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Chapter 8 Representing Principles
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C H A P T E R 8 Representing Principles Aristotle conceived of democracy as a ruling partnership among relative equals.1 The ancient approach was to look for one, all-purpose epistemic virtue for the political domain. We lack a word in our vocabulary that picks out a distinctive political expertise—a teché for modern democracy. This is no accident. The model of an agency relationship gets its purchase from its ability to divide up cognitive labor—to permit knowledge specialization by political actors. You could spend all your life informing yourself about any given subdomain of the modern bureaucratic state. To avoid this overload, democratic citizens take out periodic loans. They transfer their decision-making authority to agents who bear their decisional costs, by contracting out some of their obligations. This drastically reduces the political reasoning that they must engage in on a daily basis. The freedom that this form of agency offers should not be downplayed. Our moral reasons for a division of deliberative labor are diverse. Representation is more than a strategy for reducing decisional costs. Mediating agents can reduce the risks of empirical and moral error. They can guard against attempts to prey on our psychological vulnerabilities . If we design the agency relationship between citizens and lawmakers in the right way, we can guard against our vulnerability to framing effects, self-bias, and political priming. Representative institutions are constituted by the inequalities that they impart. The motivation for creating and sustaining a principal-agency relationship—with all of its attendant risks—is to manage asymmetries in information. The ideal of a partnership among relative equals, I think, needs an update. For in what sense can contemporary citizens credibly think of themselves as democratic partners? What are the justified terms for this loaned power? On my view, we are equal coreasoners about the moral principles that bear upon the use of coercive state power. Our principles of justice guide reasoning about our political institutions. I argue for a distinctive agency relationship between citizens and lawmakers . My view reverses the standard approach to democratic representation . We shouldn’t assume that lawmakers represent their principals, and devote our theoretical efforts to identifying the right currency. This has led to a persistent disagreement between representing a citizenry’s actual or imagined preferences. Neither, I argue, offers us a justifiably democratic agency relationship. I approach the problem from the perch 194 • Chapter8 of a citizen who is liable for her decision making but realizes that she cannot possibly do it well.“It is not the job of the state and its institutions to replace me,” Barbara Herman writes; “it is just to do some of my moral work.”2 This citizen searches for an agency relationship that would allow some of her obligations to be contracted out. We can call this relationship Principled Representation. It holds that there is a moral reason to constrain law making—to assert our special standing in the legislative process. We have, on my view, the nonoptional authority to provide the moral principles that set our interactive terms. The first section assembles the materials of the theory from earlier chapters. I then distinguish two conceptions of practical authority over the next two sections. This helps us see precisely how a theory of democratic representation can assign citizens an ongoing role in basic structural reasoning. The next section tests the theory by exposing it to increasingly nonideal conditions. I present two arguments for my approach to representation. First, it simultaneously avoids what I call the command and council problems. I attempt to put a price on rival views of representation . The family of delegation views fails to offload enough decisionmaking authority, whereas trustee views offload too much authority. The second argument appeals to a conception of political equality that understands citizens as peers in reasoning about shared terms of interaction. Protected Principles A theory of democratic representation would fully specify the correct relationship between citizens and their lawmakers. It would form part of an account of democratic lawmaking, which would systematize the decision-making responsibilities of elected legislators charged with arriving at acceptable terms of association. Such a project can be developed at the macro- and microdemocratic levels. The systemic version considers how we can design or redesign institutions—electoral and governance—in ways that induce elected representatives to act in particular ways. This, of course, is the familiar way of setting the problem. We socially engineer political behavior through a complex set of incentive...