Abstract
Political egalitarians tend to defend equal distributions of voting power at specific times, as in ‘one election, one vote’. Appealing as it is, the principle seems incompatible with distributing power proportionally to the stakes voters have at different elections, as in ‘one stake, one vote’. This article argues that the tension above stems from the temporal scope ascribed to political equality, as at specific moments of democratic decision-making instead of over entire lives. More specifically, ascribing a lifetime view to political equality renders equality compatible with proportionality at different elections. I first show that storable votes differ from standard votes in their distinctive commitment to lifetime political equality. I then argue that storable voting schemes are compatible with three key reasons to value political equality: equal consideration of interests, relational equality, and non-domination. Finally, storable votes are also consistent with proportionality at specific times. I conclude that the neglected idea of lifetime political equality can, through storable votes, deliver proportionality without inequality.
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Notes
See e.g. Mckerlie 1989, 2012, p. 22; Holtug and Lippert-Rasmussen 2007). This is expressed in Thomas Nagel’s claim that ‘the subject of an egalitarian principle is not the distribution of particular rewards to individuals at some time, but the prospective quality of their lives as a whole’ (1995, p. 69). In John Rawls’s view that ‘the claims of those in each phase [of life] derive from how we would reasonably balance those claims once we viewed ourselves as living through all phases of life…’ (2001, p. 174), or in Ronald Dworkin’s specification of equality of resources ‘as a matter of [equal] resources over an entire life’ (2002, pp. 94–95).
Even those claiming that relational equality must limit distributive inequality do not defend distributive equality at all times (e.g. Schemmel 2011).
That is not to say that all forms of age discrimination are all permissible, and equally so. For instance, differential longevity can be a reason to prefer biases favouring the young over those favouring the elderly (e.g. Lazenby 2011).
Freedom to distribute power unequally across life is compatible with removing the freedom to do so equally, as with age-weighted voting rights. At least, if we assume that one is free to do what one is forced do to (Cohen 2011, p. 147). But since the conception I defend strives for age-group equality, it must also comprise the freedom to spread votes uniformly across life.
I assume in this article that the currency of political equality is opportunity or access to political influence rather than political influence as such. Many egalitarians share this assumption (Cohen, 2001; Kolodny 2014, Scanlon, 2018; Swift, 2006, p. 298). Arguably, what I shall say holds for equality of political influence as well. Yet, one difference is that the latter would likely impose more restrictions on the extent to which voters may choose to allocate votes across life.
That is assuming, as we should, that the short-lived can also not be compensated ex post (afterwards). On this, see Fleurbaey et al. (2014).
I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out. One solution is allowing voters to still cast their remaining votes after they die (e.g. Mulgan 2003), for instance, by bequeathing votes to others. Still, assuming it is better to cast votes alive rather than dead, the possibility of post-mortem voting should be seen as a complement to, rather than a substitute of, the initial storable voting grant.
The argument applies to all cases where the timing of resource distribution is at stake. For instance, it is why Van Parijs prefers a basic income to a lump-sum endowment of unconditional income early in life (1997, pp. 40–45).
As we shall see, it is possible to accommodate voting intensity within a single election. For instance, each voter can express the intensity of interests in different candidates within the same election, while all votes are equally important (e.g. Vargas 2016). My point is rather that expressing interests intensity for different elections contradicts electoral equality.
While I refer to interests throughout the article, the same can be said of preferences. Indeed, discussions of storable votes are often put in terms of preferences rather than interests. I only stick to ‘interests’ to avoid alienating those who consider it important to maintain the distinction, and because expressing ‘interests’ tends to, all else equal, have more normative weight than expressing ‘preferences’.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
One could indeed wonder whether relational egalitarians should (also) endorse a lifetime view. For a discussion and defence, see Lippert-Rasmussen (2018, pp. 130–135). I shall not assume that the lifetime view is included in the temporal scope of relational equality.
I assume that storable votes meet c); if people can choose whether to cast one vote or none and on which candidate to cast their single vote, they can also express their political interests more accurately, if they so wish.
The variant that I shall now explore might not fully coincide with the proposal by Polsner and Weyl (2015) because our focus is only on the quadratic aspect of the voting menu. Other elements of their proposal are more controversial. One is that voters may buy as many votes as they want (Polsner and Weyl 2015, pp. 30, 38), allowing the wealthy to buy more votes than the rest. The intuitive solution to this problem would be to assume that quadratic voting is instead attached to an artificial currency distributed equally to all (e.g. as considered in ibid., p. 45).
The distribution incentivises voting inequality on Election Day when 0 < x < 1, and the opposite is true when x is either zero or > 1.
I consider the proportionality version of the famous ‘all-affected principle’, where ‘power in any decision-making process should be proportional to individual stakes’ (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010, p. 138). As Angell and Huseby (2020, p. 378) note, proponents of the all-affected principle have not yet refuted this version. For a seminal discussion of the principle, see Goodin (2007).
Note that storable votes do not also have to reward those who abstain from voting. For instance, voters can be deducted one storable vote per election in which they abstain, possibly stimulating turnout more than standard ‘one person, one vote’ schemes.
Posner and Weyl (2017, p. 12) consider a different version of voting discounts to counter the inegalitarian effects of quadratic voting between the wealthy and the poor by making votes more expensive for the former than for the latter. On this, see also Laurence and Sher (2017). However, the voting discounts I consider here are more general and are supposed to attach to groups with higher electoral stakes, whoever they may be.
One of the anonymous reviewers points out that prices might turn out to be too high (or too low) for the number of votes circulating in society at a given time. Discounts can regulate these cases of voting inflation by changing the cost of each vote. It would ensure the stability of a political system, such that the number of votes circulating at a given point in time does not distort future democratic decisions.
For the distinction between good specific and all-things-considered perspective, see Brighouse and Swift (2006).
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Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to Axel Gosseries for his continuous support and crucial comments on successive drafts of this paper. For helpful written comments and discussion, I am also very thankful to two anonymous reviewers, Anca Gheaus, Kevin Hartmann, Refia Kaya, Louis Larue, Tim Meijers, Catarina Neves, Kieran Oberman, Serena Olsaretti, Hervé Pourtois, Hugo Rajão, Riccardo Spotorno, Pierre-Etienne Vandamme, Yannick Vanderborght, Philippe Van Parijs, and Andrew Williams. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the University of Minho, University of Bucharest, Pompeu Fabra University and at the University of Louvain. I acknowledge the financial support of the ARC research project ‘SAS’ Pensions research project (ARC No. 18-23-088, UCLouvain).
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This research was financially supported by the convention ARC No 18-23-088 (‘SAS’ Pensions research project, UCLouvain).
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Valente, M.S. Proportionality without Inequality: Defending Lifetime Political Equality through Storable Votes. Res Publica 28, 715–732 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-022-09547-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-022-09547-2
Keywords
- Equality
- Time
- Distributive justice
- Lifetime view
- Political equality