Is Democratic Leadership Possible?

Abstract

Leadership can baffle our ideal of democracy. If representatives track our preferences, actual or ideal, what room is left for them to pushback against a constituency? This has led some political theorists to conclude that the concept of democratic leadership is paradoxical. I challenge this view by constructing a theory that takes shared commitment as its principal ingredient. The Commitment Theory brings out what is morally distinctive about leadership in a representative democracy. In principle, democratic leadership recruits citizens as genuine partners in shared political activity. The account explains why leadership is taken to be a core property of a functioning democracy and, at the same time, a potential threat to the practice. It is then tested against cases of opinion formation, cue-taking, and frame manipulation. I conclude that the theory avoids dual objections: that it either overcounts or undercounts instances of democratic leadership.

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