Democracy s Domainpapa_1158

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1 David Miller Democracy s Domainpapa_1158 i In this article I try to address the question whether democratic theory can guide us in solving what is sometimes called democracy s boundary problem, the problem, that is, of deciding who should be included in the demos or constituency when democratic decisions are taken. How, in other words, should the political units within which democracy will be practiced be constituted? I take this to be primarily a question about people rather than about territory, although of course the answer we give will have immediate implications for the territorial reach of democratic authority. It is a question that was not much addressed during the last century, when democracy itself became the preeminent political value, but it was largely taken for granted that its primary domain was the nation-state. But several recent developments have made it more urgent. The most obvious of these is the growing interest in transnational or global democracy, whose advocates argue that democracy at the national level is no longer adequate to address a range of problems that arise as a result of globalization, broadly understood. Another is the issue of secession: the issue of whether there may be democratic reasons to break up larger states into smaller units. A third is the issue of immigration, where it has been argued that the appropriate demos for making decisions about the immigration policy of any given state should be Earlier versions of this article were presented to the 6th Pavia Graduate Conference in Political Philosophy, University of Pavia, September 16 17, 2008, and to the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop, October 13, 2008, and I should like to thank both audiences for their comments and suggestions. It draws upon my Wesson Lectures on Democracy delivered at Stanford University in I am particularly grateful to Joshua Cohen for his written commentary on that occasion. The article has also been much improved by comments from the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, no. 3

2 202 Philosophy & Public Affairs extended to include would-be immigrants alongside existing citizens of the state in question. 1 In all these cases, the underlying question is whether the nation-state provides an adequate answer to the domain question, or whether we must consider new ways of constituting the demos. The issue in this article is whether democratic theory is of any help in solving this problem. The answer is not obvious. One might think that decisions about domain should be made on other grounds; for example, one might appeal to values such as freedom of association, or national self-determination, or economic efficiency. Once the domain is fixed, one can appeal to democratic theory for guidance on the best institutions and procedures to be adopted, but it is simply a mistake to think that the theory can address the domain question itself. Several prominent democratic theorists have held this view. Joseph Schumpeter, in his famous discussion of the idea of democracy, argued that since every democratic system excludes some potential participants, for example, those below a certain age, on grounds that the existing members of that system take to be rational, there is no alternative to allowing each demos to define itself. 2 Attempts to propose criteria from the outside simply reveal a disagreement about what makes a person fit to participate in democratic politics, and Schumpeter felt no discomfort in conceding that polities that excluded, for example, Jews, blacks, or women might still qualify as democracies. So for Schumpeter the boundary question is unanswerable and in a sense trivial: we must simply accept the boundaries that political communities have set for themselves. Robert Dahl, by contrast, did not think that the question was a trivial one on the contrary and he grappled repeatedly with it in his various contributions to democratic theory, but still concluded that we cannot solve the problem of the proper scope and domain of democratic units from within democratic theory. 3 Since after saying this Dahl immediately 1. See Arash Abizadeh, Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders, Political Theory 36 (2008): Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, ed. Thomas B. Bottomore (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), pp Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p For other attempts by Dahl on the domain problem, see Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), chap. 2; Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

3 203 Democracy s Domain goes on to present seven criteria for judging whether the domain of a democratic unit is justified, however, that conclusion is ambiguous. It might mean that there is no simple entailment from democratic principles to the choice of political units; rather that choice, although informed by democratic principles, has to be made on the basis of contingencies of time and place; in other words, it requires empirically grounded political judgment as well. Or it might mean that the criteria proposed by Dahl are not themselves democratic criteria. Both possibilities find support in Dahl s text. Why is it important to see whether democratic theory has anything to contribute to the domain problem, given that there are other ways of solving it? There are two reasons, one negative, one positive. The negative reason is that if we have to step beyond the idea of democracy itself to obtain an answer to the problem of domain, we are likely to become enmeshed in controversy. Suppose the appeal is to national selfdetermination: the boundaries of democracy should be made to coincide, as far as possible, with national boundaries. This solution will only appeal to those who value national self-determination on independent grounds, and by no means everybody does. The positive reason is the discomfort we intuitively feel with the idea that boundary setting is purely arbitrary from a democratic point of view. Few readers, I believe, will be happy with Schumpeter s suggestion that we must leave it to every populus to define [it]self, 4 because the implications of this position, clear to see in the exclusions that Schumpeter contemplated, seem inconsistent with the idea of political equality that is central to democracy itself. We are likely, of course, to condemn the exclusion of women or racial minorities from political rights on other grounds that it is merely arbitrary, or that it exposes them to exploitation, for example but we also think, I suggest, that it is plainly undemocratic, meaning that it violates some constitutive element of the idea of democracy itself. The problem, then, is to see how an appeal to the underlying values of democracy might guide us in thinking about the question of its domain. One reason for thinking that the domain problem cannot be resolved by an appeal to democracy can be quickly set aside. This is the well-worn Press, 1974); Robert A. Dahl, Procedural Democracy, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fifth Series, ed. Peter Laslett and James Fishkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). 4. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 245.

4 204 Philosophy & Public Affairs observation that if a democratic procedure such as majority voting is used to decide the question of who is to be included in the domain, an obviously circularity is involved, since to use the procedure we must already know who should be allowed to take part in operating it. (There is no reason to believe that by starting with some arbitrarily chosen constituency and allowing that constituency to take repeated votes on its own membership, we will always arrive at the same equilibrium outcome.) Clearly then, the domain problem cannot be solved by appeal to democratic procedure. But this does not mean that it cannot be solved by appeal to democratic theory, understood to mean the underlying values, such as political equality, that justify procedures like majority voting. It is too quick to conclude, as Whelan does, that democratic theory cannot itself provide any solution to disputes that may and historically do arise concerning boundaries on the grounds that democracy, which is a method for group decision-making or self-governance, cannot be brought to bear on the logically prior matter of the constitution of the group itself, the existence of which it presupposes. 5 This conflates democratic theory, as a set of normative ideals, with democratic method, as a procedure or procedures that reflect these ideals. 6 ii A better diagnosis of the problem, I believe, is that democratic theory very often gives ambivalent answers to the question of domain, as different elements within the theory pull in opposite directions. At this point, it is necessary to say something about the theory itself, and to recognize that democracy has many of the features that W. B. Gallie sought to capture in his notion of an essentially contested concept. 7 Conceptions of democracy vary along a number of dimensions: they vary 5. Frederick Whelan, Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem, in Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983), p. 40. See also Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), who speaks of a paradox internal to democracies, namely that democracies cannot choose the boundaries of their own membership democratically, p This point has also been made by Gustaf Arrhenius, The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory (mimeo), sections II III. 7. W. B. Gallie, Essentially Contested Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 ( ):

5 205 Democracy s Domain both in terms of the institutional arrangements that they regard as the best embodiment of the democratic ideal, and in terms of the underlying values that these institutions are meant to serve. It would be a large task to survey each of the many possible conceptions and ask how it would resolve the domain question. Instead I shall consider just two such conceptions, which I shall label liberal and radical (or L-democracy and R-democracy for short), that naturally form two ends of a spectrum along which many, if not all, contemporary democratic theorists can be positioned. As will shortly become apparent, the contrast between L-democrats and R-democrats is in the first place a contrast between different normative understandings of the purposes of democratic institutions, though this translates into a disagreement about the form these institutions should take (for example, about whether democracy must involve representation, and if so what the relationship should be between representatives and those they represent). I choose to focus on this particular contrast because it shows us most clearly how answers to the domain question depend on the conception of democracy that is being invoked to resolve it. So let me now provide brief sketches of the two conceptions, keeping in mind that many democrats will opt for some intermediate position that draws selectively from both. For L-democrats, the value of democracy is best understood instrumentally, in terms of the content of the decisions that will result from following democratic procedures. Democracy, in other words, is important for the outcomes it produces. What outcomes are these? L-democrats will respond to this question in different ways, but two historically important answers are that democracy serves freedom by protecting members of the demos from domination, and that democracy promotes welfare by ensuring that political decisions track the aggregate interests of its constituency. Democratic procedures are assessed in terms of these values, so majority rule, for example, is supported insofar as it protects the freedom and welfare of the majority, but challenged when majorities are likely to oppress or neglect the interests of minority groups. For R-democrats, by contrast, democracy is valued intrinsically, and the idea of collective self-determination stands at the heart of democratic theory. Democracy is a system in which people come together to decide matters of common concern on the basis of equality, and the aim is to reach decisions that everyone can identify with, that is, can see as in

6 206 Philosophy & Public Affairs some sense their decision. This cannot mean, obviously, that the decision reached represents everyone s first choice; if that degree of consensus existed, a political procedure for making decisions would hardly be needed. But the process by which the decision is reached process here encompassing not only formal voting procedures and the like, but also the manner in which the debate between alternatives is conducted is such that each person feels that he or she has had a chance to influence the outcome, and that the outcome itself is at least a fair compromise between competing interests or rival convictions. If Locke is the patron saint of L-democracy, Rousseau with his conception of the general will stands in the same relation to R-democracy. How does the contrast between these rival conceptions of democracy bear upon the question of democracy s domain? If we think, in liberal terms, about democracy as valuable for the outcomes it produces, then one of our main concerns will be with the relationship between the constituency that makes the decisions and what we can call the impact group: the set of people whose lives are affected by the decisions made. We may, for example, want to establish procedures that as far as possible ensure that the constituency and the impact group are one and the same, that those who make the decisions are the same people as those who bear their impact; or we may prefer a more complex arrangement that we believe offers better protection to certain members of the impact group. We will approach the domain question by asking, first of all, about the effects (understood as policy impact) of bounding the demos in this way rather than that. If, on the other hand, we begin with the radical conception of democracy, our first concern will be with the composition of the demos itself. We want its members to be engaged in collective self-determination in such a way that when decisions are taken, each of them is able to see the outcome as legitimate. Although formal procedures will matter here, procedures alone cannot ensure this result. It depends also on the personal qualities of the members, and the way that they relate to one another when deciding political issues: how far do they trust each other to argue sincerely, for example, and to appeal to principles consistently even when this works to their personal disadvantage? So questions of domain will be approached by asking, in the first place, whether any proposed political unit brings together a group of people whose qualities and relationships are of the right kind to form a demos. For R-democrats

7 207 Democracy s Domain the question of impact is secondary: their implicit assumption is that a well-functioning demos can be expected to make good and fair decisions. 8 I shall elaborate on these arguments shortly, but to keep the larger picture in view let us reflect for a moment on the implications of the two conceptions of democracy for the domain question. Broadly speaking, we might expect L-democrats to be subject mainly to an inclusionary push. Because many questions that are decided democratically within a given constituency have an impact on individuals or groups outside of that constituency, there will always be a prima facie case for enlarging the demos to include those affected individuals or groups. If they are going to be vulnerable to the decisions that are taken, shouldn t they have a voice in making them? R-democrats, by contrast, are likely to be subject to an exclusionary pull. If we expand the demos on the basis of impact, the enlarged constituency may fail to function as a demos should, by virtue, for example, of there being too little solidarity among the members on account of physical distance or cultural diversity. Indeed it has often been considered that this exclusionary pull is so strong as to invalidate R-democracy in its pure form in the modern world, the thought being that only a political unit on the scale of a city-state can produce a demos that is sufficiently cohesive to practice it. iii It is too simple, however, to say that L-democrats will always be drawn towards inclusion while R-democrats will be drawn towards exclusion. As we dig a bit deeper, we see that both schools face inclusionary and exclusionary pressures. Consider first the question of the qualities that a 8. It should be said that Rousseau himself did not assume that this was necessarily true of the decisions taken by a demos in relation to outsiders. For instance, it is not impossible that a well-governed republic might wage an unjust war (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 8). He immediately added, however, that this would not happen unless the people is seduced by private interests which some few skillful men succeed by their reputation and eloquence to substitute for the people s own interest. For Rousseau s general thinking about the foreign relations of self-governing republics, see Rousseau on International Relations, ed. Stanley Hoffman and David P. Fidler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

8 208 Philosophy & Public Affairs group of people must possess in order to function as a demos, and consider how an R-democrat would answer this question. 9 The first quality is sympathetic identification. Those who belong to the would-be demos must identify sufficiently closely with the remainder of the group that they are motivated to try to accommodate their interests and their convictions. In other words, they do not regard those others simply as obstacles to the pursuit of their own ends, as, say, two people bidding against each other in an auction will do. The attitude they take has to be of the form: I recognize that those people have interests that are different from mine, or beliefs that I do not share, but I regard them nonetheless as members in full standing of my political community, and I care enough about them to try to reach an agreement that everyone can accept if at all possible. This goes some way beyond recognizing their human rights, an attitude that one should adopt towards all human beings merely as such. The stronger form of recognition that R-democracy requires depends upon mutual identification. The second quality that the demos must share is underlying agreement on ethical principles. There must be some basic convictions that members hold in common, forming a kind of bank that can be drawn on to resolve practical disputes. It is not necessary that there should be full agreement on every principle; moreover, there will almost inevitably be disagreement about the relative weight that different principles carry. What is necessary is everyone should be able to distinguish between appeals to principle that are prima facie valid because the principle invoked is indeed one that the political community recognizes and appeals that are to purely private convictions (or to interests dressed up as convictions). Unless that condition is met, no democratic deliberation will be possible, because the idea of making arguments that other people are bound to take on board, either accepting them or responding to them, will have no purchase. The third necessary quality is interpersonal trust. Members of the demos must have sufficient confidence in one another to play by the 9. Historically, those who we now think of as making up the R-democratic tradition excluded large classes of people from the demos on grounds of their alleged incapacity to take part in rational discussion and decision making. I shall not discuss such exclusions here: for a survey, see Dahl, Procedural Democracy, pp Instead, my discussion of the domain question takes it for granted that all adults in possession of their faculties will be included in whatever domain is chosen.

9 209 Democracy s Domain rules of the democratic game. This means first of all abiding by the decisions that are reached even in cases where you find yourself on the losing side. But trust has an equally important role to play in the process leading up to the decision. Participants have to believe that the arguments others put forward are sincerely made, that their makers really believe in the principles they cite to justify their positions. There is no point in my arguing with you if every time I counter one of your arguments produce evidence, say, to show that it does not hold water you shift your ground and appeal to some other principle. If I see you doing that, then I ll think that you re not really deliberating at all. You have already decided on the position you want to hold, and you re simply behaving instrumentally in order to win support by invoking principles that you don t really believe in. Moreover, if we are going to move towards a fair compromise between rival views, then once again trust between the parties is needed: no one is going to be willing to make the first concession unless she believes that the other side will reciprocate. Finally, the demos must be a stable group whose members come together repeatedly over time to decide upon a range of different issues. Stability is important because of its connection with sincerity and trust. Decisions taken at one point can serve as reference points for future decisions, and participants can be expected to behave consistently. So if I proclaim my adherence to a particular principle as part of my argument for decision 1, then I can be held to that principle later on when decisions 2 and 3 are made. This gives me a considerable incentive to be sincere. Moreover, stability over time allows greater scope to reciprocity. Some decisions are of a nature that admits of no compromise on any particular occasion. If we have to choose a President or a Chair, we cannot split the difference between a man and a woman, a Christian and a Muslim. But we can agree to elect a man now and a woman next time and so forth. Reviewing this list, one might be tempted to conclude that R- democrats will want to narrow democracy s domain as far as possible. But for two reasons, at least, that conclusion would be too quick. First, it is by no means clear that small size is always optimal if one wants democratic dialogue to have the properties that R-democrats look for (or to put it in Rousseauian terms, if one wants a general will to emerge). It is important that participants should have the freedom to express a range of different views, and not be subject to social pressure to adopt the

10 210 Philosophy & Public Affairs majority view (or the view of the most eloquent speakers) against their private convictions. It may be better for that reason for political interactions to be separated from social interactions generally, and for the participants to enjoy a degree of anonymity when they express their opinions. The village or the small town, in other words, may not be the best setting for R-democracy. 10 Second, as Dahl and Tufte emphasized in their study of size and democracy, there is a rather obvious trade-off between what they call citizen effectiveness (citizens ability to control collectively the decisions of their political system) and system capacity (the political system s ability to implement those decisions). 11 A very small unit may do well on the effectiveness criterion internally, but confronting an environment in which the presence of larger and more powerful units leaves it with very little autonomy. Since the guiding ideal of R-democracy is collective self-determination, both dimensions have to be taken into account when settling the question of domain. iv Compare now the answer given by L-democrats to the question, What makes a demos? Recall that the main idea in this tradition is that democracy serves to protect the interests of its constituency, and especially serves to protect against domination. A major worry, therefore, is that the demos might itself become an agent of domination, or more precisely that a majority group within the demos might become such an agent vis-à-vis the minority the fear, in other words, of majority tyranny that so disturbed liberals such as Mill and Tocqueville. From this point of view, cultural homogeneity, valued by R-democrats as a source of identification and trust, looks much less appealing. Unless complete cultural homogeneity can be achieved, it is better from an L-democrat s point of view to have a society made up of many cultural minorities, so that there is much less chance of a majority forming with a will to oppress a 10. Evidence for this proposition can be found in Jane Mansbridge s study, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), which found that town meetings in a small New England town were largely consensual, but that this was partly because conflicts of interest were suppressed to avoid disrupting the social fabric of the community. 11. Dahl and Tufte, Size and Democracy, chap. 2. See also Robert A. Dahl, A Democratic Dilemma: System Effectiveness versus Citizen Participation, Political Science Quarterly 109 (1994):

11 211 Democracy s Domain particular minority. Ideally, cleavages within the demos should be crosscutting, so that people who find themselves on opposite sides of the argument on one occasion will find themselves on the same side on the next. It is also desirable, from an L-democratic point of view, for the demos to be segmented: rather than having one body, direct or representative, to make all of the decisions, it is preferable to have a number of interlinked sites of decision, so that a majority in any one place is likely to find itself countered by an opposing majority elsewhere. This idea was well expressed in Madison s defense of large republics in Federalist Number 10. Reserving the label democracy for small, unitary polities, Madison argued that such systems had shown themselves always to be spectacles of turbulence and incompatible with personal security. 12 In contrast, in a large federal republic, it would be near to impossible for a majority faction to form across the republic as a whole: the influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states. 13 Representatives elected by different constituencies within each state would serve as checks on each other, dampening down the passions that made pure democracies turbulent. We should not conclude, however, that for L-democrats the more diverse the demos, the better for democracy. For L-democracy to function as it should, some degree of social unity is required. Besides guarding against majority tyranny, democrats are also concerned that government should be subject to effective popular control, and the danger here is that in a divided society the governing class is able to play groups off against one another, drawing support from one quarter for policies that oppress or discriminate against rival groups. This was the argument deployed by John Stuart Mill to show why what he called free institutions were only possible in societies whose members shared a common national identity, which Mill regarded as the source of the 12. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: or, The New Constitution, ed. Max Beloff (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 45. I draw here on my discussion of Madison in Republican Citizenship, Nationality and Europe, in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2008), where I locate his argument in a wider stream of thought about the virtues of extensive republics. 13. Hamilton et al., The Federalist, p. 47.

12 212 Philosophy & Public Affairs solidarity that could provide an effective check on government. 14 What matters here is not the particular way in which Mill understood nationality, or indeed whether he was correct to think that only such an identity could provide the necessary solidarity. What is more relevant for democratic theory is the general shape of his argument. Mill argues, first, that political freedom is only possible when governments are held in check by public opinion; but this must be genuinely public, in the sense that there is at any time a prevailing consensus on political questions which is known (both by the government and by the people themselves) to be shared across the political community. The main prerequisite for this is a common language, but, beyond this, common cultural instruments: books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches must be common property across the society if people are to understand what others are thinking. 15 Second, there must be a shared commitment to limiting the powers of government. People must, in other words, prefer to see their governments kept in check by general rules than to use governmental power to exploit or oppress rival groups. Mill doesn t give examples, but religious freedom seems to illustrate his argument well. For this freedom to be safeguarded in a society divided between, say, Catholics and Protestants, each group has to care more about protecting religious liberty in general than in suppressing the other group s. Mill s hypothesis is that this can only happen where common sympathies create sufficient solidarity between groups. Thus even someone as strongly committed to individual and cultural diversity as Mill had to recognize that a functioning democracy would need some degree of social unity, which helps to explain his support for national revolutions seeking independence from, most notably, the multinational Austrian Empire. So both R-democrats and L-democrats give us reasons for bounding the demos, for restricting its membership to those who can be expected to display the relevant qualities, and relate to other members in appropriate ways. R-democrats are more demanding in this respect, but both camps have to adjudicate between reasons that favor a smaller (and therefore generally more homogeneous) demos and reasons that favor a 14. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1972), p Mill was not, of course, a democrat in the strict sense: but his reasons for opposing universal and equal suffrage need not concern us here. 15. Mill, Representative Government, p. 361.

13 213 Democracy s Domain larger (and therefore generally more diverse) body. In practice, thinkers from both ends of the spectrum have converged on the nation-state as the relevant unit for democracy, though with considerably more misgivings on the part of R-democrats (Rousseau, who listed the immensity of States as one of the factors leading to the death of popular sovereignty, 16 often spoke of the importance of love of fatherland, but only in his late essay on Poland did he unequivocally identify fatherland with nation in the modern sense). 17 v Up to this point we have been approaching the question of democracy s domain by looking at the internal properties of a good demos, in the light of two contrasting conceptions of democracy itself. That would be the end of the story if every democracy were an isolated, self-contained unit. But as we know, this is far from being the case. So now we must ask how things change when we consider that the decisions taken in democratic bodies, especially states, are likely to make a significant impact on people who are not currently entitled to participate in those bodies. Does this call for a radical revision to the conclusions we have so far reached about democracy s proper domain? As I suggested earlier, the effect of considering impact is likely to be to give democracy a more inclusionary push to expand the demos so that it includes more of those who will bear the impact of its decisions. In particular, it may point us beyond the nation-state towards transnational forms of democracy. But now we need to look more closely at the grounds on which this inclusionary push is based. Here again there are a number of possibilities that might be considered: different principles that would point us towards contrasting solutions to the domain question. I shall focus on just two of these, both of which have been prominent in recent debates about expanding the demos beyond national borders. The first is the affected interests principle: a democracy s domain should extend to include all those whose 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, p Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings.

14 214 Philosophy & Public Affairs interests will be affected by the decisions it takes. The second is the coercion principle: the domain should extend to include all those who will be coerced by its decisions. Since one can be affected by a decision, in the relevant sense, without being coerced by it, but not vice versa, the first principle is likely to extend the domain more widely than the second. Before exploring the two principles in greater detail, it is worth asking why democratic theorists should be moved by the considerations they represent. L-democrats and R-democrats will be moved in different ways. L-democrats especially must feel the force of the affected interests principle. If democracy is justified instrumentally, as a device for protecting the interests of the people who make up its constituency, then it is going to appear anomalous if there are people not currently included in the demos whose interests are nonetheless impacted by the decisions it takes. R-democrats will not be concerned in this way with interests per se. But both they and L-democrats must respond when the coercion principle comes into play, because the normal effect of coercion is to undermine personal autonomy, while protecting autonomy is central to both conceptions of democracy. It is hard to see how a democracy could be legitimate if it prevents outsiders from enjoying one of the conditions it is designed to protect. So it seems that both principles must have a bearing on the domain question, even when we approach it entirely from within democratic theory. And it seems also that their effect is to generate what I have called an inclusionary push, towards incorporating those not already inside the domain within it. But is this indeed so, on closer inspection? I shall start with the affected interests principle, whose merits have already been debated in recent political philosophy. 18 On the face of it, the affected interests principle is quite plausible. Simply formulated by Dahl, it states that everyone who is affected by the decisions of a government should have the right to participate in that government. 19 Now Dahl suggests that we must add a rider to the effect that the right of participation should extend only to those who are competent to participate, and that seems reasonable, since if the rationale for 18. Most thoroughly by Robert Goodin in Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): Dahl, After the Revolution, p. 64.

15 215 Democracy s Domain participation is that it allows you to protect your interests, then this only applies to those who are capable of doing that, and not, say, to small children or the insane. But even with that rider, the superficial plausibility of the affected interests principle quickly evaporates once we begin to investigate it more thoroughly. Let me indicate four problems that it confronts. First, if we take affected interests in its simplest sense to mean being made significantly better or worse off by the policies a demos adopts, then for any question that has to be decided the domain is likely to vary with the outcome, creating a problem of circularity. 20 That is, if group X has to make a decision between two policies, one of which is detrimental to group Y, but the other of which has no impact on that group, then to know whether the members of group Y should be included in the demos alongside the members of group X, we have already to know which outcome will occur. 21 If to avoid that problem we say that everyone who may possibly be affected by a decision should be included in the constituency that makes it, then the demos will expand in all directions, depending on which possibilities are contemplated in the deliberation leading up to the decision. The upshot is that if we adopt the affected interests principle, we can only be sure of avoiding the circularity problem by making democracy s domain universal, that is to say by including every (competent adult) human being in the demos. Some philosophers, including Goodin, are willing to accept this implication. But this would mean setting aside all of the questions raised earlier in this article about the qualities we require for a well-functioning demos. There would be a stark choice between satisfying the affected interests principle and constituting the demos in such a way that its decisions were likely to meet other desiderata (such as offering protection to minority groups). Second, there will also be an interaction between the domain and the scope of democracy, where scope refers to the range of issues that a 20. See Whelan, Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem, p. 19; Goodin, Enfranchising All Affected Interests, pp This assumes that a person s interests are affected by a decision when it makes him or her better or worse off by comparison to the status quo ante. If we remove this baseline and say that interests are also affected by decisions that might have been taken but weren t, then we immediately face the problem described in the remainder of this paragraph.

16 216 Philosophy & Public Affairs given demos deems itself competent to decide. 22 We should not assume that this scope is universal: for any demos there will be questions that are normatively off-limits, so to speak, such as private matters that should be left up to each individual member to decide. Suppose then that a particular constituency has to resolve an issue that potentially affects the interests of those who are currently not part of that constituency. If it follows the affected interests principle, it seems it must find a way of including these outsiders in the decision. But an alternative would be to rule out in advance any decision that significantly affected the interests of the excluded group, assuming this does not exhaust all the possibilities. 23 This again creates an indeterminacy problem, because one cannot settle the domain question without knowing in advance which scope limits any particular demos is going to impose upon itself (one might imagine such limits being laid down in a constitution, but if we approach the question from a democratic perspective, we will want the demos to retain ultimate control over its own constitution via some kind of amending procedure). Third, the affected interests principle in its simple form takes no account of the obvious point that a decision may impact upon people to very different degrees: it may affect their interests in relatively trivial or highly significant ways. Insofar as the principle is meant to reflect the underlying idea that people should have an equal opportunity to advance and protect their interests politically, it seems that in applying it we should try to ensure that each person s capacity to influence a decision should correspond to how significantly he or she will be affected by its outcome. That suggestion can lead in one of two directions. First, assuming that the domain question has already been settled, we could try to find a decision procedure that gives people power in proportion to 22. I follow here the terminology suggested in Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, p For the point that scope and domain are (normatively) interdependent, see also Dahl, Procedural Democracy, p Some issues are such that whatever decision is taken will inevitably have spillover effects: for example, a political unit s choice of energy policy may affect the interests of outsiders whatever it decides to do. Even here, it might rule out any policy whose effects were on balance detrimental to members of other units, since the affected interests principle seems to derive most of its force from cases in which those who have no say in a decision are harmed by it. No taxation without representation is a more compelling slogan than, say, no public goods without representation. See also here Whelan, Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem, section II.

17 217 Democracy s Domain their stake in any particular decision, for instance by giving some more votes than others. This path leads into a morass of problems, particularly if we have concerns about other aspects of democratic equality, and I shall not pursue it further. 24 Second, we could preserve equal voting rights on each issue, but then try to settle the domain question in such a way that within each domain, members interests were impacted to approximately the same degree, at least over the expected run of decisions. This approach is more promising: but if we follow it through, the constituency for particular decisions cannot then be adjusted in an ad hoc way in order to protect the interests of outside groups. Suppose that the Xs form a group whose decisions, taken together over time, have a roughly equal impact on the interests of each X. One of these decisions may also affect members of external group Y. But changing the constituency for that decision to include members of Y may well upset the equality of influence that would otherwise exist between the members of X. 25 What this reveals is a practical tension internal to the affected interests principle between ensuring that everybody whose interests are affected by a decision can take part in making it, and preserving the proper proportion between the weight of a person s interests and her opportunities to protect them politically. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Dahl s simple statement of the affected interests principle refers to those who are affected by the decisions of a government, because this already suggests something about the manner of the affecting. In particular, it suggests that those affected have no option but to bear the consequences of the decision: there is in general no escape from what one s government decides to do. 24. For a valiant attempt to grapple with some of these problems, see Harry Brighouse and Marc Fleurbaey, Democracy and Proportionality, Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming). 25. Suppose, for example, that an economy contains two groups of manufacturers, one of whom produces primarily for the domestic market and the other for export. Some decisions mainly affect the first group and others mainly the second. Suppose that each group wins on some occasions and loses on others, or better perhaps that a convention emerges whereby the domestic producers are given a greater say over questions that primarily concern them, and similarly for the exporters. This arrangement seems to meet the demands of the affected interests principle as well as can be expected internally. But now it is proposed that representatives of the receiving countries should be given a say in decisions concerning export policy; after all, their interests are also affected. If this proposal were to be accepted, the balance between domestic producers and exporters would be upset, probably to the detriment of the exporters.

18 218 Philosophy & Public Affairs Although not all of the decisions made by a government can be described as coercive, many of them are. Think, by contrast, of cases in which one may be affected by a decision, but it is relatively easy to take evasive action. Shoppers, for example, are certainly affected by the pricing and other decisions taken by supermarkets, but we have little inclination to say that they have a right to participate in those decisions, because in a reasonably well-functioning market they can switch to another supplier if they feel they are being overcharged or unable to buy the products they want to buy. So the affected interests principle is most plausible where people are unavoidably affected by certain decisions, which means that the principle s inclusionary push is weakened whenever those currently outside the demos can take steps to avoid the impact of its decisions. Taken together, these four problems radically weaken the force of the affected interests principle as a basis for fixing democracy s domain. If we combine them, we could say that those who are currently excluded from the demos have a justifiable claim for inclusion only if (a) their interests would be significantly affected by its decisions whichever way those decisions go; (b) they are not protected against harmful consequences by the demos s having imposed scope limitations on its own powers of decision; (c) including the excluded group would preserve the equal opportunities of current members to protect their interests; and (d) they cannot readily avoid the impact of the decisions that are going to be made. All of this severely compromises the ability of the affected interests principle to serve as an independent criterion for settling the domain issue. We cannot simply hold that whenever a democratic body impacts on the interests of outsiders, those outsiders should be included in the demos forthwith. Widening the demos may change its character and/or the decision procedures it uses, and these in turn will alter the quality of the decisions its takes, and their impact on different groups of people: the original citizens, the newly admitted group, and further groups whose interests might not have been affected by the original demos. The circularity problem runs deep. vi Let us then see whether the coercion principle offers a better way of bounding the demos. Again the principle itself seems plausible at first sight. The belief that where someone is routinely forced to comply with

19 219 Democracy s Domain the decisions of a democratic authority, they are entitled to a say in those decisions, is strong and widely shared. It explains, for example, why states that deny citizenship to long-term immigrants who make their life in the new country are justifiably accused of violating democratic principles. But to understand the principle, we need to look more closely at what it means to be coerced by a decision, or a series of decisions. A helpful starting point is the following passage by Lamond: What is common to all modes of coercion, and what makes them instances of coercion, is the underlying notion of sufficient pressure being brought to bear by one person to force or make another person do as the first wills. Hence to be coerced into doing something is not to do it voluntarily; it is to do it against one s will. But there are different sorts of pressure which can achieve this, and it is pressure not physical force nor sanctions which is the key operative factor in coercion. 26 The key points in Lamond s account that deserve emphasis here are, first, that to be coerced is to be made to pursue some reasonably specific course of action that follows the intentions of the coercer; second, that this is not a course of action that the agent, left to her own devices, would pursue; third, that the coercer applies sufficient pressure, meaning that it is no longer reasonable for the agent to do other than what the coercer demands; if the coercion takes the form of a threat, for example, the threat is such that it is not reasonable for the person threatened to refuse to comply. 27 There is, of course, no hard and fast rule for determining what level of pressure is sufficient in a particular case to count as coercive. One merit of this understanding of coercion is that it helps to bring out why coercion is more detrimental to the person coerced than the other ways in which her interests may be set back by outside intervention. The key point is that coercion undermines autonomy by making the person coerced into an instrument of the coercer s will; she has no real choice but to do what the coercer commands. This means that coercion 26. Grant Lamond, The Coerciveness of Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 20 (2000): 39 62, atpp This makes room for the possibility that coercion can fail: a strong-minded or foolhardy person may resist the pressure that the coercer brings to bear.

20 220 Philosophy & Public Affairs requires a particularly strong form of justification in order to be legitimate, a justification that is not required in the case of impacts of other kinds. In particular we must pay heed to the distinction between coercion and prevention. 28 Coercion means that there is some course of action that the agent is forced to take; prevention means that some course of action that might otherwise have been available is now blocked. So, for example, a woman who refuses a man s offer of marriage may prevent him from doing what he most wants, but she does not coerce him; there is no course of action that she imposes on him. Prevention, in general, stands less in need of justification than coercion: everything depends on how important the blocked course of action is to the agent. Although it is nearly always better to have more options available than fewer, removing one option from the available set is much less serious than reducing the eligible set to just a single course of action, which is what coercion paradigmatically involves. 29 To avoid confusion here, notice that prevention can sometimes take the form of threatening coercion if a person chooses to act in a certain way. Suppose, for example that my neighbor wants to visit me in my house. Since I dislike his company, I refuse: I prevent him from entering my house. He is persistent, however, so when he knocks on my door yet again, I tell him that if he does not leave me alone, I will call the police. If my threat does not deter him, then eventually coercion will be involved: 28. This distinction seems largely to be overlooked in the academic literature on coercion. Nozick s influential analysis, for example, begins by discussing the case in which one agent stops another from performing some action, which is better understood as an account of (one form of) prevention than of coercion. He later switches to examples in which people are forced to act in relatively specific ways without seeing any significance in the switch (see Robert Nozick, Coercion, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fourth Series, ed. P. Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and Q. Skinner [Oxford: Blackwell, 1972]). Nor does the distinction appear in Scott Anderson s otherwise helpful literature review in Coercion, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( The discussion that follows draws upon the fuller analysis in my paper Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh, Political Theory (forthcoming). 29. As a moment s reflection shows, prevention and coercion stand at opposite ends of a spectrum, in the middle of which there will be cases where the first agent s intervention significantly shrinks the range of options open to the second without narrowing it to just one. These, then, will be borderline cases. Note as well that coercion is consistent with leaving the coerced person some degree of choice: a mugger who allows his victim to choose which cash outlet he will use to withdraw the sum of money being demanded is still a coercer.