Realism and Idealism in Democratic Theory

• In Event: Poster Session: Current Studies of LGBT Politics & Normative Political Theory
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Normative Political Theory

Abstract

Disagreement concerning democracy’s core conceptual features is a characteristic feature of democratic theory. This article shows that disagreement between two broad groups of democratic theorists regarding democracy’s conceptual content poses obstacles to democratic theory’s capacity to guide the reform of our existing political institutions. In the design and reform of our existing political world, these families of views point us in different and contradictory directions. This article also suggests a method of reconciling these contradictory approaches by situating them as conceptually prior and posterior, respectively, to the need for value reconciliation.

This article distinguishes what I call “realistic” and “idealistic” justifications of democracy on the basis of the independent sources of value that are used as a basis of justification. Characteristically idealistic justifications tend to locate democracy’s appeal in its propensity to promote a single value, while characteristically realistic justifications ground democracy’s appeal in its propensity to enable the (often partial) realization of multiple values. Both types of democratic theory are valuable, but I show that their action-guidance is necessarily incompatible. Because realistic theories set out multiple desiderata (e.g. Landa and Pevnick 2020), tradeoffs among them take the form of a production possibility frontier, to which the realistic theory is indifferent by stipulation. This is to say that such theories indicate ranges rather than ideal points, and provide indeterminate guidance about value reconciliation. By contrast, because idealistic theories ground democracy’s appeal in the achievement or approximation of a single value (e.g. Kolodny 2023), the guidance given by that value is precise and determinate. Taken together, these views produce incoherent or mutually exclusive action-guiding recommendations for the reform of non-ideal regimes.

It is possible to reconcile these contradictory views of democratic theory by situating them on opposite sides of a “reconciliation moment,” where the action guidance of a particular ideal is tempered by the need to reconcile it with other sources of value. While some might argue that in a pluralistic, modern setting the inevitability of value conflict renders ideal democratic justifications based on a single value redundant, I demur. Instead, I argue that value maximization across multiple values presupposes some understanding of each value’s particular role in democratic justification, insight which can only be obtained by considering these values in isolation from one another. In this way, idealistic democratic theory can perform a fundamentally evaluative function, providing the basic criteria for the comparative evaluation of candidate regimes with respect to the value in question (compare Wiens 2017). On the other side of the reconciliation moment, realistic democratic theory can help us evaluate the necessity of considering multiple values simultaneously, showing us the possibility frontier yielded by different combinations of value. This points the way to a synthesis of views on democratic justification.

By setting out the core conceptual difference between realistic and idealistic approaches to democratic theory, this article clarifies and provides a taxonomy for a literature that has recently proliferated (e.g. Landemore 2020, Arlen and Rossi 2020, Landa and Pevnick 2020, Viehoff 2021, Ingham 2021, Kolodny 2022, Bagg 2023, Kolodny 2023).

Author

• Matthew Draper, University of California San Diego