Two Concepts of Agreement

Abstract

A central problem of democracy is the aggregation of divergent individual inputs into overall collective decisions.Social-choice-theoretic impossibility results famously demonstrate the intractability of a large class of such aggregation problems.This paper develops a taxonomy of two concepts of agreement, agreement at a substantive level and agreement at a meta-level, and discusses the escape-routes these concepts open up from the impossibility problems of social choice.Specifically, two contexts of democratic aggregation are addressed: first, the familiar context of preferences, and second, the largely unexplored context of sets of judgments over multiple interconnected propositions.Drawing on some recent developments in social choice theory and democratic theory, I will defend the view that, when agreement is conceptualized in democratic theory and when it is sought in democratic practice, more emphasis should be placed on agreement at a meta-level than is commonly done.Finally, I will address the more general question to what extent it is acceptable for the stability of institutions for democratic aggregation to be dependent on specific empirical contingencies.

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