Recursos genéticos

provide a clear measure by which a political outcome can be reliably judged. In reality, it might be suspected that the clarity of the imperatives of a comprehensive doctrine will exert a significantly greater pull than the attractions of a political theory, deliberative democracy, which delivers outcomes the deliberative democratic credentials of which are unclear.

I do not mean to raise the bar too high. It is quite conceivable that holders of

comprehensive worldviews would be prepared to endorse a political theory because, from their standpoint, it provided a justification for state legitimacy notwithstanding a failure to provide consistently politically-legitimate outcomes.36 Holders of comprehensive worldviews with some sympathy for a political theory are likely to perceive two types of legitimacy. Particular outcomes will be legitimate or illegitimate. (In the case of

deliberative democracy, decisions will be more legitimate or less legitimate in so far as they are or are not the result of a proper process of deliberation.) Beyond that, adherents to comprehensive doctrines are likely to think in terms of a second-order legitimacy where, in the round, the decisions of a state are viewed as sufficiently legitimate (i.e. in quantity and quality) to legitimate the state. An overall account of legitimacy (i.e.

35 _{Dryzek p.29.}

36 _{Where there has been no agreement, that may have been due to the failure of a party or parties to act in}

keeping with deliberative democratic norms or it may be an instance of all (or most) parties acting appropriately but where some have not been persuaded by the reasons of others. In the latter case, where agreement is not reached, it should be noted that there might be some wider deliberative benefit. As Benhabib puts it:

[I]t is assumed that even when [moral and political dialogues fail to produce normative consensus] and we must resort to law to redraw the boundaries of co-existence, societies in which such multicultural dialogues take place in the public sphere will articulate a civic point of view and a civic perspective of ‘enlarged mentality’. The process of ‘giving good reasons in public’ will not only determine the legitimacy of the norms followed; it will enhance the civic virtues of

democratic citizenship by cultivating the habits of mind of public reasoning and exchange [Claims p.115].

second-order legitimacy) will not assume or demand that a state will, at all times, produce those outcomes or act in line with those procedures, which are the basis of its legitimacy. It is not credible to offer an account which has it that a state oscillates between legitimacy and illegitimacy from week to week depending on its performance as against the accepted standard of the political theory. There must be a ‘margin of grace’. Presumably, though, only a certain margin of grace will be acceptable to those who hold a particular

comprehensive view. There will come a point at which so few decisions and outcomes match the accepted standard of first-order legitimacy that those who adhere to a particular comprehensive worldview will no longer consider the state to have second-order

legitimacy. It is not easy to see, though, why holders of comprehensive worldviews should be prepared to credit a deliberatively-democratic system with such a second-order legitimacy because it will not be possible to arrive at a clear view as to the extent of the margin of grace that will be demanded of that comprehensive doctrine given the

difficulties in judging the first-order legitimacy of outcomes.

Holders of comprehensive worldviews are not merely going to be concerned about the likelihood that properly deliberatively democratic decisions will be forthcoming; they will be just as concerned, if not more so, about what happens when deliberative

democratic outcomes are not forthcoming. What sort of non-deliberative outcomes will be forthcoming? Will these be outcomes that are satisfactory from their perspective or will those who hold to that particular worldview always be ‘on the receiving end’ suffering decisions that conflict with their comprehensive doctrine?

Conclusion

Deliberative democracy cannot amount to a political theory. It fails as a procedural theory since deliberative democrats have not demonstrated that the deliberative process will be consistently fair. The inarticulate and the marginalised are unlikely to be able to take a proper part in the process. In any event, there are good reasons to think that proper deliberative outcomes will not be readily achievable. Further, deliberative democracy as a political theory is unlikely to be stable; holders of different comprehensive doctrines would be unlikely to endorse deliberative democracy because of uncertainties about the status and nature of the outcomes that would actually be delivered.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have been an exclusionary exercise – excluding the possibility of procedural and deliberative accounts of democracy as bases for a political theory of democracy. In chapter 6, I turn to instrumental accounts of democracy.

Chapter 6

Democracy as an Instrumental Theory

Thus far I have sought to show that there can be no credible procedural or intrinsic or deliberative political theory of democracy. If this position is persuasive, we are left with the possibility of an instrumental or outcome political theory of democracy.1 In this chapter, I make some preliminary observations about the kind of outcome theory that is most likely to function as a political theory before moving on to consider the outcome

1 _{I think that the distinction between procedural and instrumental defences of democracy should be quite}

clear. Vernon, though, offers an unusual distinction between different democratic theories. Vernon argues that the distinction is between ‘an “aggregative” conception, valuing democracy on the grounds that its outcomes give expression to voters’ demands and preferences’ and ‘a “procedural” conception, which values democracy as an expression, in its mode of operation, of some basic value, typically that of equality’ [Vernon p.3]. My approach, and I think it is the approach that most writers about democracy have in mind, elides Vernon’s two conceptions into one: the procedural account. An instrumental, outcome, theory is something different again. In truth, what Vernon calls a procedural theory comes close to being vacuous. He characterises such theories as embodying the idea that ‘[n]o judgments need be made about outcomes, […;] democracy is valuable because, by its very nature, it embodies equality’ [Ibid. p.4]. Presumably what Vernon has in mind is the thought that electoral democracy, in affording one vote of ostensibly equal weight to each citizen, makes an important declaratory statement about the value a democratic polity places upon each individual. But it is not clear that Vernon’s assertion makes sense: if democracy is valuable, what else can that mean other than democratic outcomes are, accordingly, judged to be valuable? How could one value democracy but not attribute value to democratic outcomes? To value democracy is to value its outcomes. By way of example: an outcome theory may value democracy because it generally produces good outcomes. The theory is unlikely to argue that each and every democratic outcome is right or valuable. Such a position would be incredible. But that does not mean that the some decisions are legitimate and some are not. The theory provides for legitimacy for all democratic decisions. It is not clear, in any event, that such a limited account of proceduralism really would express equality. Surely, there has to be some substance: there is only meaningful equality if something of value is divided equally. If there were frequent elections in a country but these were merely plebiscites on the colour of the tie that a despot would wear, that would be a very inadequate expression of equality. There needs to be a substantive account of what citizens get from democracy before it can be said that democracy meaningfully embodies anything. What Vernon calls his ‘aggregative’ conception is simply that aspect of a procedural theory that does seek to explain why the procedure is valuable: it seeks to explain why the process is fair and thus why the outcomes of such a process are valuable. There are, perhaps, two versions of the aggregative aspect of a procedural account which produce two quite different types of procedural theory. Perhaps the more orthodox one, which I have responded to in earlier chapters, has it that a decision is valuable if the process by which it was arrived at was properly democratic but recognises that such an outcome may not be a good outcome by the measure of some moral theory. Such dissonances between fair, legitimating, procedure and morally bad outcome can and do occur. Quite conceivably, a properly democratic outcome may be

illiberal. The more extreme, perhaps heterodox, view has it that a properly democratic outcome is thereby a good outcome. Some deliberative democrats appear to take this line. Young, for instance, writes ‘[w]hat counts as a just result is what participants would arrive at under ideal conditions of inclusion, equality, reasonableness and publicity’ [op. cit. p.31]. In other words, where there is what she understands to be a fully democratic process, the outcome will be necessarily just. What I class as an outcome theory, though,

benefits of democracy. Having considered the instrumental benefits of democracy, I ask whether an instrumental defence of democracy would allow democracy to function as a political theory. I conclude that if democracy is only justified because of its instrumental benefits, democracy cannot realistically function as a political theory.

It may be helpful to distinguish an orthodox outcome theory of democracy from a political outcome theory of democracy. An orthodox outcome theory of democracy might be defined in the following terms: such an outcome theory is a theory that a

democratic system in any polity will [or is more likely to] produce better outcomes than any non-democratic system in that polity over a reasonable period of time.2 The

inclusion of ‘over a reasonable period of time’, imprecise though it is, is necessary to take into account the fact that outcome theories will have to concede that democracies produce bad outcomes from time to time and so, at any one moment, it may be hard to maintain that the democracy is producing better outcomes. The claim of an orthodox outcome theory is that, over a sufficiently long period of time, average ‘performance’ will reveal that democracy is the best system of governance. Critically, democracy is only justified if it trumps all other alternative governmental systems.3 Although ‘better’ in such a