Elections are a core institution of representative democracy; as a matter of fact, they are often seen as its most democratic moment. Yet, even when they are believed to work properly, elections are increasingly charged with many deficiencies: They are a coarse-grained mechanism of accountability, too many citizens desert them, and those who do not are too incompetent to make rational and informed decisions. For some, elections are even inegalitarian, as they confine lay citizens to the role of selectors of their own rulers. None of these charges are entirely new (they never are). But many seem to share the belief that while some time ago elections worked decently enough, things have now gotten so worse that a serious reform, or even replacement, of the institution is called for.
This project in normative democratic theory identifies three challenges that scholars and intellectuals have raised against elections, meant as a democratic mechanism of officeholder selection, characterised by voluntary, universal and equal suffrage.
According to the first challenge, elections are too inclusive. As many Western philosophers before them, political scientists like Bryan Caplan (2007) and theorists like Jason Brennan (2016) decry citizens’ ineptitude at making rational and informed decisions. Brennan’s and others’ solution to this problem is to restrain universal suffrage by disenfranchising incompetent citizens, though the stringency of the epistemic requirements varies according to different scholars.
A second challenge goes in the opposite direction and takes elections to be too exclusionary, as turnout rates in most liberal democracies are in constant decline. Scholars like Lisa Hill (2002) and, more recently, Emilee Chapman (2022) and Kevin Elliot (2023) propose to compel attendance so as to force politicians to be accountable to the majority of citizens, rather than solely to the old, wealthy and educated ones who tend to vote.
A third challenge more radically denies elections any democratic status: Scholars like Hélène Landemore (2020) and public intellectuals like David Van Reybrouck (2016) consider elections inherently aristocratic and propose to replace them with the more democratic selection by lot. Aiming to respond to all three challenges, this project investigates whether elections have any democratic value and, if they do, the conditions at which they realise it.
Building on my previous MSCA research on the ethics of voting, I deploy an innovative, conjoint methodology. On the one hand, like other scholars, I intend to offer a top-down democratic justification of elections as a collective practice of selection-making that realises the values of political equality and popular control. On the other, I look at what voting means for the individual citizen, at the kind of power it allows them to exercise, and at the conditions that make its exercise democratic. This combined approach serves not only to rescue elections from the aforementioned three challenges, but to identify ways to improve the relation of justified trust between citizens and representatives that elections make possible.