Assuming the right to vote is of instrumental value to those possessing it, it is hardly surprising that those who already have it resist extending it to others. Doing so would simply water down the power of their own votes, after all. Such was the history of electoral reform in nineteenth-century Britain. In the run-up to the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Poor Man’s Guardian editorialized, “We cannot think so ill of human nature as to think that those who will … have gained their own freedom will not aid us to gain ours.” But it was not to be. “Middle-class people, once given the vote, wanted to conserve institutions which they had formerly been inclined to attack.”1 Having secured voting rights for themselves, they were in no hurry to extend them to others.
Today, too, principled arguments for letting foreigners who are strongly affected by our elections have a say in them are met with something akin to slack-jawed incredulity.2 People seem rigidly committed to keeping the franchise just as it is.3 Pressed for a principled reason, they sometimes say that (all but only) those people who would be bound by a law should get a say in the making of it. But when shown that that principle too would imply a far more extensive franchise than at present,4 people tend to back off that principle quick-smart. Even benighted ethno-nationalist rationales for expanding the demos meet with the same fate. In 1887, staunchly conservative A. V. Dicey (backed by James Bryce, H. G. Wells, and Andrew Carnegie) proposed a political union of white Anglo-American peoples worldwide. Dicey was dumbfounded when,5 despite the celebrity of his recently published Law of the Constitution,6 that proposal gained absolutely no traction. The bottom line seems to be this: Principles be damned; people insistently want to keep the electorate just as it is.
It is not unduly cynical to suspect that what’s at work behind all those reactions is protection of existing privilege, just as it was in nineteenth-century Britain. But perhaps we can, and should, try to do better than that on behalf of those opposing our principled reasons for expanding the franchise. I think there is (or anyway once was) a respectable principled reason for a geographically delimited franchise of just the sort that presently prevails and people still seem to cherish. That is the Principle of Proximity.7
In the first three sections, I show why the Proximity Principle might once have appealed. But I conclude that proximity was only ever just a proxy for other things that morally matter. In earlier days, physical proximity was indeed a good proxy for those other things, and a geographically bounded franchise was morally broadly justified in consequence.8 But nowadays physical proximity has ceased to be a particularly good proxy for those other things that morally matter, which now warrant extending the franchise beyond traditional territorial boundaries.
Like the Proximity Principle, its more apt modern rivals – the All-Affected and the All-Subjected Principles – pertain purely to the franchise. They tell us who should have a vote on matters that we should settle by a vote. What those things are, and indeed whether we should settle anything by democratic voting and if so with what structure, must be determined by altogether separate normative principles. Those are the subject of the fourth section.
The Status Quo: Geographically Delimited Electorates
When political theorists talk about who should properly be allowed to vote in a state’s elections, they tellingly refer to that as “the boundary problem.”9 Boundaries are, first and foremost, lines on the map (and all too often fortifications on the ground). They demarcate, first and foremost, territory. They are, first and foremost, geographical concepts. To equate the issue of who should have a right to vote with the issue of where the geographical boundaries should be drawn is to suggest that, first and foremost (if not perhaps exclusively), locational considerations should determine who is included in and who is excluded from the self-governing demos.
Of course, not everyone inside a state’s borders is necessarily entitled to vote. Children are not, for one reason; foreigners just passing through are not, for another; aliens who are permanent residents are typically not, for yet another. And, of course, some people outside the state’s borders are entitled to vote in that state’s elections (initially just the state’s soldiers stationed abroad but subsequently extended to pretty much all citizens living abroad).10 So there is no one-for-one matching of place of residence and right to vote.
Still, those are exceptions that prove the rule. Electorates are, for much the greatest part, geographically determined. Just as the state is defined territorially so too is the demos.11 From a democratic perspective, the latter might seem to follow straightforwardly from the former. Democratic self-government requires that we have a say in how we are governed, and if the state that governs us is geographically delimited, then who has a democratic say in that government should be likewise. While that logic may have held good in previous times, it does no longer, I shall argue.
The Rationale: The Proximity Principle
By and large, the people around us are typically like us in various ways that may matter to us. We speak of “our nearest and dearest,” as if the simple fact of “being near” makes them “dear” to us.12 If that were all there was to the matter, the Proximity Principle would reduce without remainder to the Affinity Principle13 – the reason we should make decisions by voting together with people near to us is that we like being together. Of course, that is not always true (recall that other old adage “good fences make good neighbors”). But maybe it’s true often enough to explain away much of the Proximity Principle’s apparent appeal.
But there is something else lying behind the Proximity Principle that is of much greater moral importance.14 Living nearby to one another tends to have four salient consequences. Proximity is likely to increase:
the frequency of your interactions;
the range of your interactions;
the depth of your interactions; and
the certainty of your interacting.
Of course, once again there is no strict necessity in any of that. You might be relatively certain of having frequent, but not remotely deep, interactions with some near neighbors on a wide range of matters. (Relations with the people living next door are often like that.) You might be relatively certain of having only occasional but deep interactions on a narrow range of matters with other near neighbors (your family’s mortician, for example). And there may be others who live nearby with whom your interactions have literally none of these features. Conversely, it’s perfectly possible for you to be pretty certain of having frequent and deep interactions with distant others on a wide range of matters (your grown children living abroad, for example). So it is just contingently the case that these things are often (but not invariably) associated with, and indeed arise from, living in close proximity to one another. Still, the generalization may be true enough in a wide range of cases.
Each of those features is of consequentialist concern. Each taken separately (still more all of them taken together) is likely to make interactions with those living nearby generally more important to you in purely consequential terms.15 Again, it’s perfectly possible for a one-off, unlikely interaction on some narrow matter (with your oncologist, for example) to be much more important to you, both objectively and subjectively, than other interactions that are more frequent, certain, and wide-ranging. So, again, there is no strict necessity in it. Still, it’s a relatively safe generalization that interactions displaying these features – which interactions with those living nearby ordinarily do – are ordinarily more important to us, for purely consequentialist reasons.
The “Mutual Interest in What One Another Does” Rationale
That, in turn, constitutes a prima facie case for us making decisions shaping the nature and content of those interactions jointly, in one way or another. That need not necessarily be through explicitly joint decision processes, still less by taking a vote. Nevertheless, if it matters a fair bit to me what you do, and it matters a fair bit to you what I do, then there is likely to be some considerable scope for each of us to improve the outcome from our own perspective by making our decisions at least partially in light of one another’s preferences. It may be no more than a matter of realizing mutual benefits through simple coordination. Or it may be a matter of gains from trade where our preferences are more divergent.
The point is simply that where it matters to us what others do (as it typically does where people in close proximity are concerned), we are likely to want to make something more like a joint decision as to what each of us will do, in light of the preferences of each for what the others do. One way of accomplishing that is by sharing with one another decisional power (voting rights being one particularly salient form) over enforceable rules that shape the actions of all of us.16
That is the first broadly consequentialist argument for thinking that those in close proximity to one another should form a single decision-making body (at least for certain purposes) in which each has a say.17
The “Efficiency” Rationale
The second argument for that proposition builds on the efficiencies of having some regularized procedures for making decisions that are binding on a set of people who are relatively certain to be recurringly involved in relatively frequent, deep, and wide-ranging interactions with one another. The argument here is akin to Coase’s theory of the firm and Simon’s theory of the employment relationship.18 The root idea in both cases is that instead of buying inputs into our production process (including workers) on a spot market, it can sometimes be more efficient to internalize the production of those inputs within our own firm. That provides a rational for “hiring rather than buying” in the case of Coase’s firm, and for entering into a long-term employment contract with workers (rather than hiring day laborers at the employment exchange) in the case of Simon’s employment relationship.
An analogous argument might apply to establishing relations of political authority among people who live in close proximity to one another and, because of that, are relatively certain to have frequent, deep, and wide-ranging interactions with one another. Such people could, of course, enter into bilateral negotiations with each of their neighbors on each occasion disputes or opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperative action arise. But if such occasions recur frequently, it is far more efficient to develop some standing rules that will be applied relatively automatically on each occasion as appropriate.19 The same efficiency argument also tells in favor of applying such rules to all those among whom such situations are likely to recur.
This is not yet an argument about whom to give a vote to. So far, it is merely an argument concerning the scope of political authority. It says merely that, purely for reasons of efficiency, people who live proximately to one another should be governed by the same political authority, insofar as their living proximately to one another gives rise to relatively certain, frequent, deep, and wide-ranging interactions recurring among them that it would be mutually advantageous for them to regulate through some system of rules that is common to all of them.20
But suppose we also think, for some other sorts of reasons,21 that people should have a democratic say in the making of the rules governing them. Then that, combined with this argument about the scope of political authority, gives rise to the proposition that everyone governed by that authority should have a right to a vote on what laws are enacted by that authority. And insofar as the earlier argument justified extending the scope of that authority to people who live in relatively close proximity to one another, this argument provides justification for also giving a vote to people who live in relatively close proximity to one another.22 That is the second broadly consequentialist argument for the Principle of Proximity.
What the Two Rationales Have in Common
Different though these rationales are in other respects, in both cases their justification for giving a right to vote to people who live geographically near to one another hinges on the contingent truth of an empirical proposition about the likely consequences of living in close proximity. Both rationales crucially assume that the interactions among people living in close proximity are empirically likely to be different (more frequent, more wide-ranging, deeper, more certain) than with others living at greater distances.
Where that empirical proposition holds true, those would indeed be good arguments for making decisions together with those living in close proximity to you. But everything depends crucially on whether, and to what extent, that empirical presupposition holds true. Once perhaps it did, but it largely does no longer.
The Waning Significance of Proximity
Imagine a world of closed communities hemmed in by imposing natural barriers that prevent individuals from interacting closely with anyone living more than 1,000 miles away. But suppose that they interact intensively with everyone within that distance. Suppose, too, that (either in consequence of that same natural necessity or as a matter of deliberate policy) the political authorities govern those communities in such a way that nothing they do affects or is affected by anyone else outside their territory. Think, perhaps, of Japan in the period just before Commodore Perry’s arrival.23
In cases like that, the Principle of Proximity, the All-Affected Principle, and the All-Subjected Principle would all point in the same direction. As per the Principle of Proximity, people would interact in the requisite way only with people relatively near to them on the islands of the Japanese homeland. As per the All-Affected Principle, what happens in Japan affects only people in Japan. As per the All-Subjected Principle, the laws of Japan are applied only to people in Japan. So all three principles dictate that, insofar as Japan aspires to be a democracy (which, of course, it did not in that period), everyone in Japan should be entitled to vote in Japanese elections. But none of those principles would say that anyone outside of Japan should be so entitled.24
Globalization and Action at a Distance
Just how empirically realistic is that scenario, however? One might easily imagine it to have been true in some mythic past. One might – until one reflects upon all the great empires of antiquity. One might imagine that things were more like that in the Middle Ages.25 But even then, there were clear exceptions. It’s not just the Carolingian Empire and the Hanseatic League. Even the Vikings ranged from Greenland well into Asia Minor, not just as marauders but also as settlers governing their extended community according to shared ancestral traditions and norms.26 In short, we are all too often tempted to think that “everything changed with globalization,” and that that happened only within living memory. But globalization of a recognizably contemporary sort can clearly be found much earlier – certainly in the nineteenth century, if not before.27
In any case, globalization is now firmly upon us. In myriad ways, we have increasingly great capacity, increasingly utilized, to impact the lives of others far away.28 Interdependence is the order of the day.29 Action at a distance, which Einstein in another context dubbed “spooky,” is now a fact of daily life.
The action at a distance that has come to characterize today’s globalization may well be driven largely by socioeconomic actors. But states, even when they are not the prime movers, are often essential facilitators; and insofar as they are, what one state does affects a great many people outside its borders. Whenever that is the case, the All-Affected Principle would dictate that all those worldwide who are significantly affected by a state’s policy should have a say in the making of that policy. Add to this all those who are directly affected by a state’s policy in waging war, dumping agricultural surpluses, and so on. That is why scholars rightly suspect that, given the realities of the globalized world, the All-Affected Principle, systematically applied, would have seriously expansionary effects on the franchise, at least in all the major countries of the world.30
The increased capacity for action at a distance, both on the part of would-be perpetrators of offenses against a state and on the part of the state in resisting them, has also given rise to an increasing tendency for states to write their laws in such a way that they apply to people who are neither that state’s citizens nor in that state’s territory.31 Details vary from state to state, of course. But most states claim at least some rights to criminalize, within their own legal code, actions of distant foreigners that would undermine the state’s security. For a quaint example, states have conventionally claimed a right to prosecute anyone found counterfeiting their currency or their seal, wherever that counterfeiting occurs.32 For a contemporary example, states often now claim a right to prosecute the planning, assisting, or carrying out of acts of terrorism by anyone anywhere in the world – generalizing the long-standing right that states claimed to prosecute people of whatever nationality engaging in piracy anywhere in the world.33 Given those facts about state practice – the jurisdictional claims that they make, the range of people they purport to bind by their laws – a great many foreigners abroad should, under the All-Subjected Principle as well, have a right to vote in the making of such a state’s laws (at least on those laws).
Implications for the Proximity Principle
What gives both the All-Affected and the All-Subjected Principles those expansionary implications for the franchise are new capacities for (and realities of) action at a distance. It simply is no longer necessarily the case, if ever it was, that we are only strongly affected by the actions of people geographically proximate to us. It is no longer necessarily the case, if ever it was, that we are subject exclusively to the laws of the state with authority over the physical space that we inhabit.
Those new realities mean that the empirical assumptions upon which the Proximity Principle rests can no longer be taken for granted. It is simply not necessarily true that we are most certain of being most frequently impacted in the deepest and most wide-ranging way by our interactions with those who are physically proximate to us.
Proximity was only ever a mere placeholder for those other features that are (or, rather, used to be) strongly but only contingently associated with it. Those features, and what follows from them, are what really matter morally. Physical proximity, as such, does not. Insofar as proximity has now become disassociated from those other features, and is no longer a good proxy for them, we no longer have any good reason to confine our political jurisdictions or our democratic electorates to people who live physically proximately to one another.
Abandoning proximity as a poor proxy, we are forced back to judging those matters in terms of the features that really matter – the frequency, depth, range, and certainty of interactions among people. If we systematically have interactions with distant others of requisite frequency, depth, range, and certainty (and if we think our collective affairs should be run in a democratic way at all), then we ought to extend a right to vote in our elections to those distant others for precisely the same reasons the Principle of Proximity used to tell us to extend such a right to our near neighbors.34
It is an empirical question to what extent distant others really are affected in these relevant respects by the laws enacted by any given state. Distant others will, of course, be more affected in these respects by some laws more than others. The same is, however, true of citizens in any existing state. They are more strongly affected by some laws than others, but we nonetheless think they should have a right to a vote, the same one vote, on all of their state’s laws. Below I shall argue that we may want to apply the same principle within expanded jurisdictional authorities of the sort I propose.
Or, again, it may turn out that distant others are not affected in the relevant ways by a large enough proportion of a state’s laws to justify giving them a right to vote on all the laws enacted by that state.35 Even so, there may well be a case for giving the distant others a vote on specific sorts of laws that do systematically affect them in the relevant respects. Federal systems with devolved authority over some matters do that all the time. There may well be a good case for constructing any expanded jurisdictional authority on the same model, as I shall also argue below.
Other Normative Principles and Their Natural Extensions
The Proximity, All-Affected, and All-Subjected Principles all fundamentally serve to answer the same question: “Who should be governed together with one another, under a common body of laws?” How they are to be governed is a separate matter. That must typically be settled by other normative principles.36
When extending jurisdictional authority beyond tightly confined geographical spaces, as I have argued we must, we should presumably use the same normative principles for determining how that expanded polity is to be governed as we have traditionally used for governing the existing polity. There are three such principles of interest here. One is the principle that that authority should be exercised in a democratic manner. Another is the principle of “limited government,” according to which there should be a private realm into which public decisions should not intrude. Third is the principle of decentralization, according to which decisions that can most effectively and efficiently be made and implemented locally should be made locally, and higher levels of government should do only what lower levels of government cannot (or perhaps will not).
Democratic Decision Making
Presumably the expanded polity should be democratic in just the same way and for just the same reasons that the current polity is or should be. Different political theorists specify those differently. Here there is no need to enter into those disputes. Choose whichever democratic theory you prefer. All I need to insist upon, for present purposes, is that you should apply those same democratic principles to the rules of governance for new, extended jurisdictional authority as apply to the current, more restricted jurisdictional authority.
If you opt for the All-Affected Principle or the All-Subjected Principle, those might give you an extra reason for deciding things democratically.37 But it is an extra reason, over and above those reasons that we already have for making decisions democratically in polities presently organized around the Principle of Proximity. They may not be entirely superfluous, but neither are they remotely essential.
Under either of those two principles, it might seem natural to suppose that votes ought be apportioned according to the extent to which people are affected by or subject to the law that is being enacted.38 If so, then insofar as people vary in either respect, their voting power ought to be proportional to their varying stakes in the issue.39 Many contributors to this volume seem tempted by that thought.40
There are fancy ways in which that might be implemented. Various schemes for “point voting” have been devised.41 The version most consonant with democratic equality would assign each person an identical number of points per year, which the person concerned can use to “weight” their vote on any given proposition.42
That is not what is done in any currently existing democracy. The rule is not “one interest one vote” but, rather, “one person one vote.”43 Here is a way to rationalize that practice, notwithstanding the obvious fact that people’s interests vary across different issue areas.
In representative democracy, people vote on who is to represent them on a range of matters. Some people will have greater stakes in some of those matters, others in others. But everyone will, hopefully, have broadly the same stakes as everyone else across the full range of matters that will come before the representatives whom they elect. Insofar as that is the case, giving “one person one vote” for their representative would be vindicated.
That is essentially a “consolidation” strategy. It works because the representatives will be deciding a wide range of matters, some more important to some of their constituents and others more important to others in ways that roughly balance out. Were it a special-purpose jurisdiction (a school board or a water board, for example), that consolidation trick might well not work. There, perhaps, we really would have to figure out some way to apportion or weight votes proportionally to people’s differing interests in the specific matters handled by that body. That is in some sense a violation of democratic equality (of “one person one vote” anyway).44 And it is one that may well not be readily resolved by consolidating across merely a few such special-purpose jurisdictions, since some voters may have more at stake in the matters handled by all of those special-purpose bodies.
Hence we might be tempted to assign points in proportion to stakes. Before doing so, however, we had better find some good way of independently assessing how great people’s stakes really are. Just asking people to say how great their stakes are would simply invite strategic misrepresentation, designed to get more points with which to (over)weight their votes.
From those reflections follows a clear design desideratum for the new extended polity that I am recommending. To avoid the latter difficulties, it would be better just to give every person one vote and leave it at that. But from the former observation, we know that we can justify doing that only if the new expanded polity has control over a wide range of matters across which people’s stakes are likely to vary in a suitably counterbalancing way.
Limited Government
Whatever principle we adopt for democratically deciding those things that are to be decided by a vote, there are some things that should not be decided by a vote. Democratic authority is limited authority. Democratic majorities may be sovereign in the public sphere, but there is a private sphere upon which they may not properly intrude.
There are various ways of delimiting and defending that private sphere. Notions of individual rights and autonomy, privacy, and dignity typically come into play there. And some would extend those protections to (at least certain sorts of) associations as well as to natural individuals. Here I need take no stand on any of those issues.45
All that matters for present purposes is this. Insofar as we have good reasons for thinking that political authority should be limited in current polities, then those same limitations should continue to apply as we expand political authorities in light of the new realities of globalization and action at a distance.
Decentralization
A final normative desideratum, reflected in current practice virtually every–where and commended by political theories of many stripes, is that government should be decentralized. That is to say, there should be various tiers of government, some more localized and others less so, standing in some ordered relation with one another; and matters that can efficiently and effectively be handled at the local level should be handled there, with higher-level jurisdictions being responsible only for matters that transcend local boundaries or cannot (or will not) be efficiently and effectively dealt with there.
This is, of course, just the principle of “subsidiarity” familiar from the writings of Althusius and the practice of the European Union.46 But that makes the principle sound far more arcane than it actually is. Decentralization is the rule pretty much everywhere. Even in notionally unitary states, there is typically a tier of local government that enjoys considerable latitude in deciding matters pertaining to that locale alone.47
That is just to say that, over many matters, the Proximity Principle is still roughly right. In many respects, people are still frequently, certainly, and wide-rangingly affected by the activities of people physically proximate to them. Decisions governing those activities should still be made by that smaller, geographically delimited set of people in consequence.48 With globalization and increasing action at a distance, however, people are in other respects frequently, certainly, and wide-rangingly affected by the activities of people at considerable physical distance from themselves. Decisions governing those activities should be made by the more widespread set of people involved.
We have already acknowledged that the Proximity Principle needs to be relaxed in some such way when consolidating and unifying smaller political units into much more extensive polities, sometimes straddling whole continents. As we created larger and larger political units, however, the smaller and more local units not only remain but also retain some considerable authority to manage their own affairs. We should follow the same practice as we move to expand jurisdictional authority yet further.
The Shape of an Extended Jurisdictional Authority
What would the new expanded polity look like, if designed to respect those same three normative requirements that we think rightly apply to current polities?
First, it will be a limited government. There will be some things that no government, at any level, will be permitted to do. Second, it will be decentralized government with a nested hierarchy of jurisdictional authorities. Higher levels will have authority over only those matters that cannot or will not be attended to effectively and efficiently by lower levels of government. Third, decisions all the way up and down that hierarchy of governments will be made democratically, with everyone within each jurisdictional authority having a right to vote on the decisions of that authority.
Hence, when we are expanding the jurisdictional authority and the democratic demos associated with it for some purposes, we would not be expanding it for all purposes. Matters that are genuinely of purely local concern will still be voted upon purely by members of that more local demos.
The only things that everyone in the extended demos would be voting on are matters that are, indeed, of concern to them all. My proposal for a new expanded polity merely prevents states from doing things that affect others outside their borders, or from subjecting them to their laws, without giving those outsiders a proper say in the making of those laws and policies.49
My preferred strategy for doing that, as I have said, is to create a higher tier of limited authority in which everyone extraterritorially affected or subjected has a vote. Assuming that there are sufficiently many and diverse matters with extraterritorial impact of that sort, everyone can just be given a single vote for representatives elected to make laws at that level, precisely as in current representative democracies.50
Conclusion
To recapitulate, I think the Proximity Principle constitutes the best principled defense that can be given to justify today’s geographically delimited franchise. But proximity was only ever a proxy for what is truly of principled concern, and while it may once have been a good proxy, it is no longer. With globalization and the concomitant increase in the capacity for and reality of action at a distance, the same factors that used to tell so strongly in favor of people voting together with those living nearby now tell equally strongly in favor of extending the same rights to distant others who are now similarly affected by and subject to the laws being enacted. As we extend the polity beyond its traditional geographically delimited forms – extending the right to vote as we do, assuming these new polities, like the old, should operate democratically – we can nonetheless retain traditional constraints of limited and multilevel government.
The principle that all those affected by a collective decision should be included in the decision is long-standing, dating at least back to the Justinian Code in Roman private law: “what touches all must be approved by all” (Quod omnes tangit debet ab omnibus approbari; see Lane, this volume).1 Over the last several decades, the idea has migrated into democratic theory.2 The reason is the principle expresses a very basic intuition about what democracy is good for: I should want to have a say in decisions that significantly affect my life. With say, I am part of networks of codependents who can collectively self-determine and provide opportunities for self-development. Without it, I am likely to be subject to forces over which I have little or no control.
The implications following from the All-Affected Principle (AAP) are, however, often in conflict with the standard view of political inclusion dating back to the democratization of modern nation-states. On the standard view, entitlements to a say over collective matters should follow membership, formalized as citizenship. The powers and limitations of citizenship are tied to residence in organized political jurisdictions: nation-states, states, provinces, municipalities, and so on. They are made effective through voting, electoral representation, and rights-based protections for speech, organization, and advocacy. Indeed, in Europe, the Americas, and a few other places, the most important democratic project from the mid-eighteenth century until recently was the democratization of the nation-states that began to consolidate in the early modern period.
Yet justifications for democratic inclusion based on membership are increasingly undermined by the changing circumstances of politics. From the standpoint of social and political development, the impacts of collective decisions reverberate across jurisdictions. Governments, organizations, firms, and citizens of countries, states, counties, and cities make decisions that produce effects borne by people in other jurisdictions. Often these effects deeply affect people’s lives, through problems of security and war, economic development, trade and markets, and environmental externalities including climate change. A decision taken “democratically” in one polity – inclusive of its members – can be experienced as oppression, domination, or tyranny in another. No justification of exclusions based on membership can make such effects democratically acceptable. Indeed, such arguments are central to anti-globalization and populist demands for recentering power in nation-states by hardening borders to trade and migration. Even if democratic theorists are not using the AAP, large numbers of people already do so intuitively, although too often with reactive framing. Yet despite the recent surges in reactive nationalism in most of the developed democracies, increasing numbers of people understand our obligations to others as those of social justice that should extend to every human being, uncontained by the boundaries of political membership.3
These are not new problems or insights. What is new, emerging over the last decade or so, is a discussion of whether membership-based principles of democratic inclusion might be either supplemented or even replaced by the AAP. Just as new is the pushback: those who defend membership-based entitlements for inclusion commonly note that the AAP is unworkable or unorganizable owing to its expansiveness; or that membership trumps weaker or more extensive externalities owing to thicker ethical obligations among co-nationals; or that being affected in itself does not justify claims for inclusion. For the most part, those of us who have been using the AAP have not developed a fully adequate account that responds to these questions.
Here I sketch an approach to the AAP that begins to respond to both the normative claims inherent in democratic ideals, as well as to the issues of organizing these ideals into institutions and practices beyond state-based constituencies. I do so by making the following arguments.
First, I interpret the AAP as a normative specification of social justice as it relates to democratic inclusion. It is a claim about who should, normatively speaking, be entitled to inclusion in political constituencies – existing or latent – based on how their essential interests in self-development and self-determination are affected by others. That is, it is not a theory of political organization, nor is it a replacement for the ties of memberships. But it is a way of specifying normatively the reach of democracy under conditions of extensive interdependency. It captures the common-sense normative core of democracy as self-government and challenges us to imagine institutions and practices that might respond. Second, I comment on the three most common objections to the AAP – all species of the objection that the AAP is unworkable as a principle of democratic inclusion. While these objections are compelling in their own terms, they suffer increasing irrelevance to the changing circumstances of politics. Third, I comment on the All-Subjected Principle (ASP), an important alternative account of entitlements to democratic inclusions. While the ASP captures one important kind of affectedness, it remains tied to the project of democratizing consolidated nation-states, and so fails to respond to evolving patterns of interdependency. Fourth, I suggest that the normative force of the AAP should be derived primarily from social justice, specified as obligations that follow social relationships that support self-determination and self-development under conditions of extensive interdependency.4 Fifth, specifying the AAP in this way produces a distinction between democratic equalities and democratic equities. Whereas democratic equalities are empowerments that are equally distributed and empowered by states or state-like entities (rights to vote, speak, organize, etc.), equities are about essential interests related to self-determination and self-development. When the AAP is interpreted as a principle of equity as it relates to inclusions, the claims that follow should be proportional to these essential interests. This interpretation helps to specify the scope of the AAP to those effects that are most important for individuals: those affecting self-determination and self-development. Sixth, this approach to the AAP helps to identify constituencies – actual or latent – relative to essential interests. Because such constituencies will not necessarily match the territorial organization of jurisdictions, the AAP challenges us to find new ways and means of democratic inclusion for essential interests. Finally, I look at the question as to whether the AAP is workable in practice. I note the principle is far from unknown within existing democratic polities: we have many institutions and principles of responsiveness that are proportional and equity-based, such as entitlements for schooling limited to school-age children, cancer treatments for those who have cancer, administrative directives for “stakeholder” or “community” engagement in policy development, and so on. These proportional, equity-based entitlements work in parallel with democratic equalities, which provide the empowerments that citizens may differentially activate, depending upon their essential interests. Thus, we already use the AAP extensively if unevenly. We now need to theorize the principle so we can figure out what it requires of democratic political organization.
Interpreting the All-Affected Principle
The All-Affected Principle, as I shall conceptualize the idea here, is a principle of inclusion relative to problems of democratic self-government. The relevant interests are those related to the goods of self-development and self-determination. Following Iris Marion Young5 and others, self-development refers the development of capabilities necessary for individuals to actualize their potentials, while self-determination refers to opportunities to self-govern together with others, and to participate with others in determining the conditions of self-determination (see also Gray, this volume, and Gould, this volume). The relevant affected interests are those that significantly impact chances and opportunities for self-development and self-determination through (a) relationships of codependence and co-vulnerability, and (b) externalities of organized collective entities or structural phenomena such as markets. The status of the AAP as a normative claim turns on affectedness in these senses: negatively, when effects undermine self-determination or self-development (that is, effects that amount to domination or oppression), and positively as conditions for self-determination or self-development. All is a marker of inclusion that I will interpret as relative to “affected interests.” From a democratic perspective, the ethics behind the “all” is relatively simple and uncontroversial: each individual is morally equal with respect to self-development and self-determination. No individual should be merely an instrument of the interests of others, nor beyond the consideration of others with respect to support for self-determination and self-development, nor denied self-determination and self-development through domination or oppression. That is, each individual holds equal moral entitlement to develop the life they have and to govern that life – both through individual choices, and through others in those matters related to codependence and co-vulnerability.
Two important features of the AAP follow. First, the scope of the principle is relative to effects that impact individuals’ capacities for self-determination and self-development. That is, the AAP should identify just those effects that matter to these fundamental interests. Second, the normative claims for inclusion increase proportionally to the extent fundamental interests are affected. So “all” does not mean everyone who is potentially affected in any way, but rather with respect to one’s fundamental interests in self-development and self-determination.6 Thus, although everyone is potentially affected by almost everything in a world of thick interdependencies, some are deeply important for self-determination and self-development (food, clothing, shelter, education, security, etc.), while others are relatively trivial and/or have little or no bearing on social justice (e.g. being crowded out of seeing a new movie release).
Since the AAP is a principle of inclusion, we also need to ask: Included in what? The most immediate implication is that it tracks effects that mark out potential demoi or constituencies (a point to which I return below), for which there should be corresponding empowerments and sites of collective action. Framing this question is one of the most productive features of the AAP – and it is a question that is framed out of the membership-based model of democracy, which assumes inclusions must refer to states or state-like entities. In contrast, the AAP expands entitlements for inclusion into complexes of effects for which collective agency is much less clear, particularly beyond nation-states, or within polities with complex jurisdictions that do not map onto the patterns of affectedness, or as consequences of structural forces such as markets that do not seem to have any particular responsible collectivity.7 These kinds of situations are not an argument against the AAP, but rather an argument for using the principle as a way of identifying normatively important patterns of effects that amount to constituencies for which there is no responsible collective entity. In such cases, collective agents should be invented and created just so collective responses can exist. In the case of global climate change, for example, the Paris Accords counted as a step toward creating a collectivity that can coordinate and distributing responsibilities. In other cases, such as global trade, treaties among states can bring into existence multilateral bodies and procedures that can, at least in principle, begin to scale collective agency to market externalities, which can, at least in principle, be pushed in democratic directions. In this way, the AAP highlights those areas in which collective agents should exist to address effects, or (alternatively) where they do exist but do not function democratically.
Finally, there is the question of how inclusions in effect-based demoi or constituencies should be democratically empowered within potential or actual sites of collective action. Standard democratic theory simplifies the question by assuming that these sites are state-based jurisdictions, and the key empowerments are rights to votes in competitive elections, structured to form governments and hold them to account (see e.g. Goodin, this volume; Stilz, this volume). Although voting rights are basic and crucial democratic empowerments, they are not the only kind – a point that is important if we are to conceive of empowerments that are sufficiently flexible to map onto effect-based constituencies. Democratic polities include (and depend upon) a variety of other empowerments that (a) are enabled and protected by liberal-democratic constitutional states, but which (b) can be deployed by individuals and groups selectively, and (c) can function across organized jurisdictions. These include public argument and deliberation, association for a purpose, protest and resistance, legal standing with respect to claims or entitlements, representation by advocacy groups, capacities to exit, and so on.8 As I shall argue below, ideally each individual should have empowerments appropriate to the ways in which their essential interests are affected, and the kind of collectivity (existing or latent) that might respond to these effects.
Three Objections
Objections to the AAP are primarily that (1) the principle comes with unacceptable costs to workable units of self-government, and/or (2) that it is so expansive as to threaten other goods, and/or (3) that it is too expansive to be feasible.
The first objection, that the AAP would undermine workable units of self-government, challenges its most basic conceptual purpose: identifying demoi by focusing on affected interests. As complexes of affectedness become more extensive, demoi should also expand. As demoi expand, democratic self-government becomes more difficult in two ways. First, expanded demoi thin out the ties of obligation and community that are a consequence of individuals living in proximity to one another. As ties weaken, so do the social and moral requisites of democratic self-government.9 Second, and closely related, as demoi expand, the say that any individual might have within a collectivity shrinks, up to the point that it becomes infinitesimally small, effectively depriving “democracy” of any practical meaning.
While these problems are challenging, they are less so if we interpret the AAP as tracking important kinds of embeddedness in complexes of effects. When we do so, the AAP identifies demoi that will differ in nature and extent depending upon kinds of embeddedness and their impact upon essential interests in self-development and self-determination. We should thus imagine expansive demoi as addressing issues in ways that underwrite (rather than undermine) self-determination and self-development, including (say) bonds of place-based community, or protecting locales from (say) externalities of trade or the consequences of climate change. What these kinds of demoi might require would be disaggregated and overlapping political regimes that map onto complexes of effects. Most such regimes would focus on single issues or complexes of related issues, such as trade, migration, food security, climate change, and so on (e.g. Young 2000, Chapter 7). These kinds of demoi and related regimes are not only imaginable, but many already exist in UN agencies, INGOs, and treaty organizations. The AAP helps to theorize the demoi that correspond to and justify these regimes, and to identify their (usually latent) democratic potentials. For regimes at large scale, empowerments might be realized through advocacy representation and issue-focused publics in ways that build upon state-based rights and protections.
A second kind of objection is that empowerments that follow the AAP would actually threaten other important goods. This point is often made by citing Nozick’s story about several individuals’ desire to marry someone who loves someone else. They do not gain the entitlement to decide whom the loved one will marry by virtue of being affected, as such an entitlement would undermine the goods of liberty and autonomy.10 While it is always important to be attentive to trade-offs among goods, this objection loses its force when we specify the interests at stake as those of social justice: self-determination and self-development. Clearly “having a say” should not justify a situation in which the essential interests in self-determination and self-development are overridden by the preferences of others. It is not that “democracy” and “liberty” conflict, but rather that the basic point of democracy, self-government based on equal moral worth, is violated by a decision by some to impose an essential life choice on another.11 For the same reason, Nozick’s generalization of autonomy rights from the private realm to the self-determination of states – setting up a conflict between the autonomy rights of members and nonmembers – also fails. The relevant moral units of a democracy are individuals, not states.12 States (or any other kind of political regime) should be justified as providing essential conditions of self-development and self-determination, not as means for members to exercise autonomy rights at the expense of nonmembers.13
A third kind of objection amounts to a reductio ad absurdum. As Goodin has argued,14 if the most basic right of inclusion, voting, were to be distributed through the AAP, everyone would have a right to vote on almost everything, or for representatives who decide on almost everything (see also Stilz, this volume). At best, we would have to imagine a world government; at worst, we should imagine a situation in which a global demos somehow decides on every collective decision, externality, or structural effect that makes a difference for anyone.15 Even if desirable (it would not be), such a situation would clearly be infeasible, defeated by sheer scale and complexity. Yet this kind of reduction depends upon imagining that every effect produces equal entitlements, particularly voting rights. But if we conceive entitlements as relative to essential interests, and recognize that entitlements can be empowered by many other forms of democratic influence, the reductio ad absurdum goes away. The resulting picture is complex and institutionally demanding – as are the circumstances of politics today – but it is not absurd.
The All-Subjected Interests Principle?
A combination of these concerns and objections are behind the main conceptual competitor to the AAP: the principle that “all those subjected” to the powers of a state should have a say in state-based collective decision making (ASP). The ASP stipulates that the only collective effects that generate democratic entitlements are those that follow from the coercive implementation of law or policy. Democratic entitlements follow from the circumstances of legal subjection to decisions, either actual or potential.16 While the ASP has the advantage of narrowing the scope of democratic entitlements, it does so at a high cost to our ability to think about democracy under conditions of extensive interdependency.
First, it assumes that the key problem for democratic theory going forward remains the democratization of states. While this project remains crucially important and is very far from complete, we now live in a world in which even most high-capacity states do not control all those effects important for the self-government of their own citizens. Because the targets of democratization are evolving, the relative cleanliness of the ASP is bought at the expense of relevance. By stipulation, the ASP excludes problems of self-government that follow from extensive interdependencies (both across borders and within borders) that generate problems of self-government – and, thus, problems of democracy.
Second, the ASP backs democratic entitlements out of the circumstance of subjection. Legitimate subjection to laws and policies are part of democracy, as they make possible collective responses to problems of collective action.17 But treating subjection as the basis for democratic entitlements fails to provide a positive normative argument for democracy. It is a reactive grounding focused on a harm to be avoided – illegitimate subjection – rather than goods to be achieved. The democratic project, however, has always been about more than subjection, actual or potential. It is about collective organizing and acting in ways that underwrite self-determination and self-development.
Social Justice and Ethics
The AAP, I am suggesting, should be about those effects that are important for social justice, interpreted, following Iris Young and Onora O’Neil,18 as entitlements and obligations that follow from those interdependencies necessary for self-development and self-determination.19 While self-development and self-determination are activities of individuals with the support of others, from a political perspective we should be thinking about the general conditions that make these activities possible. Self-development depends upon standard welfare supports, including those that expand capacities and mitigate life risks: education, healthcare, housing, basic income, and so on. Self-determination depends upon rights that provide political standing, such as rights to vote, due process, etc., and freedoms that protect against oppression and domination, while enabling association, speech, and advocacy.20 “Democracy” is (always) a complex combination of these supports and protections that, together, enable individuals to collectively self-govern. Democracy has value just because it provides individuals with influence over those collective interdependencies necessary to underwrite self-determination and self-development. Stated in this way, social justice is a description of the goods that justify democracy. It follows that we should conceive of the relevant collectivities as those configured to address effects relevant to social justice.
The case that democracy and social justice are intrinsically related has long been part of the traditions that have underwritten contemporary democratic theory, from the emphasis on self-determination (especially through reasoning together with others) in Aristotle, to a focus on the development of democratic capacities in Jefferson, Tocqueville, Mill, and Dewey. Less noticed, however, is the close relationship between Kantian ethics and the AAP – and this relationship also helps to justify the AAP (see Gray, this volume). The relationship can be built out of the categorical imperative and its related political formulations: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” With respect to legislation and law, Kant developed a parallel formula: “Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each to co-exist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law is right.”21 These formulations have, of course, been hugely influential in ethics, liberal-democratic constitutionalism, and human rights discourse. Less remarked is their close relationship with the AAP, even though they have been effectively incorporated into some influential formulations.22 The categorical imperative and the theory of right ask individuals to imagine themselves as members of universal communities, where those communities are populated with other individuals, each of whom has a life to live, interdependent with others. Each has the capacity, by virtue of being human, to be self-governing, and each is entitled to equal moral respect. While the categorical imperative is most often interpreted as a reason-based ethics of duty (as in deontological ethics), we should notice that it also directs us to imagine how our actions might affect others’ capacities for self-governance – leading us to consider those chains of effects, potential and actual, that link our actions to those of others, considered as moral equals.23 The AAP can thus be viewed as an elaboration of this kind of moral imperative, such that we arrive at a proto-democratic view of what social justice requires. All other things being equal, inclusions should follow patterns of effects that rise to the level of importance for social justice.24
The AAP as a Principle of Equity
If these intuitions into social justice within contexts of extensive interdependencies justify the AAP, what are the implications for political equalities? In particular, how does the AAP fare from the perspective of democratic equality? As noted above, if we interpret the AAP as requiring equal votes or voice over all the interdependencies that affect us, the principle collapses. If we narrow the scope to essential interests, as does Fung,25 the AAP captures the intuition that we should care about those inclusions in collectivities that are most important for individuals. And if we follow this logic, we could end up with the somewhat surprising position that democratic inclusions should be proportional to the nature and extent of affectedness for these essential interests. Following roughly this argument, Brighouse and Fleurbaey propose that democratic entitlements such as voting should not be distributed equally, but rather proportionally, relative to individuals’ stakes in their essential interests.26 They argue that a (social justice) principle of equal moral worth incorporated into all democratic theory requires proportional empowerments, distributed according to differential individual circumstances and capacities.
The social justice logic of this argument is compelling. But it is hard to see how this kind of proposal could ever be legitimate. Publics, especially in democracies, view equal political entitlements, such as the right to vote, as public recognitions of equal moral worth. Indeed, in the very unlikely event that such a system were to be proposed within a political arena, most would view it as denoting differing kinds and classes of citizenship, and a clear violation of moral equality. Moreover, it would almost certainly undermine the reciprocity necessary for public attention to considerations of social justice. Social justice rights (e.g. to education and healthcare) can only be effective if matched to duties and responsibilities (e.g. supporting public education and universal healthcare). Adding empowerments to the rights side of the equation at the expense of the duties and responsibilities side of the equation would undermine general commitments to welfare policies by (relatively) misrecognizing and disempowering those very people upon whom the burdens of duties fall. Indeed, this logic is what the All-Subjected Principle gets right: entitlements to voice and votes are at least partly justified by the burdens of citizenship, including paying for (say) state-based welfare entitlements. In short, it is hard to imagine a proposal that would more quickly and completely undermine public commitments to social justice.
But we can still retain Brighouse and Fleurbaey’s argument that higher stakes, or greater impacts on social justice-based interests, should scale proportionally onto importance of inclusions, as the AAP would suggest. We can do so in a way that is both morally robust and politically viable by distinguishing equality from equity. The intuitions captured by the AAP are best conceived as a democratic way of thinking about equity – in particular, the proportionality inherent in equitable social relationships. Thus, democratic equality is justified by equal moral worth and a default competence assumption that individuals are capable of collective self-government.27 Democratic equality cashes out in equal distributions of political entitlements (or empowerments) necessary to exercise influence over collectivities. These include protective rights to liberty and autonomy, positive rights to vote, speak, and organize, welfare rights such as rights to education, a basic income, etc., as well as rights of exit from social and economic relationships. Democratic equalities provide recognitions among co-equals of their moral worth, and political standing to individuals so they might act as democratic citizens. These rights are necessary to exercise democratic agency, and they should be organized into collectivities.28 States or state-like entities (such as the EU or the International Criminal Court) are the key distributors and guarantors, and it is difficult to imagine a future in which this would not be the case. Constitutional liberal-democratic states provide platforms, as it were, for individuals to act within, between, and beyond jurisdictions.
Equities, however, are by their very nature proportional to affectedness, and thus require differing kinds of collective attentiveness. Elaborated through the lens of social justice, equity is what we owe to one another by virtue of those co-dependencies and externalities that affect our abilities to self-develop and self-determine. Ideally, equitable inclusions are scaled proportionally to basic needs, so that individuals approach equality in their capacities. As Young quite sensibly puts it, because “of their differing attributes or situations, some people need more or different to enable equal levels of capability with others.”29 Thus, in higher-functioning welfare states, citizens are equally and universally entitled to receive state services. What we expect, however, is that services are delivered and used equitably, in accordance with the AAP – what Rosanvallon has perceptively called “the legitimacy of proximity.”30 Every citizen has an equal right to schooling for their children, but it is primarily school-aged children and their parents that have directly affected interests (including interests as taxpayers, interests in a productive economy, etc., but less directly). Schooling is thus distributed not in accordance with the principle of equality, but rather equity. Entitlements to voice are magnified for those most directly affected through institutions like Parent-Teacher Associations. In Canada, to take another example, entitlement to medical treatment is equal and universal, but, ideally, it is delivered equitability (and unequally) according to specific health needs. This kind of equity tracks the kinds of responsiveness from collectivities that people tend to want in democracies – a kind that Rosanvallon perceptively calls the “democratic legitimacy of particularity.”31
This relationship between equalities and the proportional qualities of affectedness helps to make sense of patterns of political activity we might ideally expect in a democracy. Even when they are robustly guaranteed, people tend to activate their (ideally equal) rights when their essential interests are at stake. Even though democratic rights are equally distributed, they are not equally used. Most use their voice and votes quite selectively, according to the issues they prioritize. They speak and organize on issues they consider urgent, they activate entitlements to medical care when ill or injured, and so on. So, ideally, democratic equalities make possible vectors of inclusion that respond (proportionally and differentially) to equities.
On this view of the complementary relationship between equalities and equities, it is important to think about political arrangements that are sensitive to individual circumstance, and which can be used by individuals according to their needs. While the examples I have used lean toward collective attentiveness, we should also be thinking about arrangements that enable and empower voluntary transactions that respond immediately and directly to needs – particularly associative and market-like transactions. Thomas Christiano (this volume) experiments with the idea that, under fair conditions, decentralized voluntary transactions (including associative and market transactions as well as self-selected political forums) might be viewed as means of realizing the AAP; when people can choose their relationships (through joining and exiting, or buying and selling), they can choose the ones that are more likely to serve their more important interests.32
Of course, as Christiano argues, these kinds of voluntary ways of realizing the AAP will work democratically not just when people have democratic equalities, but also relatively equal capacities to engage, bargain, and transact. Inequalities of circumstance undermine capacities to use equally distributed democratic empowerments,33 and unequal bargaining power within markets undermine the fairness of transactions. Owing to these well-known defects of self-selected organization, democratic theorists have perhaps overlooked the importance of voluntarily-exercised citizen powers that can reflect the relative importance of interests. Yet because of the importance of voluntary political activity as a vector for the AAP, we should attend more closely to the conditions that square its patterns with democracy. And because it is difficult to imagine a democracy within which voluntary transactions are not an important vector of self-government, proportionally supplied equities (consistent with the AAP) that underwrite relatively equal capacities to choose, transact, vote, and so on are all the more important.
In an ideal democracy, then, equality and equity would be complementary, with equal powers of citizenship underwriting proportional social justice claims, while proportional social justice underwrites relatively equal capacities of citizenship. The AAP gives such proportionality its democratic substance by relating it back to self-government.
Constituency
We can elaborate the AAP still further through the more obviously political concept of constituency. Constituency defines units of membership identified in relation to representatives who stand for, speak for, or act for its members. In standard democratic theory, constituencies are determined (typically) by states and their subunits of government, divided into electoral districts, usually based on residence.34 In federal systems, constituencies will differ by level of government and are layered, so that individuals are members of multiple constituencies. The standard theory assumes that individuals’ essential interests are encompassed by residence-based constituencies, and that their essential interests can be empowered through elections.35
Interpreted through the AAP, however, the question of constituency becomes more interesting and productive. On the one hand, the principle suggests that for some kinds of issues – particularly those important for social justice – democratic self-government should be sorted by issues representing essential interests, with each issue (or set of related issues) identifying a constituency. Interpreted through the AAP, individuals are no longer conceived as residence-based packages of essential interests, but rather as plural packages of interests connected to others who share similar interests (challenges, injustices, etc.). Considered politically, each such package can count as a constituency – either one that is organized and active with representatives, or an unorganized, latent constituency. Individuals can have (and often do have) multiple memberships in many constituencies, linked by common interests or shared struggles. On the other hand, when we think of constituencies as identified by the AAP, we can also identify democratic deficits: issues related to essential interests for which there is no representative locus of organization.36 The AAP helps us to think about where there are needs for political organization that do not correspond to residency-based constituencies, including (most obviously) issues that flow across borders such as climate change, trade, and migration.
The AAP in Practice
This interpretation of the AAP is still challenging, but in a way that matches the evolving circumstances of politics to empowered inclusions that are important for self-determination and self-development. A key piece of the challenge is to imagine forms and powers of citizenship with corresponding sites of collective action that would underwrite the proportional, equity-based demands of the AAP. In this final section, I address the question of how the AAP might be organized into political practices and institutions. I do so from two perspectives: that of the powers individual/citizen might employ for inclusion, and that of institutions and organizations that might respond (or be created to respond). I illustrate the analysis with examples that are familiar and even mundane. I do so not to undermine the progressive implications of the AAP, but rather to show we already know something about its nature and demands. The AAP is a challenge to extend and deepen democracy, but it is not utopian.
Citizen Powers as Vectors of the AAP
A key to thinking about how the AAP might be instantiated is to identify the kinds of empowerments individuals might have to organize or pressure sites of collective action. In almost all cases, empowerments require functioning liberal-democratic constitutional states with the capacities to distribute and enforce politically important rights, both protective and positive, as suggested above. Rights provide citizens with some kinds of direct empowerments, such as voting governments in and out of office. But they provide many more indirect empowerments that they can use in graduated and proportional ways, depending upon how individuals rank and prioritize issues and preferences. Where people have rights to speak and organize, they can also resist, advocate, pressure, organize for common purposes, and exit.37 Importantly, these powers might be directed at governments, but they can also cross boundaries and jurisdictions, as well as focus on other kinds of collective actors such as IGOs, INGOs, and corporations, potentially tracking the demands of the AAP.
These kinds of powers scale onto proportional affectedness more easily than, say, voting in competitive elections. It is true that every election prioritizes some issues over others, and that voters can decide which candidates or parties rank issues as they would. But voters are also locked into multi-issue, programmatic agendas set by parties or candidates. Indeed, some kinds of issues almost never make it into elections, such as endemic political corruption in places where every politician or party is corrupt. But it is possible to speak, organize, protest, strike, and sue. In the United States, civil rights were not addressed by the elected branches of government for a full century after the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and almost a century after the end of Reconstruction. Progress, when it came, was the result of determined activists using powers of organization to shape public discourse and voting, and to achieve standing in the court system to leverage constitutional standards against unconstitutional statutory law as well as illegal practices.
As I have been arguing, liberal-democratic constitutional states remain essential to realizing the AAP, not because they instantiate the principle directly, but because rights provide citizenship standing, which in turn empowers individuals to work below, across, above, and outside of state-based jurisdictions and constituencies.38 It is not accidental that most transnational and international organizations use liberal-democratic states as their locations, as they provide the freedoms and protections necessary for activism. We should also notice that many such organizations and networks help to provide little bits of citizen powers even where states are authoritarian, arbitrary, kleptocratic, or failed. When international organizations focus on basic social justice issues such as refugee status, genocide, hunger, the treatment of women and minorities, they are often reaching across borders to provide some of the most basic elements of citizenship standing where states do not.39 Of course, such empowerments are highly imperfect and uneven in their effects. But they are also relatively recent developments, and count as projects in the making. We should also pay close attention to international regimes created without any human rights or democratic pretensions, such as trade agreements. Once in place, they can become sites of leverage for democracy-related goods – sometimes formally and extensively, as exemplified by the development of the trade and economic development-focused European Commission into the European Union.
With the powers of citizenship, individuals can self-select into organizations in ways that reflect their own views of their essential interests. They can bring latent constituencies to the fore; they can precisely calibrate their advocacy; they can even organize to provide collective goods that governments neglect, as in the case of early social insurance associations.40 What Laura Montanaro calls “self-appointed representatives” (advocacy entrepreneurs) or what Michael Saward calls “representative claim-makers” can transform latent constituencies into active ones.41
The ways these kinds of powers are actually deployed, of course, will not necessarily serve everyone’s essential interests. Any kind of power that remains latent until activated through individual choices will be sensitive to differences in economic security and bargaining power, social standing and status, and education. Organizing for public, diffuse, or long-term goods – those for which high individual efforts result in only incremental payoffs – will be relatively more challenging than organizing for goods with focused and timely payouts.
Transformations of Governance Reflecting the AAP
If we look at these same kinds of relationships from the side of governance, we can see that the AAP, interpreted as an equity-based principle of democracy, is already part of the current and emerging patterns, even if we have not theorized them as such. Consider the following kinds of examples.
Stakeholder and Community Engagement
These terms are commonly used in enabling legislation for agencies and ministries, and date back to the post–Second World War era in the United States and many other countries. The intent was to provide standing to those “stakeholders” or “communities” that are directly, differentially, or disproportionally affected by legislation, particularly in the development of policies and administrative rule making. These directives define relevant publics as those with “stakes” – in effect, instantiating a version of the AAP. In most cases, these kinds of “engagement” and “consultation” rely on individuals or representatives of groups self-selecting into these processes. Depending upon the issue, the results may not be especially favorable to democracy, as they will skew toward well-organized groups and (often) permanent lobbyists for well-resourced groups or business interests. But for some issues, especially those related to social justice and often at the local level, we now see more proactive targeting of affected publics – a process I have elsewhere called governance-driven democratization.42 These democratic innovations may be instigated by professionals who are genuinely interested in inclusions, but they are often reactions to advocacy, particularly the kinds that can disrupt governance.43 This kind of development is thus often functionally related to the kinds of citizen powers I underscored in the previous section. In still other cases, agencies or ministries may use near-random or stratified sampling selection to populate a citizen group (or deliberative minipublic44) to better represent an affected public – a tactic that is especially important when the advocacy landscape around an issue poorly reflects those who are affected or potentially affected, or when powerful groups threaten to co-op a process.
Single-Issue Jurisdictions
More mundanely, governments in the liberal democracies have long formed single-issue jurisdictions to manage specific tasks or problems, effectively institutionalizing other forms of the AAP. Examples include school districts, transportation authorities, health authorities, and soil conservation and irrigation districts. In many cases, the units of government proactively engage with those drawn into these jurisdictions. Vancouver Coastal Health (a government agency responsible for delivering health to a region of British Columbia), for example, creates a variety of user groups, such as those with complex diabetes management problems, in order to define and refine their missions. School districts in the United States and Canada institutionalized Parent-Teacher Associations long ago. Transportation districts seeking to develop (say) a subway extension will often seek input from potential riders and property owners, as well as from broader constituencies of those affected by congestion, taxes, and climate change.
Single-Issue Cross-Jurisdiction Governance
Similarly, especially in transnational and international contexts, problems that affect people across borders can result in governance regimes that implicitly reflect the AAP. As I suggested above, some of these regimes are constructed specifically for social justice issues, such as human rights, food security, and displacement of persons. But they also include many kinds of joint problem-focused regimes, such as the International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes boundary waters, the Montreal Protocols on chlorofluorocarbons, or the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) with its labor and environmental conditions and riders.
The point of these examples is not to deflate the demanding character of the AAP, but rather to underscore the fact that the intuitions it expresses are quite common, and that we have, in fact, created institutions in response. We use the AAP all the time, in ways that combine political equalities with attentiveness to differential equities. Our problem is to extract the principles from these practices, examine their normative force, and then figure out what they demand of us.
Conclusion
While “democracy” involves a number of principles, the AAP is one that will help us to conceive of where democratic inclusions should exist in a world with denser interdependencies and co-vulnerabilities, and where existing units of collective action or market-like structures produce extensive externalities. But because of the density of embedded effects, we shall need to prioritize, focusing on the inclusions that are most important for people’s lives. This is why I am arguing for specifying the AAP through social justice, in this way focusing on those effects that impact individuals’ capacities and opportunities for self-determination and self-development.
There is a new urgency to retooling democratic theory to reflect the changing circumstances of politics. Reactive movements in the United States, UK, and much of Europe use a state-centric view of democracy – popular sovereignty focused on state powers – to justify withdrawing from global interdependencies and responsibilities. These may be politics of the past, but they remain attractive to large sectors of populations that feel their collective control slipping away into interdependencies that do not benefit them. Recentering politics on state-controlled boundaries seems compelling to people not just because of its simplicity, but also because there have not been good institutional responses for many kinds of cross-jurisdictional affectedness that threaten to downgrade lives and livelihoods. We democratic theorists need to show that we can think about democracy in this kind of post-sovereign world. The AAP will help us to extend and deepen the kind of democratic imagination that might respond.
The goal of democratic inclusion is to equalize power. To demand inclusion on “democratic” grounds is to demand not to be under the arbitrary and one-sided power of others. Nobody should be able to rule us but ourselves. The value of democratic inclusion isn’t reducible to any one set of political institutions or decision-making procedures, such as equal rights of participation or competitive elections. Nor is it based on knowing who counts as a citizen or member, or what the boundaries between two communities should properly be. From the perspective of those who have been undemocratically excluded, there exists a more fundamental source of complaint. It’s about the character of a relationship that makes self-rule impossible.
In opening my argument this way, I’ve perhaps left out some of the nuance. The reality is that governments are in desperate need of principled guidance on how to deal with the growing number of demands for inclusion from outside their borders. Globalization and the many issues that it raises – about migration, trade, human rights, climate change – has undermined the ability of states to draw clear lines, especially as the world becomes evermore connected and interdependent. Today, a decision made in one place can impact people in countless others. And, increasingly, the decisions with the most impact on people’s lives aren’t being made by states at all, but by private corporations, nongovernmental organizations, international governance institutions, and the like. These challenges can make an appeal to democratic ideals seem misguided, even quaint. What need do we have for abstract appeals to the value of democratic inclusion? How does this address the urgent practical questions of who is entitled to inclusion, to what degree, and on what basis?
I work out an answer roughly as follows. I start by considering two candidate principles that seek to put our normative ideals of democracy into practice. According to proponents of the All-Affected Principle (AAP), we should be looking to distribute participatory rights and empowerments to those whose interests a given decision-making process most significantly affects. A competing proposal is the All-Subjected Principle (ASP), which would have us settle questions of inclusion by determining who is subjected to a decision’s terms. Both principles share a similar concern for ensuring that the boundaries of democratic inclusion track the outcomes of decision making. But both principles also miss something important, I argue. People do not see themselves as wrongfully excluded from a decision-making process just because of its outcome. What about the underlying relationships of power and circumstance that render people vulnerable to a decision’s consequences to begin with? To make progress, what’s required is an understanding of undemocratic exclusion that avoids reducing our concerns to the possible effects of a decision. What is the underlying wrong to which complaints about undemocratic exclusion are typically directed? One complaint is about domination – the exposure to arbitrary interference. Another complaint is about usurpation – having decisions made for you, without your involvement. In the final third of the chapter, I use these two complaints as a guide to sketching out an alternative formula for democratic inclusion – one that, I believe, can do a much better job of explaining why democratic inclusion is justified in some cases, but not others, and to what degree. My argument speaks to the relational value of democratic inclusion. It offers a more grounded understanding of our democratic obligations to one another, sensitive to our equal moral claims consideration, but tailored for a globalized world.
A Normative Definition of Democracy
The standard picture that we paint of democracy is in one sense too familiar. It’s tempting to leave out the core principles and cut straight to institutional questions about implementation. Still, I think it’s worth periodically revisiting the specific values that are appealed to when we speak of “democracy,” separate from the institutions and practices with which it is usually associated. Democracy as an ideal is compatible with any number of institutional configurations and isn’t reducible to any single activity. So, if we want to know what democracy is and what it asks of us, it simply won’t do to read off a definition secondhand.
At the highest level of abstraction, democracy means – and, I believe, is most often taken to mean – collective self-rule under conditions that afford everyone political standing and consideration in matters of common concern. I won’t defend this working definition here, but I take some version of it to be implicit in most theories of democracy today. When John Rawls outlines his vision of a “well-ordered constitutional democracy” in which citizens “exercise ultimate political power as a collective body,” he is embracing this conception of self-rule.1 Robert Dahl expresses this conception with even greater clarity: “[A] democratic order is above all the freedom of self-determination in making collective and binding decisions: the self-determination of citizens entitled to participate as political equals in making the laws under which they live together as citizens.”2 This emphasis on the fundamental equality of individuals is important. In Niko Kolodny’s words, it “is rooted in a concern not to have anyone else “above”—or, for that matter, “below”—us,” such that “none rules over any other.”3
I want to suggest that this definition of democratic self-rule provides an entry point for thinking about diverse demands for inclusion, especially in a globalized world. It spells out for us what democracy requires in normative terms, separate from the specific institutions and practices through which it may be realized, such as elections, or representation, or citizenship. My central claim is that what democracy implies, at bottom, is a commitment to fostering the conditions under which individuals can be said to rule themselves as equals. This requires, first, that we are in fact able to make choices as individuals, to think for ourselves, and to craft plans that are personally meaningful and not the result of arbitrary interference or manipulation. It also requires that we enjoy equal rights and protections, including an equal say in the duties and obligations that collective life imposes. As individuals, we must be willing to share our thoughts and judgments with others. And, as a group, we must agree to fair procedures that allow us to consider what each of us wants in order to arrive at a collective decision that everyone can endorse – through voting or deliberating, for example. It follows that the possibility of democracy depends on the character of our relationship to collective decisions. This is true in a negative sense, insofar as being excluded from collective decision making, when we’re owed consideration, does damage to our autonomy. This is also true in a positive sense, insofar as having sufficient capacities and opportunities to influence collective decision making is a basic condition for democratic self-rule.
Now, none of this should be new or surprising to democratic theorists. But it bears repeating precisely because of what’s still up for grabs. Our working ideal of democracy doesn’t come prepackaged with a means of marking out democracy’s boundaries.4 There is no rule-set for determining who is entitled to be included in any given decision-making process, and on what basis. If we are committed to the ideal of democratic self-rule, then what grounds do we have for including some people and excluding others? There is a diversity of ways to formulate such criteria, from shared identity, to territorial residence, to tracing the effects of a decision on those it impacts. In what follows, I explore the two most prominent proposals found in the literature to address this so-called “boundary problem.”
The All-Affected Principle
Suppose that we determine who is included in decision making based on whom it might affect. This strategy seems fairly straightforward. Take a given decision, trace its possible consequences, note all of the constituencies that are impacted by each possibility, and then empower them in the decision-making process. What emerges is the All-Affected Principle: “very likely the best general principle of inclusion that you are likely to find.”5 A rough formulation of the principle states that anyone potentially affected by a collective decision should be included in the making of that decision. As a rule of inclusion, it’s fundamentally outcome based. The motivating concern is to ensure that decision making is responsive and accountable when people’s vital interests are at stake, such as their human rights, or their freedom, or their basic well-being.
Early proponents of the All-Affected Principle saw it as a means of shifting boundaries: enfranchising citizens from one country by giving them a vote in the domestic laws and policies of another country, on issues that affect them. It seemed obvious that extending voting rights beyond state borders was the surest approach to protecting “communities whose actions, policies, and laws are interrelated and intertwined.”6 Recent advocates for the All-Affected Principle have doubled down on its radically expansive implications. Robert Goodin argues that a consistent application of the principle means that “we should give virtually everyone a vote on virtually everything virtually everywhere in the world.”7 Since we cannot know in advance who is going to be affected by a decision, it is impossible to settle the question of who should be included without including everyone, as a precaution – either that, or we must be prepared to cough up and provide considerable financial compensation to those who are wrongfully excluded. This leads to a controversial conclusion. On this classic interpretation of the All-Affected Principle, we appear committed to expanding the state by endorsing some form of world government.
The classic interpretation of the All-Affected Principle is criticized for taking an unrealistic, overly broad approach to inclusion. But if we want to be more targeted, then we need to specify what exactly is owed to different constituencies, depending on the degree to which a decision affects them. And, we also need to define the ranges of relevant effects for which different degrees of inclusion is justified. Say there was a way of calibrating the All-Affected Principle to distinguish those that a decision-making process regularly or deeply affects from those that it does not. This would be a substantial improvement, many think.8 It would allow us to widen the All-Affected Principle’s scope so that it is no longer tracking the consequences of just a single decision point. Instead, we would be able to identify the aggregate effects of multiple related decisions on a given constituency within a given domain. We could then distribute people’s participatory entitlements accordingly, in proportion to how persistent or pervasive the effects of particular decisions happen to be. One advantage is being able to adopt a more nuanced approach to distributing democratic empowerments, such as voting rights, to “nations, regions, towns, and other geographical areas” according to what is at stake.9 People’s standing to influence collective decision making should vary depending on its relative significance to their lives. Some should be entitled to a full vote, others to fair representation or deliberation, while others still might be correct to demand to at least be consulted, or to have sufficient standing to ensure their interests are legally protected. The All-Affected Principle, on this pluralist interpretation, is now a principle of proportionality, allowing for multiple “circles of inclusion and participation” within and across existing borders and different levels of government.10
I find this pluralist understanding of the All-Affected Principle to be far more attractive than its classic predecessor. It pushes our thinking about democratic inclusion beyond state-based voting rights, by emphasizing the number and variety of rights and empowerments that self-rule requires. Still, I think the pluralist view leaves far too much undefined, since the idea of proportional inclusion is possible only if we have adequate conceptions of “affectedness” in hand. How can we determine the thresholds at which affectedness warrants a specific type of inclusion? And to whom are these thresholds applicable? The problem is that assigning appropriate weightings based on different degrees of affectedness involves a substantial amount of contextual judgment. The best we can do, on the pluralist account, is to try to work out where the boundaries of democratic inclusion lie on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis.11 So, as a strategy for inclusion, I think we’re better off looking elsewhere.
The All-Subjected Principle
If interpretations of the All-Affected Principle leave too much on the table, then it is necessary to search for narrower criteria. A proposed alternative is the so-called “All-Subjected Principle.”12 As a rule of inclusion, it states that all of those subjected to a collective decision have the right to a say in that decision. Proponents of this view make their case by emphasizing that the most basic presumptive wrong that could occur is when someone is unjustly excluded from collective decision making, but has to abide by its terms. What explains the wrong of denying people rights to inclusion to which they’re entitled?
From the perspective of those who have been wronged, the complaint is illegitimate coercion: “the view that political power is legitimate only insofar as its exercise is mutually justified by and to those subject to it.”13 If adopted, the All-Subjected Principle would supposedly have the benefit of shrinking democracy’s domain down to a more appropriate size. “[I]t explains the widely held view that [only] people who live in a country and are routinely subject to its legal system are entitled to be admitted.” This eliminates any need to expand the electorate much beyond established borders, since other complaints about being affected “can often be dealt with in ways other than by widening the demos.”14
Once we distinguish being subjected to coercion from other kinds of affectedness, then people’s various demands for inclusion seem directly answerable. I admit that this prospect initially sounds quite appealing, since it seems to do away with the need for any complicated weightings. But notice, first, that simply replacing “affectedness” with “coercion” doesn’t necessarily limit democracy’s boundaries in the way that some might hope. For, surely it is a mistake to think that autonomy-impairing coercion is something that inheres only in the collective decisions and actions of states or state-like entities with a global reach. Many other important social and political relationships where people’s autonomy is at stake – in the workplace, in the university, in the church, in the family – can be objectionably coercive in ways that trigger legitimate demands for more democracy. This makes it look like we would require a method for distinguishing different forms of coercion that warrant different kinds of protection in different domains. Otherwise, this principle would become just as radically expansive as its rival.15 But wait. Wasn’t the appeal of the All-Subjected Principle precisely that it could do away with the need for such complicated weightings? Posing this question is revealing in itself. We seem to be circling back to where we left off with the All-Affected Principle.
It’s time to take stock. I have examined two candidate principles that can be used to determine democracy’s boundaries. Both begin with the premise that who is included in collective decision making should be based on a decision’s consequences. This follows from their shared view of inclusion as something that is instrumental to protecting people’s equal claims to autonomy – the normative meaning of democratic self-rule. Defenders of the All-Affected Principle focus on the various impacts that decisions can have on people’s basic interests. They argue that rights and opportunities to influence decision making should be distributed in proportion to people’s relative stakes in the process. Defenders of the All-Subjected Principle adopt a similar strategy, but use a different threshold for inclusion. Their criterion is subjection to unjustified coercion by the law or other means. My review suggests that neither principle entirely satisfies. The problem is that both principles are too backwards-looking, making determinations about participatory rights and entitlements solely on the basis of a decision’s outcome. From this after-the-fact point of view, there’s little room left to consider the background conditions against which a decision takes place.16 Missing is any accounting of the relationships of power and circumstance that render someone vulnerable to a decision’s consequences to begin with. What about the power relationship in a decision-making process can lead to someone being impacted in an undemocratic way? The two principles we have so far considered make it tempting to focus on only the right-hand side of the equation. While the outcome of a collective decision surely matters, equally important is how that decision gets made.
Track Power, Not Just Its Effects
How, then, should we proceed? What we need, I argue, is a way of characterizing the democratic complaints that different constituencies could have about a decision-making process that avoids reducing their concerns to the possible effects of the decision. My suggestion is that, from a democratic perspective, we care about how we relate to collective decision making, in addition to its consequences. To call a decision-making process “undemocratic” is to signal that something is wrong with the relationships it presupposes. This foregrounding of the relational value of democracy is not novel.17 But if we build from the idea that democratic self-rule inheres in the structure of relations between persons, then I believe that we can reframe current debates about democratic inclusion in a new and illuminating way.
To set up this argument, I want to highlight how this shift in emphasis – from decisions to relationships – can change our view of people’s participatory entitlements. To see this, start with a hypothetical. Two countries share a border. One of them, perhaps it’s the United States, decides to pass a law that would allow for heavy amounts of pollution to be pumped into the other, Canada. Based on our discussion so far, we want to say that there are democratic grounds for including Canadians in the United States’ decision making in this instance. It’s their health that will be grossly affected, after all. This seems plausible enough. But now suppose the United States government reconsiders, and decides not to implement this controversial law. Now no Canadians are affected, and their demands for inclusion seem less justified. Of course, it remains within the power of the United States to still pass its polluting law at any time of its choosing, and thus to bring about an outcome that would burden the lives of millions across the border. Isn’t there still something wrong with this scenario? What is objectionable, I submit, is not whether a given decision has or hasn’t affected a constituency’s important interests in a particular case. Rather, it is that an agent is in a position to arbitrarily make decisions that would significantly impact that constituency’s interests in the first place.
These observations tell us something important about the true source of democratic demands for inclusion. We do not see ourselves as having been wrongfully excluded from collective decision making just because of the outcome. The basis of our objections, I argue, lies in the one-sided way that an agent relates to us in making decisions that affect us. Complaints about undemocratic decision making always reference an asymmetrical power relationship that enables one side to unilaterally and arbitrarily impose terms on the other. They tap deep intuitions that most of us share about what democracy is, and why we value it.18 What makes democratic practices worthwhile is that they underwrite and protect the fundamental moral equality of our most important social and political relationships. They secure the conditions under which we could be said to rule ourselves as free equals.
One implication of this view, I suggest, is that democratic inclusion isn’t really about defining boundaries at all. Rather, it’s about redressing imbalances of power within social and political relationships. It propels us towards equalizing asymmetrical relationships of domination and dependency, by identifying areas of our collective lives where more democracy is needed. This is why, according to Ian Shapiro, “the principle of affected interests suggests [that] the structure of decision rules should follow contours of power relationships, not that of memberships, or citizenships.”19 Though he doesn’t explicitly link the source of people’s complaints to the underlying relational structure of decision making, we can draw a general rule of thumb from Shapiro’s remarks: track power, not just its effects.
My contention is that we have in these reflections the beginnings of an alternative formula for democratic inclusion – one that can operate in the same spirit as the All-Affected and All-Subjected Principles but avoid their blind spots. It starts by picking out the complaints that may arise when people’s autonomy is undermined by an asymmetric power relationship. After all, a useful rule for inclusion must be intelligible from the standpoint of those who invoke it. So, what is the underlying wrong to which complaints about undemocratic exclusion are seeking to draw our attention? The first complaint is about domination. People are dominated when exposed to arbitrary interference. There is also an important second complaint about usurpation. People are usurped when their judgments are displaced without their consent. Importantly, both of these complaints reference more than outcomes. How might these complaints, democratically made, do a better job of indicating the degree to which people are owed inclusion in collective decision making? Let’s turn to an examination of each.
Domination: Complaints about Control
We know what it looks like when domination is the reason for undemocratic exclusions. A dominant agent – a person, a group, a state – occupies a position of power over us, and is able to interfere in our choices with impunity – for example, by threatening us, or by implementing rules and policies that limit the options available to us. When we complain about domination, I argue, we are objecting to a relationship upon which our basic interests and well-being are dependent, but that we are incapable of controlling.20 Such domination represents an arbitrary restriction of our equal freedom, under conditions where we ought to have that freedom. Here, interference is an ever-present danger, even if it never actually occurs.
Suffering domination, so understood, isn’t about being subject to coercion, as some have claimed.21 It is about the exclusionary character of a relationship that leaves us unprotected from the whims of the more powerful. There’s a strong whiff of arbitrariness about it that admits in intensities and degrees. A relationship is arbitrary to the extent that it exists only at the will or pleasure of another agent, without sufficient constraints.22 In practice, the most visible forms of such wrongful arbitrariness occur when actors with an advantage of resources in society – for example, governments, international trade and financial organizations, corporations – possess the unconstrained capacity to shape people’s choices. Less visible forms of domination may also exist in private, in the arbitrariness in relationships between bosses and workers, husbands and wives, or parents and children, among others. The remedy to these injustices, and others like them, is for people to somehow wrest back control over their own circumstances.
To achieve control in one’s important social and political relationships is a convincing rationale for demanding democratic inclusion, I argue. As a criterion within our theory, it is clarifying in two key ways. First, it invites us to focus on how undemocratic exclusions are experienced from the standpoint of the wrongfully excluded. Set aside the All-Affected and All-Subjected Principles’ earlier focus on the consequences of decision making. The fact that you are somehow affected or coerced by a decision isn’t the most basic wrong that’s being picked out when one complains about being dominated. Instead, the complaint is that a more powerful agent is depriving you of necessary conditions for self-determination. The location of this wrong is in the asymmetric relationship between you and this agent. The democratic ideal that everyone be treated as free and equal – as “self-ruling” – affords you some form of protection from domination. No one else should be able to arbitrarily interfere in the decisions that determine your life. You’re in control only to the extent that your preferences and judgments are decisive in shaping your life’s central features – compatible with same for others.23 This in turn requires that your most important relationships – including the laws and powers to which you are exposed – are clear, predictable, legitimate, and (in the case of relations between free equals) symmetric. Put this way, the connection between domination and democratic inclusion is clearer. Demands for inclusion are in many cases demands for sufficient remedies such that nobody can arbitrarily dictate the terms of a relationship, and everybody can rule themselves equally.
But using nondomination as a metric for inclusion also offers a second advantage, I think. In particular, it can help us to navigate some of the complexities that plague other approaches. How do we sort out complaints that warrant inclusion from those that do not? You can fail to get the job you wanted, have your marriage proposal refused, be denied entrance to that fancy private school, and, in general, have your life goals and plans “affected” – all in ways that are, in a relational sense, perfectly nondominating, and thus perfectly consistent with the ideal of democratic self-rule.24 Even if your plans are frustrated, you can still retain the capacity to rule yourself. Insofar as life’s frustrations do not touch the underlying relationships that enable you to continue to freely make choices, inclusion isn’t an issue.25 So, there’s no great mystery as to why we sometimes don’t feel the need to include people in decision making, even if the outcome affects them in significant ways. To know when democratic inclusion is justified, we need only see undemocratic exclusion for what it is – irreducibly about one’s mistreatment within relations of asymmetric power with others.
If we take complaints about domination to only be about undemocratic exclusion, are we committing a category mistake? The approach for which I am advocating helps us to see that many demands for inclusion are best understood as complaints about domination. It makes clear just how difficult it is to achieve nondomination without extending the basic rights and empowerments that are constitutive of democratic self-rule. Note that this does not necessarily require the equal extension of the full voting rights to all affected parties, but it does require that a decision-making process ensures that everyone is afforded sufficient rights and standings to be secure from domination, and thus capable of self-rule. People are entitled to varying degrees of inclusion in collective decision making, not because some should have equal standing and others shouldn’t. Rather, it is because to count as democratic, a decision-making process must extend to everyone the degree of consideration that is warranted by the circumstances. It is therefore a mistake, I think, to suggest that “moral right[s] to due consideration (e.g., to harms avoided or compensated)” are not “constitutive requirements of democratic legitimacy.”26 The error is in deriving democratic inclusion solely from the consequences of a given decision. Missing is inclusion’s relational component.
Usurpation: Complaints about Involvement
We’ve established one sufficient condition for being included in collective decision making. Whatever else democratic self-rule requires, our decision making must be structured in such a way as to avoid dominating one another. But if, as I suggest, minimizing domination needn’t always warrant one’s full inclusion in a decision-making process, then what does? Can we identify a complaint about exclusion that could only be remedied through the extension of equal voting rights and opportunities for participation?
I think we can, but it will require elaboration of a residual complaint that the concept of domination fails to capture. Another agent can be perfectly responsive to our interests, and make only non-arbitrary decisions in relation to us, and yet still wrong us by failing to involve us. In such cases, the wrong isn’t that you condition your judgments within an asymmetric power relationship in anticipation of the whims of the dominating agent. Rather, it’s the separate but related wrong of having your judgment displaced entirely on a matter that is either solely or equally yours to decide. There is a compelling objection, I argue, to being forced to sustain collective decisions or policies that you had no hand in shaping. Following Patchen Markell, I call this uniquely democratic complaint usurpation: “whatever it is that’s happening, and however it’s being controlled, to what extent is it happening through you, through your activity?”27
Complaints about usurpation shed light on the important moral difference between making a decision yourself and having that same decision made for you, without your permission. Here, the democratic nerve struck by this complaint is easily identified. Our collective lives together must instantiate relationships that respect our equal freedom, including our freedom to judge for ourselves what we should do, both individually and collectively. Any relationship that would sideline your input and authority while undertaking obligations on your behalf should be seen as nothing more than undemocratic imposition.28
To see the force of this complaint, consider the example of the benevolent technocrat. They follow established rules and procedures perfectly, and track their constituents’ interests impeccably. Their decisions are never arbitrary, and will clearly foster conditions that are better for everyone. We – the technocrat’s constituents – may have no complaints about domination, and would likely defer to her judgment if given the chance. Yet it is the fact that we aren’t given the chance that is democratically troubling. She’s unilaterally imposing “her judgement with respect to a matter in which her judgement is not supposed to be authoritative.”29 Nobody should have the authority to speak and act in our name if this excludes us. Put in terms of our theory, such disregard isn’t just insulting, it’s usurping – a displacement of our judgment entirely.
Of course, theorizing usurpation as a distinct kind of democratic complaint is relatively easy. But what more can it actually give us? It’s true that the traditional (liberal) view of individual rights already holds that there are certain decisions – over one’s body, one’s occupation, one’s partner – that no one else may decide for you. But usurpation is not a problem of overstepping such (negative) personal boundaries, but rather of implicating us in collective ones. In actual politics, we are routinely faced with organizations and collectivities that make decisions for us, without involving us, on nontrivial matters that are of great significance to the duties and obligations we are (rightly or wrongly) responsible for upholding and that cannot be shirked or escaped. When private corporations ignore the concerns of stakeholder communities, when international organizations step in to manage a country’s fiscal policy (think of the International Monetary Fund), or when a municipal government quietly greenlights a development project without any public participation – these “usurpations” implicate people’s agency, without involving their judgments, to sustain cooperative schemes. It is the importance of barring asymmetries of this type from altering the structure of relationships that ultimately makes usurpation such an important complaint in its own right. It explains the intuition, reported by Anna Stilz, that people feel alienated when they cannot see themselves as “authors (or “makers”) of the institutions to which they are subject.”30
Should people be entitled to demand an unqualified right to equal participation in organizations or institutions that operate through their agency? Focusing on the underlying structure of relationships, I am arguing, can help us make a determination on this point. Warranted charges of usurpation provide far weightier reasons for demanding rights and standings than do other complaints about exclusion. They are made when individuals find themselves trapped as unwilling cooperators within relationships that are insufficiently democratic. Whereas domination admits in degrees, it is not obvious how complaints about usurpation could be answerable but through full and equal inclusion in decision making. If a relationship imposes collective decisions on an individual’s behalf, then, to my mind, there is an unqualified right to an equal say in those decisions – double, if there is no realistic possibility of exit.
A Peacemaking Proposal
If the distinctions that I’ve drawn are sound, then I think we have in our possession the rough outlines of an alternative principle for democratic inclusion. Having laid out the pieces, all that’s required is some assembly. It’s common to think we are owed inclusion in collective decision making when the outcome affects us. But when it comes to making good on this intuition, one can quickly become overwhelmed by the complexities involved. In order to move forward, I suggested taking up the following challenge. Without appealing to a decision’s outcome, is it possible to specify the different kinds of complaints about exclusion for which different degrees of inclusion is the response? I claimed that an answer comes into focus once we pause and reflect on the norms of democracy. Its value is found in the relationships of equal standing between self-ruling persons. It follows that people’s complaints about undemocratic exclusion are fundamentally relational in orientation. From the point of view of the complainant, undemocratic exclusion is dominating, usurping, or both. These complaints pick out relational features that are constitutive of, and logically prior to, decision outcomes and effects. So, if we take these two complaints as a guide, then we can get a built-in metric for distinguishing the different degrees of inclusion that are warranted under different circumstances. Call the resulting formula for inclusion the relational interpretation of the All-Affected Principle. Or, if that’s too partisan a label, call it the “All-Considered Principle.” Whatever it’s called, I believe that it does a much better job of explaining why democratic inclusion is justified in some cases but not others, and to what degree.
What can this alternative formula tell us about what we owe one another in a globalized world? Even if my argument in this chapter is just a sketch, it suggests a method of determining the appropriate response to people’s diverse complaints about exclusion (see Figure 3.1). We ask first: In any pairwise relationship, do people stand in rough relations of equal power? If the answer is “no,” we then proceed to inquire into the nature of the underlying power asymmetry. One set of questions identifies relational structures that amount to domination: questions about dependency, imbalance, and arbitrariness. More often than not, this initial line of questioning leads directly to a second set of concerns about usurpation within a given power relationship: concerns about unwilling involvement. Viewed together, these two sets of questions make clear the dual demands of democratic inclusion. Such complaints often travel together in practice, but they may also come apart. One can, for example, be dominated but not usurped, as when a person finds themself wrongfully conditioning their choices on the whims of others. Likewise, one can experience usurpation without domination, as when a person finds themself in a relationship with others who predictably act in their name while leaving them out. What matters, I have argued, is that both of these wrongs reflect relational asymmetries that are best remedied through inclusions to equalize them.
Figure 3.1 Two complaints about exclusion
Conclusion
A final thought: I won’t pretend that the approach to democratic inclusion for which I’ve advocated was built through conceptual analysis alone. It’s normative, all the way down. It explicitly derives its force from a substantive appeal to what lies at the core of our ideal of democracy. I recognize, of course, that there will always be difficult tradeoffs between the realization of this democratic ideal and other important values, such as shared identity, culture, membership, or history. I also recognize that, even in our global era, there are practical constraints on the institutional forms that democracy may take, absent the protections and supports that sovereign states provide. What I am arguing, simply, is that insofar as collective decision making instantiates relationships of domination and usurpation – within and across existing borders – then those affected have solid democratic grounds to demand to be included. This, I hope, is something that everyone can agree upon.
A key task of democratic theory in an age of global interdependence is to retrieve and reconstruct core concepts and normative principles from the long history of democratic thought and practice. The need for reconstruction arises from the fact that democratic theory in the modern period developed primarily as an account of the political legitimacy of territorially bounded sovereign states. Many of the defining principles of democratic legitimacy, such as the consent of the governed and equal rights under law, have long carried unquestioned presuppositions about the territorial boundedness of democratic political orders. Although these principles provide potent standards for evaluating the legitimacy of political orders, their built-in presupposition that the principles can only be realized within territorially bounded states makes them less useful for criticizing, resisting, and transforming forms of political and economic power that exceed the boundaries of states.
Recent work in democratic theory has made significant progress in returning to central concepts in the history of democratic thought, reconstructing them so as to free them from their territorial presuppositions, and using them to gain critical purchase on the question of what it would mean to render existing global power relations more legitimate from a democratic point of view. Two principles of democratic legitimacy – the All-Affected Principle and the All-Subjected Principle (hereafter AAP and ASP) – stand out as especially important contributions to democratic theory in a global age. Both principles have deep roots in the history of Western political thought generally, and in the history of democratic thought in particular.
In this chapter, I argue that we can fruitfully historicize recent work on the AAP and the ASP as reconstructions of two distinct traditions in the history of democratic thought. The AAP, I suggest, reconstructs the intuition that legitimate government requires the rational consent of the governed, an idea that lies at the heart of the liberal tradition of democratic thought. The ASP, by contrast, is better understood as a reconstruction of the republican ideal of equal freedom under and through law. And yet useful as these concepts are for criticizing and reforming already constituted structures of power beyond the state, such as supranational institutions and transnational corporations, they fall short as criteria of democratic legitimacy because they lack a normative account of democratic agency. This shortcoming is twofold. First, the two principles become effective as instruments of democratic legitimacy only when they are taken up by democratic collective agents as principled grounds for resisting or overturning unjust or illegitimate sites of decision-making power. Advocacy for affected interests or subjected persons may produce more egalitarian outcomes, but it is not democratic unless advocates are accountable to those they claim to represent.1 Second, and more fundamentally for my purposes in this chapter, the democratic legitimacy failures of our age go well beyond the undemocratic character of existing institutional orders. The problem is not only that already constituted orders are undemocratic, but that in many key domains we lack any institutionalized capacity to address the urgent collective action problems we face as a consequence of globalization, such as climate change and rampant inequality. Addressing the democratic legitimacy failures of our age requires an account of how new political orders can be constituted in a democratically legitimate way.
Turning back to the history of democratic thought, we find that the doctrine of popular sovereignty was an important device by which to explain how democratically legitimate powers of binding collective decision can come into being. Popular sovereignty, however, is a doctrine tied at a deep conceptual level to the form of the territorially bounded modern state, and hence not useful for making sense of the possibility of democratic collective agency across borders. I turn to a different concept, that of constituent power, as an alternative resource for rethinking democratic agency in a way that liberates it from the territorial presuppositions embedded in the concept of popular sovereignty. Although constituent power and popular sovereignty are often linked tightly to one another in the history of democratic thought, I argue that this link is not unbreakable, drawing evidence from the history of the idea of constituent power from the medieval and early modern periods and from the thought of the French revolutionary thinker, Emmanuel Sieyès. Having reconstructed the idea of constituent power as a “deterritorialized” way of understanding democratic collective agency, in the chapter’s conclusion I reflect briefly on the relationship between the AAP, the ASP, and constituent power as jointly necessary principles of democratic legitimacy.
Deterritorializing Consent: The All-Affected Principle
The AAP expresses the common intuition that “individuals should be able to influence decisions that affect them.”2 Stated in such an abstract and general way, the principle is insufficient as a standard for evaluating decisions, since virtually every action has some effect on others, and it would be an unreasonable constraint on individual autonomy if we had to woo the consent of every actually and potentially affected other before acting.3 Democratic theorists have been refining the principle so that it can serve as a defensible standard for establishing and evaluating mechanisms for holding a wide variety of collective agents (state and nonstate, public and private) responsible for the significant and enduring effects of their decisions on others.4 Taken together, these arguments constitute an advance in democratic theory in an age of heightened global interdependence because they let go of the assumptions embedded in earlier formulations of the principle: that territorial states were the appropriate context for its application, and citizens of such states were the appropriate bearers of entitlements to have their interests taken into account in decision-making processes. As Ian Shapiro argues, “[t]he causal principle of affected interest suggests that ideally the structure of decision rules should follow the contours of power relationships, not that of memberships or citizenships: if you are affected by the results, you are presumptively entitled to a say.”5
To my knowledge, no one has yet written a conceptual history of the AAP. Nonetheless, some scholars have marked out some of the starting points and pivotal moments in the history of this idea. As Melissa Lane notes in her chapter for this volume, it makes sense to trace the idea back to a Roman law precept compiled as part of the Justinian civil code: quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur, “What touches all similarly must be approved by all.”6 Gaines Post has chronicled the evolution of quod omnes tangit from a principle of private law to a procedural principle of public law in the medieval period, showing that it gradually became a procedural principle of consent and a secular source of legitimate political authority.7 By the fourteenth century the principle was explicitly linked to the legitimacy of taxation and to the claims for representation in conciliar, administrative, and judicial proceedings.8 It became a key tenet of reform in the age of democratic revolutions, as in the American revolutionary slogan, “No taxation without representation.” And from there, it is not difficult to see the connection to interest-group pluralist theories of democracy, in which the equitable representation of potentially conflicting interests becomes a defining criterion of democratic legitimacy.9
Read in this way, the AAP captures the normative core of the liberal tradition of democratic thought, in which democratic institutions, together with basic civil and political rights, are seen as instrumentally valuable for the protection of fundamental interests (rather than as intrinsically valuable). Scholars have recently adapted and amended the principle so that it can function as an instrument for evaluating, criticizing, and reforming governance institutions in the global age. As Sofia Näsström has argued, the AAP “has done much work to detach the ideal of democracy from its conceptual reliance on the nation state.”10
Deterritorializing Equal Freedom under the Law: The All-Subjected Principle
Some democratic theorists have argued that the ASP is a better way to conceptualize democratic legitimacy in the global age than the AAP, and we can trace a similar project of retrieval and reconstruction in their work. Arguing that the AAP is too indeterminate to serve as a stand-alone criterion of democratically legitimate governance,11 these theorists turn to the ASP for greater specificity in identifying the group of persons who should be empowered with civil and/or political rights in relation to an order of rule.
The normative core of the ASP is that a coercive order of rule is legitimate only if it recognizes and secures the status of all subject to it as free and equal persons.12 As Nancy Fraser states,
What turns a collection of people into fellow subjects of justice is neither shared citizenship or nationality, nor common possession of abstract personhood, nor the sheer fact of causal interdependence, but rather their joint subjection to a structure of governance that sets the ground rules that govern their interaction. For any such governance structure, the all subjected principle matches the scope of moral concern to that of subjection.13
Because there are cross-border, suprastate and transnational configurations of political power, the demos, read as the people subject to coercive power, can also be understood to exceed the boundaries of citizenship within a territorial state. On one side, the ASP prescribes that non-citizens subject to the coercive authority of states also be recognized as bearers of basic rights against domination that states have a duty to realize and protect.14 From another angle, the ASP seeks to recognize non-state forms of institutionalized power as bearing a duty to recognize and protect the rights against domination of those who are subject to them.15
As with the AAP, different contemporary theorists have offered different interpretations of the ASP. Here, I highlight two, one wide and one narrow, to suggest that while they have in common a reconstruction of the normative core of the republican tradition of democratic thought, each retrieves a different strand of republicanism in order to render it usable for thinking about democracy in an era of globalization. On the wide reading of the ASP, it retrieves the idea of democratic freedom as collective self-legislation. On the narrow reading, the ASP reconstructs the republican ideal of freedom as nondomination, an idea that underwrites but does not entail the wider view. On the wider view, democracy is intrinsically valuable because participation in the exercise of collective autonomy is constitutive of the individual autonomy of those subject to binding law. On the narrower view, democracy is instrumentally valuable because it empowers individuals to contest both public and private forms of domination.16
My purpose here is not to try to adjudicate between different interpretations of the ASP, but to suggest that it is illuminating to read the contrasting interpretations of the ASP as reworkings of different strands within republican traditions of thought that loosen them from their territorial presuppositions. Following Philip Pettit’s distinction between the “Italian-Atlantic” and “Franco-German” traditions of republicanism,17 we can read the narrow interpretation of the ASP as the retrieval of an element common to both traditions, whereas the wide interpretation retrieves an idea that is distinctive to the Franco-German tradition of republicanism. The core of the narrow interpretation of the ASP can be summed up as the principle of freedom as nondomination. The second can be summed up as the principle of freedom as self-legislation (auto-nomia) that underwrites the Rousseauean/Kantian tradition of popular sovereignty.
As Pettit has argued throughout the development of his neo-republican project, the origins of the idea of freedom as nondomination lie in Roman republican thought, and in particular the distinction between the free person (liber) and the slave (servus). To be a slave is to live according to the arbitrary will of a master, that is, under another’s rule or dominium; to be a free person is to be publicly recognized as an equal under law, that is, a citizen, and not subject to another’s will (civis).18 The purpose of republican legal order is to secure each citizen’s nondominated status. Law is not a will that stands over and against individuals’ wills as a master, but secures the equal freedom of all citizens through a mixed constitution and by protecting the contestatory powers of citizens so that they can defend themselves against both private and public domination.19 The narrow reading of the ASP, in which subjection to coercion generates a right to contest the order of law to which one is subject, loosens this tradition of freedom as nondomination from its longstanding presupposition that legal citizenship within a polity is what gives a person standing to contest the coercive power of its laws. Instead, buttressed by the idea of human rights, which recognizes all human beings as persons with standing to claim equality under the laws to which they are subject, the ASP extends the principle of freedom as nondomination to anyone who is subject to any coercive order. This expansion does not entail that all who are subjected to a legal order in any respect have a right to participate in the lawmaking process, but that they have a claim to contest any coercive law that unjustifiably restricts their freedom.
The wide interpretation of the ASP, in which being subject to coercive law generates a right to participate in the making of law as its equal co-author, ties back into a different tradition of republican thought in which Rousseau and Kant are key figures. In that tradition, freedom as nondomination is reinterpreted not only as independence from the arbitrary will of another, but as autonomy, that is, being the self-originating source of the law by which one is bound. Its locus classicus is Rousseau’s idea of moral freedom as stated in the Social Contract: “obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself.”20 This reflexive understanding of freedom-as-independence is read into the civic realm as the idea of collective autonomy, in which individuals’ obligation to obey law can be reconciled with individual autonomy just insofar as they participate as co-equal members of the self-legislating community. Law is not the imposition of an alien will, but a self-imposed restriction on individuals’ own arbitrary wills, aimed at securing the possibility of realizing collective goods that would be impossible to realize if individuals pursued only their separate interests. In Abizadeh’s reconstruction of the ASP as a principle of collective self-legislation, he strips away the deeply rooted presupposition that the self-governing demos must be bounded by common culture, nationhood, or historically settled territorial borders, arguing that since borders themselves are coercively enforced, those excluded by them are subject to the coercive power of the states concerned and of the state system as a whole. This idea transforms the ASP into a regulative ideal that can never be fully met in practice, but which is nonetheless analytically clear as a standard for evaluating any actually existing coercive order, including territorial borders.21
Deterritorializing Democratic Agency: Constituent Power
My purpose thus far has been to make explicit what contemporary theorists are doing when they debate and refine theoretical articulations of the AAP and the ASP as resources for rethinking the possibilities and criteria for democratic legitimacy under conditions of globalization. I have argued that we can understand their inquiries as efforts to rework familiar ideas from the long history of democratic thought in order to make them usable for analyzing and criticizing existing structures of political power, and for generating normative insights into how these structures might be rendered more legitimate from a democratic point of view. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the AAP and the ASP provide rich argumentative resources for identifying the democratic deficits of a wide range of contemporary global structures: immigration regimes,22 global governance institutions,23 international trade and its impact on labor,24 international philanthropy,25 climate change,26 and so on.
Taken together, these arguments make a strong case that the AAP and the ASP are valuable (and perhaps necessary) criteria of democratic legitimacy. It also makes sense, as several theorists have argued, to view them as complementary to one another rather than as rivals.27 But the question remains whether they are sufficient to ground a full or adequate account of what democratic legitimacy entails. I believe they are not. The AAP and the ASP provide valuable insights into the normative constraints that must be placed on the exercise of power in order for it to count as legitimate. But democracy requires more than constraints on the exercise of political power; it also requires the capacity to generate political power, that is, the capacity to produce binding (i.e. coercive) collective decisions aimed at advancing common interests. As Jane Mansbridge has argued, democratic theory and activism have long been preoccupied with the important task of resisting illegitimate forms of coercive power. Invaluable as this “resistance tradition” has been for making political power more legitimate by rendering it more democratically accountable, an almost exclusive emphasis on resistance has led to the underdevelopment of theories of democratically legitimate collective action.28 This neglect takes on a particular urgency under circumstances of globalization, when domestic and international or transnational capacities for collective action are less and less of a match for the complex problems that arise from increasing global interdependence and mutual affectedness.
Viewed from this angle, the AAP and the ASP are valuable reworkings of elements in the venerable resistance tradition of democratic theory, but offer limited resources for understanding the character and origins of democratically legitimate collective action. If the democratic deficits of a globalized world arise not only from the illegitimate use of coercive power, but also from the lack of collective agency, then the AAP and the ASP are not adequate for a thorough-going diagnosis of the demands of democratic legitimacy under circumstances of globalization.
In the history of democratic thought, the concept of popular sovereignty has performed important work as an account of democratically legitimate collective agency. It is perhaps for this reason that several contemporary theorists have characterized popular sovereignty as a principle of democratic legitimacy that stands in a complementary relationship to the AAP and/or the ASP.29 Yet in an age of globalization, where the cross-border effects of state decisions are increasingly visible, it is clear that the principle of popular sovereignty as a form of democratic agency at the scale of the state is not adequate to secure the democratic legitimacy of the state system as a whole. The AAP and the ASP offer criteria by which to clarify the external legitimacy constraints on the democratic agency that is realized through states whose internal legitimacy is grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty.
The idea of popular sovereignty, however, like the idea of democratic self-determination to which it bears close kinship,30 may be impossible to extricate from the presupposition that democratic collective agency can only be realized within territorially bounded political communities – if not states, then state-like jurisdictions that enjoy considerable autonomy in relation to other polities.31 It is for this reason that some theorists have argued against the idea that democracy is possible, or even conceivable, beyond the scale of the territorial state.32 Others have argued that if democracy is realizable beyond the scale of the state, it will be through a divided or multilevel form of popular sovereignty institutionalized through nested territorial jurisdictions, as may eventually be possible in the European Union.33 These reconstructions of popular sovereignty as a way of reconceiving democratic collective agency beyond the state remain tied to the presupposition that democratic agency can only be exercised by territorially bounded demoi. This supposition is based, in turn, on the idea that only a collectivity whose members see themselves as participants in a common, stable, durable, and substantial system of cooperation is capable of sustaining a project of collective self-legislation, and hence of democracy properly so-called.34
The idea that collective political agency in the form of self-legislation is possible only among people who see themselves as bound to one another in relations of interdependence or mutual affectedness into the foreseeable future carries a great deal of intuitive good sense. The question I wish to explore in the remainder of this chapter is whether it is possible to extricate this idea from the presupposition that shared occupancy of a determinate territory is a necessary presupposition of democratic collective agency. In other words, is the concept of popular sovereignty, read as the power of collective self-legislation of a territorially bounded demos, the only imaginable form of meaningfully democratic agency? Or is there a normative core to the idea of democratic agency expressed by the concept of popular sovereignty that it is possible to extricate and reconstruct in a manner that liberates it from its territorial presuppositions, much as the AAP reconstructs the normative core of quod omnes tangit and the ASP reconstructs the normative core of equal freedom under law?
I believe that there is in fact a normative core to the idea of popular sovereignty that can be retrieved and reconstructed in this way: the idea of constituent power, that is, the rightful authority that people have to freely associate with one another in jointly establishing the law-governed order that will regulate their relations with one another and through which they will generate binding collective decisions aimed at serving their common interests. Through much of the history of modern Western thought, the concept of popular sovereignty and that of constituent power have been read as nearly synonymous terms. Constituent power – the power to constitute an order of government, to create a constitution – is often read as the power that properly belongs to the popular sovereign as the ultimate authority on which legitimate order is based.
It would take a far more detailed historical treatment than is possible in a brief essay to trace the concepts of constituent power and popular sovereignty through the history of Western thought, let alone the complex relationship between them. Other scholars have done this work far more thoroughly than I can hope to do here.35 Instead, I will briefly sketch two moments in the history of the concept of constituent power to show that it is unquestionably possible to read it as independent of the concept of sovereignty, and hence of the concept of popular sovereignty. First, the concept of constituent power long antedated the concept of popular sovereignty, and indeed the concept of the sovereign state. Second, the modern thinker most strongly associated with the concept of constituent power, Emmanuel Sieyès, embraced it at the same time that he rejected the concept of sovereignty as having a proper place in his theory of political legitimacy.
Although the concept of constituent power is usually associated with the age of democratic revolutions, Daniel Lee has recently shown that the idea has much older roots in the history of European thought.36 Lee traces the evolution of the concept of constituent power from sixteenth-century figures such as Donellus and Brutus (who used the concept to ground a claim of the people’s authority over the king) back to the much older doctrine of lex regia, which dates back to late Roman thinkers. The fiction at the core of the lex regia was that the people of the Roman republic had transferred their legislative authority to the emperor;37 in the medieval period, the doctrine was mobilized again to make sense of the (de facto) authority of free cities to establish their own orders, free from interference from the Holy Roman Empire, kings, or lords. Here, the doctrine combined with the concept of a “free people” (populus liber) within Roman ius gentium, in which allies of the Roman empire were treated as having the right to govern themselves according to their own laws. Medieval jurists used these concepts to extend the logic of lex regia to all free peoples.38
For the purpose of retrieving and reconstructing the idea of constituent power as a way of conceptualizing democratic agency, it is worth highlighting two points from this quick sketch of a long history. First, the idea of constituent power as the foundation of democratic authority is not inextricably tied to the idea of the territorially bounded sovereign state. This is clear from the simple fact that the normative core of constituent power was expressed well before the emergence of the idea of the sovereign state, in the form of arguments on behalf of the right of free cities to govern themselves. Second, the history shows that the idea of “the people” that possesses the right of self-legislation is indeterminate; the concept of a populus liber was variously used to denote the people of the Roman republic, the free peoples in the Roman law of ius gentium, the citizens of medieval city-states, and, eventually, the people of the territorially bounded modern state.39 The character and composition of “the people” on whose behalf this potent idea has been mobilized across the centuries is not singularly identifiable with the people of the modern territorial state, and there is no reason in principle why the idea cannot be mobilized for new constructions of “peoplehood” in the twenty-first century. Although the concept of popular sovereignty is inextricably linked to the concept of the sovereign territorial state, the concept of constituent power is not.
The separability of the concept of constituent power from that of popular sovereignty is also evident from the thought of Sieyès, the person most often credited with distinguishing the constituent power of the people from the constituted authority of the state. According to Sieyès, the legitimacy of ordinary positive law rests on its having been promulgated in accordance with constitutional laws fixing the organization and powers of legislative and executive governance bodies. The legitimate authority of the constitution, in turn, issues from its consonance with the will of the people (or, in Sieyès’ term, “the nation”). Constitutional laws, he wrote, “are said to be fundamental, not in the sense that they can be independent of the national will, but because bodies that can exist and can act only by way of these laws cannot touch them. In each of its parts a constitution is not the work of a constituted power but a constituent power.”40 Sieyès’ theory of constituent power has a number of features that are problematic from the standpoint of a democratic theory committed to egalitarian inclusion.41 Nonetheless, two features of his argument stand out as useful resources for a contemporary reconstruction of constituent power as democratic agency. The first is that Sieyès explicitly distances the concept of constituent power from the concept of sovereignty, including popular sovereignty. The second is that although at points he does describe “the nation” as a quasi-natural and pre-political subject, a more nuanced reading of his text shows that what makes the demos as a potential collective agent is not a common history, culture, or language but a dense network of social and material interdependence that is the objective condition of possibility for the formation of a subjective sense of collective purpose and agency. For Sieyès, what transforms a latent or potential “nation” or “people” into a political agent is an act of representation through which a plurality of individuals can be reimagined as a unified collectivity capable of acting jointly toward their common good.
On the first point, Sieyès explicitly criticizes the concept of sovereignty because he regards it as tied to absolutism. The decision to form a constitutional order was a choice to live under a system of law that would secure the freedom of each, which on his view (as in the Roman republican tradition) depended upon a mixed constitution in which no element reigns supreme. “It is a mistake,” he argued, “to talk of the sovereignty of the people as if it had no bounds.”42 In a later writing, pace Schmitt’s interpretation, he rejects the political theology with which the concept of sovereignty is bound.43 As Lucia Rubinelli has recently argued, Sieyès “never relied on the notion of sovereignty to describe the principle of the people’s power,” and instead substituted the concept of constituent power for that of sovereignty.44
The significance of Sieyès’ rejection of sovereignty for this chapter’s project of retrieval and reconstruction is straightforward. These passages demonstrate that one can embrace the concept of constituent power while rejecting the absolutism and decisionism that is constitutive of many theories of sovereignty, including the most common readings of Hobbes and Rousseau and, certainly, Schmitt’s politico-theological account of popular sovereignty. These passages show clearly that for Sieyès the constituent power of “the people” did not entail that the will of the people was self-validating. Rather, a legitimate political order is always constrained by principles respecting the equal freedom of its individual members.
The second key point I wish to retrieve from Sieyès’ theory of constituent power is that his conception of the people as a collective agent is not best understood as pre-political. In the opening chapter of “What is the Third Estate?”45 Sieyès defines a nation not as a people defined by shared history, language, or culture but as “a body of associates living under a common law, represented by the same legislature, etc.” In other words, the people as a collective agent is itself constituted by its members’ joint decision to live together under a common order of law which they share a role in making. Sieyès’ description of the activities that make a society are explicitly materialist and based on his analysis of the social division of labor. The heart of Sieyès’ critique of the existing order is that the very people whose productive activities and relationships jointly create the conditions for a flourishing social life are excluded from a role in the political order under which they live.
Yet the objective reality of the interdependence and cooperative activities of individual members of society is not in itself sufficient to make them a political agent. Sieyès invites his readers to imagine a three-stage process by which the multitudinous participants in these common social and economic activities become a political unity capable of collective action. The first stage is simply the emergence of a will among “a more or less substantial number of isolated individuals seeking to unite.” “This fact alone,” he writes, “makes them a nation.” At this stage, it is the convergent wills of individuals who see the advantage of acting together that constitutes a collectivity who make their association itself the object of their work.46
The second stage is one of deliberation through which associates’ several individual wills are forged into a “common will.”47 Here Sieyès explicitly introduces the concept of power as something that is generated only through a process of common will formation:
[P]ower belongs to the public. Individual wills still lie at its origin and still make up its essential underlying elements. But taken separately, their power would be null. Power resides solely in the whole…. Without this unity of will, it would not be able to make itself a willing and acting whole. It is also certain that this whole has no rights that are not connected to the common will.48
The third stage in Sieyès’ account of the formation of collective agency is representation. For Sieyès, the formation of political agency should be understood as a part of the larger social division of labor. The inconvenience, inefficiency and, in a society with large numbers of people, the impracticability of assembling to form a common will through deliberation generates the need to “entrust” the common will “to the exercise of some of their number.”49 This trust, he emphasizes, does not mean that the community “divest[s] itself of the right to will,” and the appointed delegate has no authority to “alter the limits of the power with which it has been entrusted.” Yet the character of the common will is transformed by the shift from deliberation to representation: “it is no longer a real common will that acts, but a representative common will,” which can only ever be an incomplete and limited expression of the common will.50 In other words, the authority of the representative to act on behalf of the community is always qualified by the fact that there is a gap between what the members of the association truly want and the representation of their common will by their delegates. Because of this gap, the possibility remains open that the community, whose constituent power has set up the system of representation, may reclaim its authority if its current delegates have misinterpreted its will.
We find, then, in the locus classicus of the concept of constituent power, the basic elements of a methodologically and normatively individualist theory of group agency51 for a particular kind of group – one that seeks to bring into being, where it did not exist before, a law governed order that treats all who live under it as free and equal persons, over the longue durée.52 Sieyès’ theory provides the basic conceptual resources for separating democratic collective agency both from the concept of sovereignty and from the supposition that territory provides the relevant material underpinnings for the formation of a democratic collective agent.53 Rather, it is the coming-into-consciousness of ongoing relations of material interdependence that generates the first movement toward the formation of joint intentions to identify common interests and, through deliberation, forge a common will. This common will is not a general will in Rousseau’s sense, as it acknowledges the ongoing plurality of its constituent members. Sieyès’ theory also recognizes that in the moment of transition between the constituent power and the constituted power – the moment of representation – there is always some violence done to this plurality. The representation of the collective agent as a unity always leaves a remainder, which is why the constituent power is not extinguished by the creation of the constituted power, and why claims to represent “the people” must always remain open to contestation.54
Conclusion
I have argued that recent works aimed at specifying the AAP and the ASP as criteria of democratic legitimacy for a global age can be understood as endeavors to retrieve and reconstruct much older ideas in the history of democratic thought, liberating these ideas from democratic theory’s long-standing entanglement with the usually unexamined presupposition that democracy is possible only within territorially bounded forms of political community. The AAP and the ASP are potent rearticulations of normative principles that all forms of political power, and not only those centered in territorially bounded states, must meet if they are to claim even a modicum of democratic legitimacy. Any structure of power that does not satisfy these criteria fails to treat as equals those human beings who are affected by its decisions or subject to its coercive power. Since the equal moral worth of all persons as such is the sine qua non of any conception of democracy, no political order that fails these tests can validly claim to be legitimate from a democratic point of view.
Yet both the AAP and the ASP fall short of a thoroughgoing account of democratic legitimacy because both are focused on appropriate normative constraints on political power, and not on the democratically legitimate conditions under which power, understood as a capacity for binding collective decision, can emerge. I have suggested that both are reconstructions for a global age of elements in the long-standing resistance tradition of democratic theory, where the principal concern is to restrain the illegitimate exercise of political power. In the era of globalization, there has been a proliferation of forms of political and economic power that is not constrained to track all affected interests or the equal rights under law of all subjected. The AAP and the ASP provide useful analytical toolkits by which to diagnose these normative deficiencies of the current global order. They track the objective facts of the matter about whose interests are adversely affected and whose equal standing as a subject of lawful or unlawful subjection is being violated by contemporary arrangements of political power. But these principles operate, more or less, from a juridical point of view. They are addressed to the normative strengths or weaknesses of already constituted powers, but offer little insight into the injustices that result from the absence of collective decision-making capacity in those domains where a power vacuum not only reproduces an unjust status quo but, as Mansbridge emphasizes, amplifies the drift of the complex global system toward outcomes that are unquestionably disadvantageous for the vast majority of human (and non-human) beings.55 In order to understand the potentials for democratic legitimacy under conditions of globalization, we need, as well, a better understanding of the possibility of democratic agency which, like the AAP and the ASP, is unmoored from the presupposition that democracy is possible only within territorially bounded political communities. We need to understand how democratically legitimate forms of binding collective decision-making capacity can be generated in domains where it does not already exist.
Through this chapter’s provisional reconstruction of the idea of constituent power as democratic agency, I have sought to show that we need not hold onto the supposition that the powers of collective self-legislation are available only to territorially bounded political peoples. The democratic peoplehood of territorial states will undoubtedly be an important resource for democratic agency for some time to come, as the institutionalization of collective agency through elections, projects of constitution making, and the like is still concentrated at the level of the territorial state. Moreover, the citizen empowerments that are crucial to democratic mobilization and will formation – rights of expression, association, and participation – are now institutionalized only at the scale of the state, and these are crucial instruments for leveraging political influence at other scales of politics.
The link between democratic collective agency and the powers of territorial states is a historically contingent phenomenon, not written into the concept of democracy as the self-rule of the people. In principle, there are only two constraints on the formation of democratic collective agency. The first is that there are enduring objective conditions of social and material interdependence among the people. In the absence of lasting social and material conditions of interdependence, which Sieyès characterized in terms of a social division of labor, there is no clear reason why individuals should strive to forge an association united around common interests over a sufficiently long term to warrant the establishment of a durable order of democratic self-rule. In addition, there must be a subjective consciousness of the fact of interdependence potent enough to motivate diverse and dispersed individuals to form an association around their common interests and make these common interests a site of collective self-legislation. They must discursively represent, first to themselves as consociates in a shared process of material and social production, and later to others who are also implicated in this process, their character as participants in a common social project. This moment of discursive representation, the articulation of an imagined political relationship between a multitude of individual actors as parts of a larger social whole that can and should be made democratically legitimate, is a condition of possibility for the political representation of common interests and the constitution of new powers of binding collective decision.
The boundaries of “the people” as the collective subject of constituent power, then, are constrained but not determined by either territorial boundaries or the facticity of material relations of social interdependence. Objective conditions of interdependence form one limit of the possibility of constituent power as democratic agency. The history of the post-Westphalian system of territorially bounded states carries the consequence that material relations of interdependence are especially strong at the scale of the state. Legal regimes of property, labor, taxation, and redistribution remain concentrated at the scale of the state, and state policies around economic development continue to exert enormous influence over the future prospects of individuals within state jurisdictions. But the fact of globalization has generated material and social relations of interdependence that cross state boundaries, much as the colonial policies of European states historically crossed the boundaries of ethno-cultural peoplehood to generate global divisions of labor in which some classes but not others were represented in the decisions by which the benefits of economic codependence were distributed.
Historically, the idea of constituent power has commonly been associated with revolutionary moments and moments of constitutional founding. This is a mistake; such moments are important instances of constituent power, but they do not exhaust the category. Democratic agency as constituent power is much more common than revolutionary moments. It exists wherever individuals freely associate with the purpose of instituting an institutional order that is capable of generating binding collective decisions aimed at advancing common interests. Whether or not it succeeds in instituting a new order or reconstituting an existing one, the essence of constituent power is contained in the joint intention to form a democratically legitimate order.
In concluding, let me briefly return to the proposition, noted earlier, that we should understand basic principles of democratic legitimacy as complementary to one another rather than as rivals. Whereas other theorists have suggested that the AAP and/or the ASP should be understood as complementary to the principle of popular sovereignty, I want to suggest that we should read them as complementary to the principle of constituent power. Indeed, the AAP, ASP, and constituent power can be understood as jointly necessary and mutually constraining principles of democratic legitimacy. An element of constituent power is internal to the democratic bona fides of the AAP and the ASP. A decision-making process cannot take affected interests into account or preserve the equal freedom of those subject to its decisions unless those interests and persons are represented as having a valid claim within the process. The representation of interests and persons, in turn, is not democratic unless it reflects the self-understanding of the represented as to the interests they have at stake in a given process. If the interests of the affected or subjected are represented from a juridical point of view, based on an analysis of the objective facts in a given context of decision making, the resulting decision may be just but it cannot properly be called democratic. Conversely, an exercise of constituent power, aimed at creating institutions capable of generating binding collective decisions, is democratic to the extent that it treats as equals all persons who are included in the collectivity. However, democratic constituent power is not legitimate if it does not take into account the interests that are significantly affected by its exercise, or the claim to equal freedom of those who fall subject to the institutions it establishes, even if those interests or persons fall outside the boundaries of the collective agent. In other words, the AAP and the ASP can be read as side constraints on the legitimate exercise of constituent power.
The argument advanced in this chapter proceeds at a regrettable level of abstraction. Ideally, I would turn to some illustrative cases to show how this retrieval and reconstruction of the idea of constituent power enables us to see, as forms of democratic agency, political formations that have arisen across borders in the global era. The climate change movement is one instructive example: the cross-border mobilization of diverse people who understand themselves as bound to one another by the shared human condition of vulnerability to climate change, and act jointly toward the goal of instituting a global order of binding rules that would limit climate change and address its effects.56 Other examples include the transnational movement of Indigenous peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that their mobilization generated, and the transnational peasants’ movement, La Vía Campesina, which is organized democratically at local, state, regional, and global levels and has made significant progress toward the goal of ratifying a UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. For the moment, my hope is to have contributed to the larger project of reworking democratic theory for a global era through the retrieval and reconstruction of old ideas in the history of democratic thought.
This chapter explores what I see as some problems with the All-Affected Principle (AAP), and with the proposals for redrawing political boundaries that have been made on its basis. I define the AAP as holding that everyone affected by a decision should have a right to participate (e.g. through voting, or some other form of direct influence) in a procedure governing that decision. My construal is neutral as to how votes should be weighted, whether equally or proportionally to the degree to which the decision affects individuals’ interests. My definition of the AAP is narrower than some, yet I believe this narrowness is necessary to capture the putative connection between the AAP and democracy. While a broader reading of the AAP might suggest that all those affected should have their interests considered, be represented by an advocate, or have a chance to plead their case, those broader principles are not obviously democratic. A benevolent monarch might well consider his subjects’ interests, allow them advocates, or grant them opportunities to make a case. Still, the monarch’s subjects would be deprived of all power in the monarch’s political decision making. I therefore opt for the narrower construal.
The first part of the chapter asks whether there is a convincing philosophical justification for the AAP. The second part asks whether it is best understood as a substantive or procedural principle. The third investigates whether the AAP provides a useful way to approach boundary questions. Unlike the AAP’s defenders, I argue that the principle does little to realize individual or collective self-determination. Whatever one thinks of the AAP, it is important to acknowledge that it has significant costs for self-determination as a moral ideal.
I should say at the outset that I agree with the AAP’s defenders that salient issues facing the world today cry out for global regulation: climate change and refugee crises are two obvious examples. But I worry that the AAP provides an overly blunt and simple approach to these problems. To see why, we need a better grasp of the principle.
Justifying the AAP
Let me start by asking: What does it mean to be “affected?” I propose that one is affected by a decision if it has a causal impact (or perhaps a sufficiently important causal impact) on one’s interests (or perhaps sufficiently important interests). Yet it is often counterintuitive to include everyone whose interests are affected in making a decision.1 Consider Robert Nozick’s famous counterexample:
If four men propose marriage to a woman, her decision about whom, if any of them, to marry importantly affects each of the lives of those four persons, her own life, and the lives of any other persons wishing to marry one of these four men, and so on. Would anyone propose, even limiting the group to include only the primary parties, that all five persons vote to decide whom she should marry?2
Proponents of the AAP have tried various strategies to deal with this “overinclusiveness” worry. Yet limiting relevant “affected interests” to self-determination and self-development (as does Warren, this volume) does not seem to avoid Nozick’s critique: surely one has a self-development interest in being able to marry one’s beloved. Nor does it help to adopt the proportionality interpretation of the AAP (favored by Gray and Warren, this volume).3 Since my marriage has a greater impact on my interests than those of others, perhaps we could give me the greatest say over this decision, and a lesser say to other interested parties, such as my suitors, parents, and friends. But is it really plausible that these others should have any say at all?4 To be sure, even if the decision is mine to make, I have a moral obligation to consider my suitors’ interests, and not to gratuitously harm them – e.g. I should express my decision in a way that is sensitive to their feelings. But I need not grant them any say in my decision making.
The lesson of Nozick’s example is that sometimes “ways of importantly affecting the lives of others are within the rights of the affecter.”5 Most of us believe that an individual’s personal autonomy rights grant them an important domain of choice regarding their own life, including – besides their right to decide whom to marry – rights of free expression, freedom of religion, and free choice of occupation. People are owed some range of options within which to make choices that realize their own personal self-determination, even when these choices affect others. Self-determination is not infinite, of course; it is limited by duties of justice. But within the limits of my self-determination rights, once those are properly specified, it is I, and not anyone else, who has a claim to decide.
In response to this concern, one might exclude personal autonomy rights from the domain of the AAP. When some individual has a personal autonomy right over a choice, on this view, the fact that outsiders’ interests might be affected does not entitle them to any say. Notice, however, that Nozick’s worry seems to extend beyond individuals to associations and organizations. For example, in 2016, Harvard University rejected 35,315 applicants. This decision certainly affected their important interests. Should these applicants have a say in Harvard’s admissions policies? It seems to me – by analogy to the personal autonomy case – that this is a choice Harvard alone has a right to make, in spite of its effects on outsiders’ interests. Since the number of rejected applicants is larger than the number of current Harvard University students and faculty, were they to be included in Harvard’s decisional processes, then, given their strong preferences to attend the university, they would likely have to be admitted. And were that to happen, Harvard’s educational purposes would become very difficult to attain.
Of course, like personal autonomy rights, the shape and scope of organizations’ decisional rights are limited by duties of justice. That is the reason why Harvard cannot deny admission to (among others) African American, Jewish, or female applicants on grounds of race, religion, or sex. All citizens have an important claim of justice to a fair opportunity for higher education, and excluding them on discriminatory grounds is not essential to the university’s attainment of its educational purposes. But though its decisional rights are limited by constraints of justice, within its rights, Harvard has a claim to determine which applicants to take, without granting them a say, even when the decision importantly affects their interests.
One might respond here by further limiting the AAP, holding that when either an individual or an organization has an autonomy right to make a decision, affected nonmembers lack any claim to participate in making that decision. It is worth noting that some adherents of the AAP reject this response. They argue that firms, universities, and churches ought to be democratically organized and to include all those whose interests they affect (see Gould, this volume).6 On this interpretation, the AAP becomes a radical principle. Most people do not think there is any nonnegotiable demand for democratic inclusion and decision making in all associational contexts.
I believe we should reject this radical interpretation. A just society should leave appropriate space for associations to have “a free and flourishing internal life.”7 Consider a limit case: should the nuclear family be democratically organized and include all those whose interests it affects? State pensioners and recipients of welfare benefits have an interest in my child’s future earnings. Must I grant them a say on whether they should take after-school piano lessons or learn computer programming? To require all affected outsiders to be included in the family’s decisions would undermine the goods the family makes possible for its members. This is not to say that outsiders’ interests are irrelevant. Yet the right way to respect these interests is to place justice-based limits on the family’s decisional power, drawing the boundaries of its autonomy rights in the appropriate way. Thus, the choice not to educate one’s child, or to bequeath them one’s large estate free from tax, is not one any family should have the right to make.
Suppose, then, that one accepts this further suggested limit to the AAP: both individuals and associations/organizations can have (limited) autonomy rights to make decisions without granting outsiders a say. The question then becomes: How much is left of the principle? Some authors postulate a category of “decisions in principle open to democratic adjudication,” exogenously defined, and hold that when it comes to those decisions, one has a claim to inclusion insofar as one’s interests are affected.8 But in light of our discussion, this response seems ad hoc. If a nonpolitical organization can have rights to make autonomous decisions when those decisions affect others’ interests, then why can’t a political organization have such rights as well? Suppose the Navajo Nation is considering whether to opt for English-only or Navajo language instruction in its elementary schools. Various nonmembers’ interests are at stake: the profits of textbook salesmen, the employment opportunities of English teachers. But I believe this decision is one for the Navajo Nation alone to make. If this is correct, then the work of determining who should be included in the demos is done not by the AAP, but rather by an independent account of individual and collective autonomy rights and the constraints that justice imposes on the shape and scope of those rights. A just institution should “build in” decisional permissions to facilitate individual and associational pursuits, “while defining their boundaries by general standards.”9 This is as true of a well-ordered global framework as it is of a domestic one.
One might object here that my argument merely shows that certain decisional permissions ought to be granted as a matter of substantive justice, if we are to secure important individual and associational interests at tolerable cost to other values. But who should have the authority to decide which permissions our basic structure should recognize? Perhaps everyone affected – not a bureau of technocrats, or some unelected judge – ought to decide. Someone could hold that the all-affected possess legitimate authority to determine the shape of the global basic structure, while simultaneously holding that they ought to recognize personal and collective autonomy rights. Some theorists have argued, for example, that a global democratic institution is required in order to legitimately demarcate the boundaries of the world’s constituent political units.10 On this view, as Abizadeh puts it, “the self-determination of differentiated democratic polities” should be viewed as “derivative of the self-determination of the ‘global demos’ as a whole”11 (italics in original).
It is true that the AAP might plausibly be construed as offering a theory of legitimate authority rather than a theory of substantive justice. Still, a convincing theory of legitimate authority needs to be constrained by some “core” elements of substantive justice, including basic autonomy rights. Legitimate authority cannot take a purely procedural form: decisions at odds with “core” justice requirements can undermine the authority of a democratic procedure altogether.12 These core requirements, in my view, include not only rights integral to the proper functioning of a democratic procedure itself – like freedom of political speech and association – but also other rights, like freedom of conscience, personal privacy, and the freedom to choose one’s occupation. Were a democracy to fail to recognize these autonomy rights, its citizens would have no reason to consider its verdicts binding.
Further, I believe the preconditions of democratic legitimacy extend to collective autonomy rights as well as personal ones. Were a higher-level demos (i.e. the US federal government, or a possible future global democracy of the all-affected) to decide that the Navajo Nation was not entitled to self-governance, forcibly merging its members into a wider polity against their will, I believe this decision would undercut the legitimacy of that higher-level demos. Members of the Navajo Nation would have no reason to see that verdict as binding on them. So even if the AAP is construed as a theory of legitimate authority, personal and collective autonomy rights may still constrain it.
Four Distinctions
The AAP is often invoked to support the view that we should aim for global democracy. The idea is that in the contemporary era the domain of affectedness has expanded, through global trade, investment, communication, and cross-border environmental impacts. These developments have displaced a prior equivalence between territorially based populations and the effects of political decisions that is often (in my view dubiously, given the history of global trade and colonialism) presumed to have obtained in earlier eras. To comply with the AAP, we must extend the reach of democracy over time and as circumstances allow, ultimately to the global level. Does global democratic enfranchisement indeed follow from the AAP?
It is helpful here to distinguish between two different construals of the AAP:
(1) Substantive Justification: when someone’s justice-related interests are affected by a decision, decision makers are required to take that interest into account (along with other affected interests), aiming for a fair balance of fulfillment of justice-related interests among all affected parties; and
(2) Procedural Justification: when someone’s justice-related interests are affected by a decision, that person should be provided with institutional influence (e.g. through a voting procedure) over that decision.
International interdependence clearly changes the scope of substantive justification, and this may give rise to justice constraints that should limit states’ decisions. I absolutely agree that when individuals and collectives exercise their autonomy rights, they are morally bound to consider the interests of those affected. Yet just about every moral view endorses (1), including those theories that limit themselves to negative duties not to violate others’ rights or to harm them in significant ways. Construed this way, the AAP does not say anything particularly novel. Most defenders of the AAP instead take it to imply (2): we have a duty to include the affected in an authoritative decision-making procedure. All affected interests should enjoy a say over the outcome.13
Why is procedural justification necessary? One thought is that a democracy of the all-affected is the institutional setup most likely to lead to a substantively justified outcome. (This is the traditional instrumentalist defense of democracy.) When individuals whose justice-related interests are affected by a decision are provided with mechanisms to represent and advocate for those interests, this is likely to promote a fairer balance of interest fulfillment. On this view, “making decisions democratically … is the best way to protect and promote people’s interests.”14
This is often a plausible view, but it is subject to important empirical preconditions. Democratic decision making only reliably leads to a substantively justified outcome when voters are able to gain good information about others’ interests, and when they are disposed to take those interests into account in voting. Suppose that factories in Peru emit pollutants blown downwind to Bolivia, affecting the well-being of people there.15 Many advocates of the AAP suggest that in situations like this, we ought to establish a democratic institution that can promulgate environmental policies binding both Peru and Bolivia, and that citizens of both countries should be given a vote in determining these policies. But is this the best way to promote a fair balance of interest fulfillment? It depends.
Ideally, the 30 million Peruvians would be informed about the impact of their downwind emissions on their 10 million Bolivian neighbors, and ideally they would care about these effects, voting for emissions limits even at some cost to their own prosperity. Suppose, however, that nearly all the Peruvians favor allowing their factories to pollute, at whatever cost to their neighbors, since the emitting industry is a “national” champion on which many jobs depend. In these circumstances, justification through a democratic procedure is unlikely to lead to a substantively justified outcome. A fairer balance of interest fulfillment might instead be secured by an institution (say, an international regulatory commission) that allowed for representation of affected interests and gave them a chance to contest or appeal its verdicts, but did not give them direct influence over the decision. Of course, it may well be possible to design a democratic mechanism that would do better than a simple majority vote. But the point is that whether democratic participation promotes a fair balance of substantive interest fulfillment in a given scenario is contingent. Where it does not, then from the point of view of substantive justification, we should prefer a procedure that does not grant the all-affected any say over the outcome.
Were we to institute a global democracy at present, I think the trade-off between substantive and procedural justification would be huge.16 In a domestic context, we rely on the media, personal, associational, and social ties, and shared educational institutions to gain some (imperfect) understanding of our compatriots’ interests. Of course, there is a global media and, increasingly, a global network of social and associational ties. But these networks are fragmented: they unify mainly elites, and they exclude large parts of the world entirely. Cultures, economic circumstances, and political values still vary much more widely across countries than within them. This means that it is hard for ordinary citizens of the Netherlands, say, to get a good grasp on the interests of people in the Central African Republic, and vice versa. Without denying that some subnetworks have established dense global ties, when we look at the world as a whole, diversity and lack of connectedness remain great, and our resources for bridging these gaps are not well developed. Similar worries could be raised about political motivation. Even where individuals have an understanding of distant others, they are likely to prioritize their own and their compatriots’ interests. So in the near term, we face contexts where, as Valentini puts it, “the preconditions for democracy to be successfully established at the global level are … missing.”17 Presently, a global democracy is not likely to lead to substantively justified outcomes.
Is that a reason not to aim for global democracy? One could argue that someday a reasonably just global democracy might become feasible, and it is worth putting into place the preconditions for that scenario by gradual steps.18 Perhaps global social movements should educate people around the world to develop solidarity with distant others and to establish better links across societies, which would unify masses as well as elites. I leave it open whether an instrumentally justified global democracy might become feasible in the future, and I do not rule out social movements that attempt to establish the preconditions for it. However, at any given moment, to make the instrumental case for global democracy, one must argue that it would produce more substantively justified outcomes than a nondemocratic institution would. In current circumstances, I doubt that this case can be made. I want to stress that I fully agree that global decision makers ought to be externally constrained to take into account the interests of those affected by transnational processes, e.g. not to impose significant harms on them. But I doubt that global democracy would be better at providing these constraints than would alternative, nondemocratic institutions, like international courts or regulatory bodies.
Are there other, noninstrumental reasons to work towards global democracy? Here we need some understanding of why democratic influence might be intrinsically important, apart from its effects on substantively justified outcomes. Of course, many people believe that even if a benevolent dictator or bureau of technocrats were to make substantively well-justified decisions in our behalf, there would still be an important objection to their rule. But what exactly is the nature of this objection, and does it apply to global decision making as strongly as it does in the domestic context?
Here there are two prominent arguments for democracy’s intrinsic value. The first – which I mention only to set aside – invokes public equality. It holds that to respect people as equals, it is not enough to merely to take their substantive interests into account. Instead, some institutional recognition of their equal status is required, and (at least in certain circumstances) this recognition should take the form of democratic enfranchisement. Disenfranchising people brands those excluded as inferior, fails to extend equal respect to their judgments amid disagreement, or fails to treat them as social equals.19 Whether the public equality argument would prescribe global democracy depends importantly on the nature of status inequalities at the global level, whether these inequalities are perceived as rendering some people publicly inferior to others, and finally whether granting all persons an equal say in a global democratic procedure is the best way of affirming their equal moral status. Though the public equality argument raises many interesting issues, I lack space to examine it here. For that reason, this chapter should not be seen as articulating an all-things-considered case against global democracy. I leave it open whether the demands of public equality might extend beyond the nation-state, in a way that demands the institution of global democratic procedures.
Instead, I take up a second argument for democracy’s intrinsic value: that granting people democratic influence over what affects them helps to realize a moral ideal of self-determination.20 I scrutinize the self-determination argument here because the AAP’s defenders often invoke it (for examples, see Gray, Warren, and Gould, this volume), and also because I myself believe that self-determination has considerable value. But I believe democratic voting procedures are neither necessary nor sufficient to realize self-determination. So the self-determination argument cannot support a clear obligation to pursue, over time, equal political influence at the global level. Instead, I will suggest that once we better understand the ideal of self-determination, we will see that global democracy is in significant tension with it.
Self-Determination, Democracy, Boundaries
The self-determination argument for democracy begins from the idea that each person has a fundamental interest in being the author of their own life. This interest is commonly thought to ground individual liberties, like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and the freedom to marry and form personal relationships. These liberties allow a person to express their evaluative judgments in their life-commitments. But government decisions also have an impact on the shape of a person’s life, profoundly affecting their natural and social environment in ways that pose a prima facie threat of domination. (Here I gloss over an important debate over what exactly it is about government decisions that threatens individuals’ autonomy. Is it the imposition of authoritative legal obligations? The state’s enforcement of directives, through threats or coercive sanctions? Or simply the causal impact that these decisions have on an individual’s ability to lead their life as they see fit? While this debate is important – and it is not clear to me that the AAP gets the best of it – for the purposes of this chapter, I shall assume that the AAP correctly describes the prima facie concern about domination.)
The self-determination argument then suggests that if a political subject is to be fully autonomous, the prima facie threat of domination from political decisions must be overcome. How is this to be accomplished? The answer is that, just like their life-commitments, the political decisions applied to an individual should somehow reflect their own judgments and choices. The final premise is that by granting people a right to participate in a democratic process, we enable them to be “authors” of the decisions under which they must live.21 In affording each citizen an opportunity to influence the state’s decisions, democracy neutralizes the threat that political rule poses to their autonomy, turning alien rule into self-rule. The argument can be extended to global democracy: since the decisions made by foreign states, corporations, and international organizations have consequential effects on people’s lives, to be fully autonomous, they must be given a right to participate in these decisions.
I agree with proponents of the self-determination argument that political decisions often pose a prima facie threat of domination. Yet while I agree that self-determination is an important value, I believe democratic voting procedures are neither necessary nor sufficient to secure it. Note here that I adopt a narrow definition of “democracy,” which refers to a procedure granting each person equal opportunity for influence: a procedure such as majority rule, or perhaps a lottery system.22 I argue that a shared commitment to collective political action is crucial to enabling self-determination: in the absence of shared commitment, democratic procedures have little significance; in its presence, they are not required.
Let me first explain why voting procedures are insufficient for self-determination. Recall the worry that individuals are not fully autonomous when they are substantially affected by decisions beyond their control. Yet it is not clear how global democratic procedures will solve this worry, since these procedures also would not afford individuals meaningful control over life-affecting decisions. Since 7 billion other citizens share voting power in a global democracy, whether or not decisions reflect my priorities and judgments will always be partly up to them. Indeed, they may impose their alien views on me, as happens whenever I am in the dissenting minority on some serious political question. Here, it seems, we are ruled by the global majority, “subject to the collective will of multiple others”; we do not rule ourselves.23
Thus, it seems impossible for global democracy to extend an autonomous individual control over decisions that affect them. Global citizens have only a minuscule, utterly negligible political influence, and this influence will not afford them the power to ensure that political decisions reflect their own judgments and choices. Further, in any global democracy, large numbers of people will still be outvoted, as the worry about tyranny of the majority illustrates, and these individuals will certainly see central features of their lives shaped by decisions they reject, including the possible overriding of local interests they regard as important. Given all this, in what sense does global democracy enable autonomous self-rule?
In general, individual autonomy is furthered by personal control over decisions, not by an infinitesimal share of collective control. Suppose you are out to dinner with a large group of friends. Are you more autonomous if the group takes a majority vote to decide what you will order, or if you get to choose your meal for yourself? It seems that you are autonomous only in the second case.24 Only then can you ensure that the meal you will eat will robustly reflect your own judgments about what meal would be best.
Given this line of thought, one might be tempted to conclude that self-determination is simply an illusory political ideal: political decisions cannot be authored by the entire group of people subject to them. I do not accept this conclusion. Instead, I believe self-determination is a realistic and valuable ideal. But I do think these reflections show that democratic voting plays little role in safeguarding self-determination.
In response, I propose to conceive self-determination somewhat differently. I hold that an individual is self-determining when they are governed on the basis of values and priorities that they in some way share. Of course, no individual’s personal priorities can be mirrored in each and every political decision, but there is a second-order sense in which an individual’s priorities are often reflected in group decisions – namely, when they share a commitment to a valued political enterprise and to certain shared policies by which they believe that enterprise should be structured. A commitment to participating in collective political action, on this view, is very important in enabling self-determination.
Consider a small-scale example, say, a partnership running a joint venture together. Often, in the context of such cooperative activities, a group develops shared commitments about how their enterprise should go. This does not mean that the participants converge in all their first-order judgments. Still, even when they do not converge, partners are often able to generate shared commitments – not reducible to their own judgments – about how their joint venture should be run. These commitments frequently emerge as compromises in the face of disagreement or bargaining about how the group should structure their enterprise. For example, a group might form a shared commitment to certain methods of making decisions, such as majority voting after public discussion, or to certain higher-order ideals or values.25
Participants can freely accept their group’s commitments, and the outcomes that result, even when these outcomes diverge from their first-order judgments. Here, the participant is perfectly autonomous when they comply with the group’s decisions. To take an example: while I often disagree with my colleagues about whom to hire, I prefer that we make our own hiring decisions together, according to our accepted consultation procedures, even though that means accepting some decisions with which I disagree. Indeed, I would consider myself disrespected if the dean overruled our collective decision, even when the result was to impose my preferred candidate. Though my colleagues’ decisions do not always correspond to my first-order preferences, there is still an important, second-order sense in which my priorities are reflected in these decisions. I share a commitment to a valued cooperative enterprise together with these colleagues, and to certain shared policies by which I believe our enterprise should be governed. If this is correct, then my interest in self-determination can be fulfilled even when I am subjected to decisions that I do not personally control and with which I may disagree, so long as I value my participation in the collective venture and endorse the group’s higher-order values and procedures. Though I may not endorse every outcome, I am governed by institutions that I view as appropriate.
When a group of citizens share commitments of this kind, I will say that they share a political will. A shared political will is an interlocking structure of joint intentions among individuals to cooperate together in a political enterprise and to endorse higher-order policies as to how their enterprise should run. Collective self-determination, as I understand it, requires a (robust) correspondence between citizens’ shared political will and their institutions, under conditions that enable their free deliberative reasoning.
On my view, it is a shared political will – not the existence of democratic voting procedures – that is essential for self-determination. Note that voting procedures say nothing about the composition of the demos ruled by those procedures, including whether it contains subordinated minorities. But the ideal of collective self-determination is not indifferent to the demos’s composition. Consider the following case:
Political Incorporation. In 1945, the Allies occupied Germany through a just use of force. Suppose that instead of restoring the territory to the German people, the US had annexed their zone of occupation, turning it into an additional state of the union. To legitimize this, US authorities conducted a referendum in the combined territory, in which Germans and Americans had equal votes, and a majority (composed almost entirely of Americans), voted in favor of annexation. Would this annexation have been legitimate?
I suggest that this annexation would not be legitimate. Majority voting procedures are not naturally authoritative independent of considerations about the constitution of the group ruled by those procedures, including whether that group contains unwillingly subjected minorities.26 Self-determination is not a purely procedural ideal, it is a normative theory of the conditions under which political power is consistent with the autonomy of those subject to it. These conditions are substantive, not just procedural; they include certain basic rights, as well as the institution of appropriate boundaries between political groups.
More controversially, I also hold that democratic voting procedures are not necessary for collective self-determination. Recall that I am adopting a narrow definition of “democracy” as a procedure that grants each person equal opportunity for influence. A broader definition of “democracy” refers to any system that ties legitimate political power to a process of shared deliberation among free and equal citizens.27 There is significant overlap between my account of self-determination and this broader democratic ideal. Since correspondence between a group’s shared will and their institutions is valuable only where citizens’ judgments are freely formed, my view stresses the protection of basic liberties of conscience, free expression, and free association, and the importance of deliberative public opinion.
While my account might be said to rest on broadly democratic values, I doubt that democracy in the narrow, procedural sense is necessary for self-determination. A particular group’s policy for self-governance might involve equal votes and majority rule, but it also might not. Participants may agree, under authentic deliberative conditions, that a particular individual – say, their monarch – is especially wise, virtuous, and good at interpreting the group’s shared commitments, and defer to their judgments day-to-day. So long as participants share commitments about how their joint venture should go, and so long as the monarch’s decisions count as reasonable elaborations of those commitments, then participants will be as self-determining under their monarch as they would be in a democracy. If this seems far-fetched, consider that many nonpolitical associations do exactly this. Many churches, schools, and businesses are governed by nondemocratic norms that their participants genuinely accept, and which protect their fundamental interests.
One might object here that to be self-determining, it is not enough for political institutions to reflect the authentic shared will of the population. Instead, that group must have the ability to control their institutions to serve their commitments, should they change their minds as to how they wish to be ruled. Voting procedures, it might be argued, are necessary to ensure this. I agree that there must be some way for the people to revoke authorization of their regime. But a range of different mechanisms might serve this purpose. Lockean rebellion seems antiquated and unreliable, but it might be sufficient in a society where the power of leaders depends heavily on the cooperation of the people and technologies of social coercion are undeveloped. Even under contemporary conditions, in states that possess armies and secret police, I believe it is possible for citizens to authorize a government that is not democratic – say, a constitutional monarchy – so long as there is some mechanism by which to initiate a process of constitutional reform, e.g. an amendment procedure.28 If this is so, elections and voting are not necessary to self-determination.
One might also wonder whether my argument implies that democratic voting is not a requirement of justice. I think the public equality argument explains why justice often demands democratic procedures: formally equal votes reinforce citizens’ equal social status. While I hold that voting procedures are insufficient to ensure self-rule, I agree that they enable a valuable recognition of citizens’ equal status, and this is an important reason for preferring them (see also Gray, Gould, and Warren, this volume). Still, a nondemocratic state can be legitimate – with a right to rule its population free from interference – even when its institutions are not fully just (say, because they fail to fully enable equal moral recognition). On my view, a state is legitimate if it protects its citizens’ basic rights and provides for their self-determination, even if this occurs through nondemocratic institutions. Such a state has a right not to be forced to become a democracy.
Thus, the ideal of self-determination, as I understand it, holds that it is important that political subjects see their demos as a cooperative enterprise that they value, and that they generally endorse its institutions, even when they disagree with particular decisions. This facilitates their political freedom; it gives them the ability to appropriately see themselves as governed in a way that reflects their own values and priorities, rather than being subjected, against their will, to hostile or dominating powers. So unlike the AAP, the ideal of collective self-determination suggests that political boundaries should be drawn so as to enable people to affirm their inclusion in a particular demos and to endorse the institutions that structure it.
It is natural to object here that however desirable shared political commitment may be, it is unachievable among territorially defined populations; there are always dissenters among us. While there is much to be said about this issue, I do not believe that self-determination requires that collective commitment be unanimous. Sometimes it is permissible to coerce dissenters who fail to share the commitments underwriting political institutions. One such case is where dissenters are alienated only because they hold gravely unjust political values. I believe these dissenters lack a claim to self-determination, because self-determination is conditioned upon a commitment to the principle of equal autonomy from which its value is derived. A second case is where there is no feasible institutional configuration that could accommodate dissenters’ priorities and still carry out morally mandatory state functions at reasonable cost. Here I appeal to the importantly territorial nature of our duties of justice; we cannot establish property and contractual rights, enforce those rights, and punish violators unless people who live in proximity and interact regularly are subject to common institutions. Lone dissenters therefore have a duty to accommodate to some feasible political scheme, and to compromise with their neighbors in order to do so. To claim self-determination, then, a group must be territorially organized and possess broadly representative practices.
Still, I believe the ideal of self-determination will often support (re)drawing political boundaries to allow groups to be governed by institutions that reflect their shared commitments. Here I have in mind groups (a) who have political commitments that are consistent with basic justice for others, (b) who possess or can create a territorially organized structure of representation, and (c) whose dissent can be feasibly addressed, at reasonable cost, by granting them separate institutions. Thus, self-determination favors decolonization over a wider metropole in the case of former subject peoples. It also grounds a preference for independent political institutions for Indigenous groups incorporated into settler states, and greater autonomy for persistently alienated minorities in e.g. Scotland, Catalonia, or Quebec.
The ideal of self-determination need not be predicated on the existence of prepolitical “peoples” marked out by characteristics – like language, shared culture, or common interests – that specially suit them for self-rule. I doubt that there is any such Archimedean point of view from which to delineate political peoples. Instead, on my view, a people is born only when its members engage in institutionalized political cooperation, and come to value that cooperation. Some structure of institutional representation is necessary to create groups with sufficient corporate agency to act as peoples. But this “people-forging” process can succeed or fail. Sometimes political institutions generate “uptake” among their constituents, who come to value their joint enterprise and to willingly support the institutions that govern it. But in other cases such “uptake” fails to occur, and subgroups remain persistently alienated, either because of a historical legacy of conflict or oppression, or because they share many distinctive political priorities, which go unrecognized by the majority. In this case, the ideal of self-determination may call on us to reconfigure political boundaries, to enable persistently alienated groups to be governed by institutions that better reflect their shared commitments.
Conclusion
Thus, the ideal of self-determination has implications for boundary drawing that are rather different from those suggested by defenders of the AAP; it suggests the continuing possibility of fission, rather than pressure toward global fusion. Because individuals have an important interest in seeing themselves as willing coauthors of the institutions that govern their lives, we ought to draw political boundaries, to the extent possible, to enable people to participate in cooperative enterprises that they identify with. In defining the people, we look to the patterns of affirmation and alienation that emerge as artifacts of our currently existing institutions. We then ask: Are there feasible institutional alternatives – consistent with maintaining a stable, minimally just structure of political authority – that would better realize self-determination for those who currently lack it? We delineate a new “people” – when we do – not because we are recognizing something that already independently exists, but because we have some reason to hope that a new institutional configuration will lessen alienation at reasonable cost. On this approach, the process of constituting the people is never finished, once and for all. The “people” is a mutable entity, and negotiating and renegotiating political boundaries is a process that we can expect to be ongoing.
I should stress here that self-determination is not an absolute right, but rather a moral claim that must be applied with due regard for circumstances, and it can be outweighed by competing concerns. In concrete cases, we will need to weigh the grievances of the persistently alienated against the countervailing risks to just institutions, including the potential for civil unrest, instability, ethnic conflict, or rights violations. I also do not hold that self-determination necessarily implies a right to a sovereign state; federalism, devolution, or internal autonomy may be appropriate vehicles for self-determination in many circumstances.
Yet if it is to avoid engendering pernicious alienation, a just global framework needs to make space for collective self-determination. We should extend groups the permission to form separate institutions and to order their affairs in accordance with their shared priorities, because this facilitates a valuable form of political freedom. As with the autonomy rights of individuals and associations, there are justice-based limits to self-determination: a demos is not entitled to make decisions that significantly harm others or threaten their essential rights. Transnational decisions that have these effects must be regulated. Yet global democracy is not the only – or the best – way to address these problems; international courts or oversight bodies – perhaps requiring proportionate representation from non-Western states – are another option. Self-determining peoples can also be required to form global institutions where their cooperation is essential to sustaining basic justice, e.g. by combatting climate change and ensuring that refugees receive a new home and protection for their human rights. These and other justice-duties will place limits on the demos’s autonomous decision-making power.
Still, securing basic justice for others is the only reason why a self-determining people ought to be forced to submit to the rule of global institutions. Since it is especially valuable for people to be ruled in a way that reflects their own priorities, global justice should “build in” permissions for collective self-determination, allowing groups to establish separate jurisdictions and granting them autonomy rights to make their own decisions, even where those decisions affect others’ interests (so long as they thereby violate no duties of justice). If this is correct, then it is not clear that the moral ideal of self-determination supports an obligation to pursue global democracy.
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