Democracy is the form of government in which citizens have an equal say in political decision-making. But what does this mean precisely? Having an equal say is often defined either in terms of equal power to influence political decision-making or in terms of appropriate consideration, i.e., as a matter of attributing appropriate deliberative weight to citizens’ judgement in political decision-making. In this paper I argue that both accounts are incomplete. I offer an alternative view according to which having an equal (...) say is having a say as an equal. That is, having an equal say is to be defined in terms of citizens’ occupying a role of political decision-makers, i.e., the political office of the democratic co-ruler of the polity, such that no citizen is a secondary or auxiliary decision-maker; they rule together as equals. This view aligns with the traditional understanding of democracy as rule by the people while providing a coherent conceptual framework for specifying what it means for democratic citizens to have an equal say which incorporates the strengths of alternative accounts and overcomes some of their challenges. (shrink)

Standard accounts of democratic disenfranchisement either start from a presumption of universal inclusion and justify electoral exclusions as deviations from the norm, or attempt to draw a demarcation line between justifiable inclusion and exclusion relying on membership in the political community. Even when successfully employed, each strategy only provides a partial view of disenfranchisement, which is usually targeted at just one or two groups of agents. In this article, I develop a generally applicable account of disenfranchisement, grounded in a respect-based (...) understanding of the relational value of democracy. This account simultaneously provides the normative basis for widespread enfranchisement under equal terms and for justified electoral exclusions. (shrink)

In her book Democracy and Truth: The Conflict between Political and Epistemic Virtues, Snjezana Prijic Samarzija advocates a stance that not only political, but also epistemic values are necessary for justification of democracy. Specifically, she mounts defense for one particular type of public deliberation on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I will discuss the following issue: What connects this type of public deliberation to the wider context of justification of democracy? I will attempt to explain why Prijic Samarzija's stance can (...) be understood as a version of deliberative epistemic instrumentalism and to discuss the role played by the public deliberation within this framework. (shrink)

Since field experiments in democratic politics influence citizens and the relationships among citizens, they are freighted with normative significance. Yet the distinctively democratic concerns that bear upon such field experiments have not yet been systematically examined. In this paper, we taxonomize such democratic concerns. Our goal is not to justify any of them, but rather to reveal their basic structure, so that they can be scrutinized at further length. We argue that field experiments could be democratically objectionable even if they (...) are not decisive – even if they do not swing the results of elections or other political decisions. Rather, if a class of campaign experiments is objectionable, one reason for this is that they undermine citizens’ equal standing. The ideal of equal standing affords nuanced judgments about the permissibility of field experiments in democratic politics. (shrink)