Abstract
This article develops an account of political legitimacy based on the articulation of a social choice theoretic framework with the idea of public reason. I pursue two related goals. First, I characterize in detail what I call the Ideal Two-Tier Social Choice Model of Politics in conjunction with the idea of public reason. Second, I explore the implications of this model, when it is assumed that decision rules are among the constitutive features of the social alternatives on which individuals have preferences. The choice of the decision rule cannot be made independently of considerations regarding the likelihood that individuals will vote based on political judgments that are not publicly justified. The result is an account of political legitimacy according to which only “elitist” decision rules are amenable to public justification. Some of them are plainly compatible with liberal democracies as they currently exist. Others are however more naturally associated with the concept of epistocracy.
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Notes
What Riker calls “populism” should not be confused with the meaning of this word as it is nowadays used to characterize some political movements and ideas in Western liberal democracies, though some connections could probably be made. Within political science, Patty and Penn (2014) is a recent and balanced attempt to qualify Riker’s view by developing an account of political legitimacy acknowledging the results of social choice theory. However, this account is not a social choice theoretic one properly speaking and therefore follows a different path than the one I shall take here.
See Chirat (2022) for an insightful discussion of the market/democracy analogy in economics.
The political/ethical distinction that I am making here echoes a long-lasting controversy in social choice theory and welfare economics about the implications of the former for the relevance of the latter. From the outset, Arrow argued that his impossibility result also applied to the so-called “Bergson-Samuelson” social welfare functions. On the other hand, Bergson, Samuelson, and other welfare economists maintained that, as the two kinds of social welfare functions (the Arrowian and the Bergsonian ones) were not concerned with the same domains of choice, Arrow’s “political mathematics” had no bearing on how welfare economists represent ethical judgments on market outcomes. For an early attempt to settle the controversy, see Pollak (1979). Fleurbaey and Mongin (2005) provide an assessment essentially in favor of the welfare economists, while downplaying in part the relevance of the political/ethical distinction. See also Igersheim (2019) for an historical account of the controversy.
What I call ethical social choice theory is sometimes presented as a competitor to the social contract approach to justice and equity issues, e.g., Sen (2009).
This is precisely at this point that Arrow makes the suggestion that his impossibility result also applies to the social welfare functions of welfare economics, sparking the controversy I am alluding to in footnote 3 above.
The TTM is normative because it makes a claim about the properties of the judgments to be aggregated. One may of course disagree that in a healthy democratic polity, people ought to vote based on their “social preferences.” In this paper, I am concerned with uncovering the implications of taking this normative model seriously for democracy.
The preferences of an agent i are single-peaked if and only the social states can be ordered along a line in such a way that if x is i’s preferred state, for any state z that is on the right or on the left side of x on the line, z is strictly lower in i’s ranking and, for any state y located between x and z on that line, we have \(x{\succ }_{i}y{\succ }_{i}z\), with \({\succ }_{i}\) the asymmetric and transitive relation of strict preference. Formally, single-peaked preferences are a restriction on the domain over which an Arrowian social welfare function is defined and thus correspond to a relaxation of the axiom of unrestricted domain.
The concept of (political) legitimacy is a contentious one. The rest of the discussion will proceed based on the following generic definition: a social decision is legitimate if and only it can be justifiably enforced through coercive means with respect to all members of the relevant population. Such a definition is agnostic on whether legitimacy exclusively depends on the procedure or is also responsive to the content of the social decision.
See also for instance Downs’s (1962) account of the role of public interest in a democracy. Downs suggests that voting behavior results from the articulation by citizens of their personal interests with their conception of the public interest. The view I shall defend based on the idea of public reason shares a lot with Downs’s account.
The literature on this issue has been growing fast recently. See for instance particular Gaus (2011), Thrasher and Vallier (2015; Kogelmann and Stich (2016); Kogelmann (2019); Chung, 2019, 2020a). See however Weithman (2011), Hadfield and Macedo (2012) and Quong (2010) for a defense of Rawls’s account.
See Anonymous for an account of interpersonal comparisons of goodness in a similar framework.
An anonymous referee has suggested an alternative definition more in line with Gaus’s (2012: 319) account of public justification. On this alternative definition, a social alternative x would be justified if it is ranked above the threshold of “blameless liberty” (i.e., a situation where no moral rule applies) by every social evaluation function in F*. The reason I prefer the definition given in the main text is twofold. First, Gaus is concerned with the justification of moral rules while I am more generally interested in the justification of social states. The notion of “blameless liberty” is harder to make sense of in this last case. Second, suppose that some state x is ranked above the threshold of blameless liberty by all social evaluation functions in F* but never first. Then, when comparing x with another social alternative y that is ranked first by at least one function F in F*, all members of the public will agree that F gives a reason to prefer y to x. More generally, a social state x that is not ranked first by any function in F* is always “defeated” by at least one other state that is preferred by at least one function in F* in the sense that there is always a reason to prefer an alternative state y to x. Note however that the main point made in the paper remains valid if we opt for the alternative definition. The choice between the two definitions is therefore more a matter of convenience than substance here.
See Taylor (2005: 23) for a formal definition of oligarchic rules, as well as other voting rules. Note that one of the proofs of Arrow’s theorem precisely consists in showing that, under the conditions imposed by Arrow, the existence of a decisive group of voters entails the existence of a dictator – the impossibility indeed follows from the fact that the set of voters is such a group.
See Kugelberg (2022) who argues that this more particularly creates troubles for “public reason proceduralism.”
This applies to the criteria one may want to impose to social evaluation functions and political decision rules, but also to their informational basis. For instance, while it may be legitimate to license or even to require interpersonal comparisons of utility for the former, there are reasons to consider that the latter should not depend on such comparisons in any form.
More than one characteristic can refer to a decision rule if we allow for several orders of decision rules, i.e., higher-order decisions rules that select lower-order decision rules. The idea Arrow is hinting at is then that there should be as many orders of decision rules as needed to reach unanimity at some level. Arrow (1963: 90) suggests that such a unanimous agreement is “implicit in every stable political structure.” In contrast, following convergence public reason theorists like Gaus (2012), I do not think that such unanimity is required to establish the legitimacy of social choices. Because of that, it does not add anything to the analysis to allow for decision rules of different orders.
Note that Kogelmann (2017) does not consider the case where preferences are also defined over decision rules. But the indeterminacy problem he identifies is of the same nature: the more people’s preferences are diverse (whether they order or not decision rules), the less likely are the conditions for an agreement over a decision rule to be met.
This result holds for the single-peaked restriction, but the single-peaked restriction and the never-worse restriction are actually equivalent.
The trivial case is of course the one where X has three components and one (or two) of them is not ranked first by any decision rule \(F\in {\varvec{F}}^{\varvec{*}}\). In general, never-worst is satisfied if a social alternative is ranked among the two best by every member of the public – this is only a sufficient, not a necessary condition though.
Consider for instance Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2005) account of the transition from dictatorship to democracy and the converse. Their model has two types of players – the elites and the citizens – with marked different preferences over the political regime. Elites prefer a dictatorial regime as it permits to maintain a relatively low level of taxes while citizens have a preference for a democratic regime that empower them to raise the level of taxes.
This is actually what some proponents of an “epistemic” defense of democracy are assuming when they rely on mathematical theorems as Condorcet’s jury theorem. These theorems typically assume that there is a true answer to a problem to be found, or at least that answers can be objectively ordered according to their “truthiness.” Then, providing that additional assumptions are satisfied (such as the kind of dispersion of opinions around the “true” one or their independence), these theorems show that increasing the number of voters and/or the diversity of their opinions increase the likelihood that the social choice will be the correct one. Maybe could we imagine proving a variant of these theorems applying to the TTM where the social choice correctly reflects the public interest if and only if it selects a social alternative belonging to the set X*. This is a possibility that I cannot explore here.
Alternatively, if we consider that the “general will” is automatically publicly justified, then that means that the majority rule does not track it properly, at least in practice, given what we know of voters’ behavior.
A good example is given by the French “Convention citoyenne pour le climat” that, for one year, has gathered randomly chosen citizens. With the help of experts, these citizens had the task to produce propositions of law regarding climate and the ecological transition. The law “climat et résilience” enacted the 22 August 2021 is partially grounded on the propositions of the Convention.
This depends on whether we use of strong or weak definition of preferences over decision rules, as defined in Sect. 5. If the latter, social alternatives with democratic decision rules may be ranked above elitist ones and the social ordering still be publicly admissible.
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Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article has been presented in the INEM conference held in Venice in May 2023 and in the AFSE Conference held in Paris in June 2023. I thank the participants of these events for their comments, more particularly Herrade Igersheim for a fruitful discussion on some aspects of the paper.
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Hédoin, C. Public reason, democracy, and the ideal two-tier social choice model of politics. Const Polit Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09437-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09437-0