Democratic disenfranchisement: a relational account

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• democracy
• disenfranchisement
• recognition respect
• relational value
• second-personal claims

Acknowledgments

I thank Rainer Baubock, Adelin Dumitru, Annabelle Lever, Attilla Mraz, Andrei Poama, Vlad Terteleac, as well as audiences at the 2021 ECPR General Conference and the 2021 MANCEPT Workshops for comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Theorists advancing justifications of disenfranchisement usually take exclusion to be required by their accounts, but it is possible for disenfranchisement to be merely permissible and not necessary. Sometimes the distinction is explicitly drawn, as Lopez-Guerra (2012) and Mraz (2020) do when arguing that lack of full franchise capacity (in the former case) and lack of sufficient cognitive capacities (in the latter one) can only ground the permissibility of disenfranchisement, but other reasons need to be given in order to ground its requirement. By introducing the either/or qualification, I aim to cover both types of claims.

2 It is worth mentioning that the two most comprehensive accounts of democratic disenfranchisement (i.e. Beckman 2009; Lopez-Guerra 2014), which seek to address all the distinct strands of the disenfranchisement literature at once, are vulnerable to this challenge as well. First, Beckman’s contractualist account is explicitly open-ended: “[t]he contrast with other normative theories is that contractualism offers no template of relevant considerations. […] Contractualism shies away from any metric of ‘relevant reasons’ and allows for a broader spectrum of reasons to enter the picture” (Beckman 2009, 58). Thus, while contractualism may rule out some of the grounds of disenfranchisement or some of the countervailing reasons which qualify them, it does not ultimately give a general and determinate solution to the value conflict underlying disenfranchisement. Second, Lopez-Guerra’s (2014) approach is also explicitly value pluralist, in that it sometimes appeals to instrumentalist reasons (e.g. based on epistemic quality or the maintenance of political order) and at other times to proceduralist reasons (e.g. based on electoral integrity or on allocative justice), without an in-depth assessment of how such reasons cohere with one another and without attempting to provide any general rules of priority between them.

3 See Ziliotti (2020) for an overview.

4 The reason for drawing on the relational account is not solely to do with the operational necessity to focus on one particular conception of democratic value. Rather, it also stems from the difficulties which both instrumentalism and proceduralism seem, at least at first sight, to encounter in grounding the Inclusionary and/or Exclusionary Theses. While a more comprehensive analysis of this claim is unfeasible within the spatial constraints of this article, some brief remarks can be offered in support of it. First, instrumentalism does not guarantee that the fundamental value which is to be pursued through political decision-making, be it epistemic quality, justice, the maximization of the protection of people’s significant moral rights (Arneson 2003), or others would not be better pursued through non-democratic means, such as epistocracy or a mechanism which significantly overrepresents groups that would otherwise represent persistent minorities. If this is right, instrumentalism is not adequately equipped to justify the Inclusionary Thesis. Proceduralism suffers from the same problem, since it does not guarantee that the fundamental value which is intrinsic to political decision-making, be it equality, fairness or another one would not be better pursued through non-electoral means. For example, numerous political theorists have argued that a sortition mechanism is better able to satisfy political equality, because elections allow for very unequal chances of gaining the substantial political power associated with holding office – either due to unfair discrimination by voters, unequal economic resources between competitors, or unequal access to opportunities to develop the political skills required for a successful candidacy (e.g. Guerrero 2014; Malleson 2018; Abizadeh 2021). Additionally, the proceduralist approach does not seem to have the internal resources to vindicate the Exclusionary Thesis either, since the exclusion of some individuals from the franchise would by definition instantiate a regime of unequal political power, whose justification can only be found in values other than strict equality of political power.

5 While Beerbohm (2012, 43–44) does not appeal to respect as a core feature of how political relations should be shaped, he does briefly suggest that second-personal reasons, as described by Darwall, have normative purchase in showing how individuals standing in such relations can be wronged. As nothing in Beerbohm’s view seems to be incompatible with casting the appropriateness of political relations in terms of respect, I propose this mutual respect-based account as one possible way of specifying the general picture drawn by him. But I stress that this is not the only possible interpretation – for a different account see Kapelner’s (2022) recent proposal, which instead relies on the idea of mutual service.

6 With non-political examples serving only clarificatory purposes.

7 It might then be argued that the cosubjects who put forward an invalid Authorial Claim should not be bound by the same claim put forward by other cosubjects who can satisfy the Consideration Claim. But this seems implausible. As long as political decisions need to be taken within a community, those who are able to take everyone’s interests into account should be able to participate in the decision-making process, even though it’s reasonable to assume that the interests of cosubjects who do not have standing as coauthors should weigh heavier in the deliberations of coauthors, and that they are entitled to special protections in the face of established rules, protections which are not available to coauthors. In fact, the legal principle of excluding children and people with severe cognitive disabilities from criminal responsibility, either in full or in part, can be defended precisely on such considerations.

8 Of course, the consequence is that they now bear moral responsibility for the substantive character of their contributions to the collective decision, in a way which was impossible in the case of sortition.

9 Furthermore, unlike Kolodny (2014) and Bengtson (2022), but similar to Kapelner (2022), my relational account is not egalitarian since it does not morally require giving everyone equal consideration in one’s electoral decision-making process.

10 I am not claiming that there are no relationally-independent moral reasons to factor such interests into Ana and Andrew’s plans. For example, maybe they know that Alice works at a restaurant which is going through a tough time, giving them a moral reason to spend their money there.

11 An idea often missed by political philosophers arguing in favour of a duty to vote for the common good (e.g. Brennan 2011), and discussed more in-depth by Lever (2017).

12 For a related view, which distinguishes more thoroughly between different claims to inclusion we have in respect to our standing towards a political community see Baubock (2018, 18–54).

13 Together with a moral one, as I will suggest below.

14 Thereby continuing to advance a valid Consideration Claim.

15 See, however, Ramsay (2013) for a discussion on the deliberative challenges faced by imprisoned convicts and Marshall (2018) for a rebuttal, as well as Lopez-Guerra (2014, 113–114) for a rejection of the epistemic case.

16 I thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point.

17 Perhaps only temporarily, since in time and in some cases rehabilitation could restore the damaged political relation.

18 And, in Lavi’s (2010, 426) phrasing, from the active membership of which she already excluded herself.

19 These arguments have usually been offered in discussions on enfranchising children through competency tests and, less frequently in the case of disenfranchising adults with severe intellectual disabilities, but can be extended to other cases as well.

20 See Beckman (2014a, 230–231) for a brief discussion of the relative importance of overexclusion and overinclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS–UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2019-0868, within PNCDI III.