Cities and the Democratic Boundary Problem

• In Event: The Demos and the Boundary Problem

Abstract

Over a half-century ago, Robert Dahl, in his 1967 APSA presidential address, placed a good deal of hope for the future of democratic governance in the city. His hope that the city might be a site of democratic renewal and revitalization has been widely shared amongst political theorists and urban affairs scholars in the intervening decades. This paper considers the democratic potential of cities in light of some of the “boundary problem” literature in democratic theory. This literature has largely been used to assess the legitimacy of international sovereign boundaries, but has rarely been applied to jurisdictional boundaries within polities, where cities reside today.

With the boundary problem literature, democratic theory contains resources that press us toward ever larger polities: for some following John Dewey’s argument that the indirect consequences of associational life create democratic publics and other proponents of the “all-affected” principle, democracy seems to demand decision-making across borders, or perhaps ever larger polities. Democratic theory also contains resources that press us toward smaller democratic units, where face-to-face participatory political engagement, and the kind of interpersonal relationships and communitarian values that sustain them, remain a possibility, as they create the possibility of meaningful democratic cooperation. One response, common in recent democratic theory, is to try to balance these conflicting imperatives by identifying a goldilocks jurisdiction (often the local neighborhood, the city, or the metropolitan area) big enough to encompass many affected actors, but not too big. Rather choose a side, or identify a just-so jurisdiction that perfectly balances competing democratic desiderata, this paper will explore options for capturing the democratic value of both these democratic impulses in urban settings that does not rely on a singular jurisdictional answer. I will argue that the institutional power-sharing arrangements exist that can better capture the democratic value of both maximally incorporating effected parties and capturing the benefits of empowered communities, using some exemplary examples of power-sharing between state, regional, and local government that, despite their flaws, point toward a way to balance these seemingly conflictual democratic demands. Relatedly, I will argue that resistance to this kind of democratic design may stem from a misguided effort to mimic the conditions of the ideal of “sovereign” democracy and the illusion of control that comes with it, and democratic theorists have good reasons to be wary of this move. It will also explore a potential danger with distinct democratic downsides associated with this kind of approach, identified by some urban politics scholars as “jurisdictional proliferation”, and explore how this danger for robust urban democratic can be, if not wholly neutralized, minimized and contained.

Author

• David Watkins, University of Dayton