4 DEMOCRACY, ELECTORAL AND CONTESTATORY

Abstract

I have argued elsewhere that the ideal of democratization—the ideal of bringing government under the control of the gov erned—has two dimensions.1 It represents both the familiar ideal of giving people electoral control over government and the usu ally unarticulated ideal of giving them contestatory control as well: giving them the sort of control that comes from the ability to contest government decisions effectively. This essay approaches the two-dimensional conception of democracy from a new angle. I begin with some propositions about the normative role of democracy (section 1). I argue that democracy can play this role only so far as it operates in two dis tinct dimensions, electoral and contestatory (section 2). And then I try to show two things: first, that the institutions found in polities that we are happy to describe as democratic display those two dimensions (section 3); and, second, that the two-dimen sional conception can help us in thinking about how those insti tutions might be reformed so as to serve democracy better (sec tion 4). The first argument is an attempt to show that the two-di mensional conception is fairly true to established ways of conceiving of democracy; it does not represent a new-fangled idea. The second is a complementary attempt to show that never theless there is point to articulating that conception; it enables us

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 180 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.