics faculty's staff common room.

The exasperated vice-chancellor called the cops. The Tactical Response Group, no less!

Speaking to Karen Middleton for her biography, Albanese: Telling It Straight, the PM admits that the university's escalation of hostilities took him and his comrades by surprise. 

They locked themselves in and negotiated through the window, pretending to police and media that their numbers were vast, when in fact they were 14 students, one baby and a "talking stick" that was used to civilise group discussion. 

The sit-in was broken up and Albanese was charged with "serious alarm or affront" (later dismissed), but within a week he was back in the common room for a second, longer occupation. And at day 10, the young Labor activist started to get sick of the anarchists and Trotskyists who were his new roommates.

"They'd sit in a circle and they'd keep talking until everyone agreed," Albanese told Middleton.

"So no-one ever made a decision … they had no strategy for it to end. And what was clear was that for some of them, the sit-in was the objective. It was literally a place to live!"

So what did Albanese do? He arranged for some Labor Club colleagues to arrive early one morning to the common room, and force an immediate vote to disband.

"We stacked it, basically," Albanese recalled. "To end it."

What's the point of this ancient history?

Well, it helps to explain the PM's extreme caution around the pro-Palestine protests on campuses around Australia, Sydney University's version of which has been largely dismantled this week .

Albanese himself was a founder of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in his early days as a federal MP. He was a committed university protester, obviously. But he has done nothing to encourage the students speaking out on what used to be a cause close to his heart. Why?

The broadest hint as to his private sentiment came in May when The Australian reported that the PM had told a group of rabbis that the protesters were just "campus Trots".

Another clue came a fortnight ago when the PM and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton teamed up in Parliament to condemn the Greens for lending support to protesters blockading MPs' offices or daubing them with slogans.

Campus Trots are an historical annoyance for Albanese. So are the Greens, who have niggled him in his inner-west Sydney seat of Grayndler for his whole parliamentary career.

Past deeds in student politics (and there are many MPs who underwent this peculiar form of boot-camp) won't tell you everything about a fully grown political leader.

But the crenellations of these juvenile adventures can be unmistakeable. Some experiences are formative, and permanent.

In 1983, for instance, while the current PM was awaiting his turn with the talking stick in the Economics staff common room, a young Julia Gillard was fighting a different battle as president of the Australian Union of Students (AUS). 

The left-wing national student union, established in 1970, was struggling to attract campus affiliates, and Gillard was convinced that the muscular pro-Palestine stance of the organisation was partially to blame.

"The bigger cost for the AUS of this foreign policy preoccupation was the way it alienated the vast mass of students, who were studying to get their qualifications, often holding down part-time jobs," she wrote in her 2014 memoir, My Story.

This analysis was not, ironically, a million miles from the sentiment of young Abbott, who in 1977 drove his purple eight-cylinder Leyland P76 to the AUS conference in Melbourne, accompanied by his friend Greg Sheridan - now The Australian's long-time foreign editor - who recalls the expedition in his own memoir When We Were Young and Foolish.

The pair attended a Palestinian film night that was part of the conference program, and heckled from the audience with pro-Israel sentiment. The film was stopped, a scuffle ensued, and Abbott was struck in the back of the head with a clog by one of the angry organisers, who had removed it from her own foot for this purpose. 

Later, Abbott was roughed-up "by Maoists" in a residential hall corridor. It was a violent year; Jewish Labor MP Michael Danby, the former Member for Melbourne Ports, was also beaten up in Melbourne that year, as was the then-Monash Students Association chair Peter Costello, who sustained a broken wrist when attacked by an anarchist.

Gillard, as AUS president, eventually succeeded in closing down the debate on the Middle East; in 1983, the union adopted a neutral "no policy" stance on the matter. The AUS folded later that year. But 30 years later, when Gillard was prime minister, her decision to oppose a UN General Assembly vote recognising Palestine caused a series of internal caucus explosions that her leadership — ultimately — did not survive. 

Recently, Gillard and Albanese both gave interviews to former treasurer Josh Frydenberg for his Sky News documentary Never Again, an examination of the rise in anti-Semitic sentiment in Australia over the eight months since the Hamas attacks on October 7 and Israel's brutal response, which have generated unerasable scenes of scorching inhumanity and violence.

The conflict in the Middle East casts a long shadow over Australian politics, and Australian protest. 

Is the PM correct in his assessment that the pro-Palestine movement consists mainly of Greens and campus Trots?

That's the other thing about democracy. The people always end up letting you know.

• X (formerly Twitter)

Related Stories

Premier jacinta allan condemns protesters who stormed state labor conference.

Pro-Palestinian students pack up protest camp after University of Sydney issues order to move on

'I will not be lectured about peace and non-violence': Bipartisan condemnation of Greens' involvement in pro-Palestinian protests

Campus clashes, abortion bans and Trump's court reprieve: 24 hours told us a lot about the US election

• Abbott, Tony
• Anthony Albanese
• Federal Government
• Gillard, Julia
• Political Leadership

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election Results
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• Auto Racing
• 2024 Paris Olympic Games
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Biden concedes debate fumbles but declares he will defend democracy. Dems stick by him — for now

President Joe Biden is trying to quell Democratic anxieties over his unsteady showing in his debate with ex-President Donald Trump. Biden appeared to acknowledge the criticism on Friday saying ”I don’t debate as well as I used to.”

On Friday, the day after the first 2024 presidential debate, House Democrats and Republicans weighed in on the performances of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

President Joe Biden, right, and first lady Jill Biden walk off stage after speaking at a campaign rally, Friday, June 28, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

• Copy Link copied

President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally, Friday, June 28, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Joe Biden, right, and first lady Jill Biden, left, walk to the stage to speak at a campaign rally, joined in background by Eric Fitts, Friday, June 28, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Joe Biden speaks during a presidential debate hosted by CNN with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate hosted by CNN with President Joe Biden, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden worked forcefully Friday to quell Democratic anxieties over his unsteady showing in his debate with former President Donald Trump, as elected members of his party closed ranks around him in an effort to shut down talk of replacing him atop the ticket.

Biden’s halting delivery and meandering comments, particularly early in the debate, fueled concerns from even members of his own party that at age 81 he’s not up for the task of leading the country for another four years. It created a crisis moment for Biden’s campaign and his presidency, as members of his party flirted with potential replacements, and donors and supporters couldn’t contain their concern about his showing against Trump.

Biden appeared to acknowledge the criticism during a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, saying ”I don’t debate as well as I used to.” But he added, “I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.” Speaking for 18 minutes, Biden appeared far more animated than he had the night before as he excoriated Trump for his “lies” and for waging a campaign aimed at “revenge and retribution.”

“The choice in this election is simple,” Biden said. “Donald Trump will destroy our democracy. I will defend it.”

He added, alluding to his candidacy, “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”

What to know about the 2024 Election

• Democracy: American democracy has overcome big stress tests since 2020. More challenges lie ahead in 2024.
• AP’s Role: The Associated Press is the most trusted source of information on election night, with a history of accuracy dating to 1848. Learn more.
• Read the latest: Follow AP’s complete coverage of this year’s election.

First lady Jill Biden, at a Friday evening fundraiser in New York City, said her husband told her after the debate, “I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that great.” But she seconded the president in stressing that he tells the truth and he bounces back from adversity.

Even before the debate, Biden’s age had been a liability with voters, and Thursday night’s faceoff appeared to reinforce the public’s deep-seated concerns before perhaps the largest audience he will garner in the four months until Election Day.

Privately, his campaign worked to tamp down concerns and keep donors and surrogates on board. Democratic lawmakers on Friday acknowledged Biden’s poor showing, but tried to stop talk of replacing him as their standard-bearer, and instead shift the focus to Trump’s attacks and falsehoods.

“Well, the president didn’t have a good night, but neither did Donald Trump with lie after lie and his dark vision for America,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper told The Associated Press on Friday, hours before he introduced the president in Raleigh. “We cannot send Donald Trump back to the White House. He’s an existential threat to our nation.”

Former President Barack Obama backed up his former vice president, posting on X that “Bad debate nights happen.” Alluding to his own poor showing in the first debate of his reelection campaign in 2012, Obama continued, “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

He added: “Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries answered with a flat “no” when asked Friday if Biden should step aside.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., allowed he “had to take a few more antidepressants than usual” after Biden’s debate showing.

But he added that “a Donald Trump presidency would cause me far greater discomfort than a Joe Biden debate performance.”

Biden’s campaign billed the Raleigh event as the largest-yet rally of his reelection bid in the state Trump carried by the narrowest margin in 2020. He then traveled to New York for a weekend of big-dollar fundraisers that his campaign now needs more than ever.

Biden’s campaign announced that it raised $14 million on debate day and the morning after, while Trump’s campaign said it raised more than $8 million from the start of the debate through the end of the night.

Vice President Kamala Harris, whom the Biden campaign sent out to defend his performance, tried to reassure Biden supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday, saying, “This race will not be decided by one night in June.

“This race will be decided by you. By us,” she said. “Who sits in the White House next year will be determined by what we together do in these next 130 days.”

Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said there had been no internal conversations “whatsoever” about Biden stepping aside, though he, too, acknowledged that the president had a “bad night” on stage.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said he could hardly sleep because of the number of telephone calls he got after Biden performed “horribly” in the debate.

“People were just concerned. And I told everybody being concerned is healthy, overreacting is dangerous,” Cleaver said.

Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat whose support in that state helped Biden secure the Democratic nomination four years ago, said he would likely speak to Biden later Friday and his message would be simple: “Stay the course.”

Biden and his team have long wagered that voters would look past their concerns about his age and unpopularity when confronted at the ballot box with a choice between the president and Trump. Despite their concerns about Biden’s performance, they took solace in Trump doing little to expand his own appeal to voters on Thursday.

Polls from CNN and 538/Ipsos conducted soon after the debate found that most debate-watchers thought Trump outperformed Biden. But the two men’s favorability ratings remained largely unchanged, just as they did in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction.

Democrats seized on Trump’s equivocations on whether he would accept the will of voters this time around, his refusal to condemn the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden, and his embrace of the conservative-leaning Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion nationwide.

But Biden fumbled on abortion rights, one of the most important issues for Democrats in this year’s election. He was unable to explain Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. A conservative Supreme Court with three justices nominated by Trump overturned Roe two years ago.

As elected Democrats united behind Biden publicly, donors and party operatives shared panicked text messages and phone calls Thursday night and into Friday expressing their concern that Biden’s performance was so bad that he may be unelectable this fall.

Among the few public Democratic voices calling on Biden to step aside was congressional candidate Nancy Boyda in Kansas, who broke with most in her party and called on Biden to suspend his campaign and retire at the end of his current term.

But there were no immediate signs of organized efforts among donors, his campaign leadership or the Democratic National Committee to convince the president to step aside, according to interviews with several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive conversations.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat frequently mentioned as a 2028 contender and speculated about as a potential replacement for Biden, released a statement backing him on Friday.

“The difference between Joe Biden’s vision for making sure everyone in America has a fair shot and Donald Trump’s dangerous, self-serving plans will only get sharper as we head toward November,” she said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also dismissed questions on whether he would consider stepping in for Biden, telling reporters, “I will never turn my back on him.”

Under current Democratic Party rules, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace Biden as the party’s nominee without his cooperation or without party officials being willing to rewrite the rules at the August national convention.

Trump was set to hold a rally Friday afternoon in Chesapeake, Virginia, a onetime battleground that has shifted toward Democrats in recent years but that his aides believe can flip toward the Republicans in November.

Superville reported from Raleigh, North Carolina; Price from Norfolk, Virginia; Peoples from Atlanta. AP reporters Stephen Groves, Brian Slodysko, Colleen Long and Farnoush Amiri in Washington, John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, JJ Cooper in Las Vegas, Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed.

June 24, 2024

New Member Appointed to Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee

%news-subtitle%

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service today announced the appointment of Alicia Cheng, a graphic designer and educator, to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC). Members are appointed to the committee by the postmaster general to provide expertise in business, history, science, technology, art, education, sports and other areas of public interest. Working together, they make recommendations for future stamp subjects.

Cheng is currently head of design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she leads the team responsible for designing exhibitions, permanent galleries and communications materials.

Before that, Cheng was a co-design director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and later went on to become a founding partner of MGMT. design, a collaborative female-owned graphic design studio focusing on exhibition design, museum publications, print, branding and data visualization.

She currently serves as an external critic for the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has taught at Yale University, Maryland Institute College of Art, Barnard College and the Cooper Union School of Art.

A keen student of the early development of communication and distribution systems, Cheng has contributed articles on Victorian photography and public service announcements to The Atlantic magazine and an article on the history of the printed ballot for The New Yorker. In 2020, she published the book “This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot,” with an accompanying exhibition at the Cooper Union.

She is a member of the Board of Visitors for the Temple University Rome Program and was a past board member of AIGA/NY and the Fine Arts Federation, a design advocacy consortium in New York City.

Cheng attended Barnard College in New York City and received an MFA in graphic design from Yale University with a focus on information design and dance notation systems. She was born in Ann Arbor, MI, and resides in Brooklyn NY with her husband and daughter.

Submitting Stamp Suggestions

Due to the time required for research and approval in the stamp selection process, ideas for stamp subjects should be received at least three years prior to the proposed issuance. Each submission should include pertinent historical information and important dates associated with the subject. Proposals must be in writing and submitted by U.S. Mail. No in-person appeals, phone calls or emails are accepted. Mail your suggestion (one topic per letter) to the address below:

Stamp Development Attn: Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee 475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300 Washington, DC 20260-3501

Postal Products

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps , by calling 844-737-7826, or at Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon .

The United States Postal Service is an independent federal establishment, mandated to be self-financing and to serve every American community through the affordable, reliable and secure delivery of mail and packages to 167 million addresses six and often seven days a week. Overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, the Postal Service is implementing a 10-year transformation plan, Delivering for America , to modernize the postal network, restore long-term financial sustainability, dramatically improve service across all mail and shipping categories, and maintain the organization as one of America’s most valued and trusted brands.

The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

For USPS media resources, including broadcast-quality video and audio and photo stills, visit the USPS Newsroom . Follow us on X , formerly known as Twitter; Instagram ; Pinterest ; Threads and LinkedIn . Subscribe to the USPS YouTube Channel and like us on Facebook . For more information about the Postal Service, visit usps.com and facts.usps.com .

Media contacts

• James McKean [email protected]

Printable version