Modern politics is complex—and so are the issues that elected representatives in contemporary democracies must deal with. This increase in political complexity is frequently associated with contemporary democratic-crisis phenomena such as citizens’ distrust in established political elites and institutions and their lack of interest in and disengagement from conventional forms of political participation. According to the mainstream of public and scholarly discourses, these phenomena are symptoms or manifestations of a more entrenched democratic malaise. A significant branch of democracy scholars—prominently Jason Brennan (Against Democracy [Princeton University Press, 2017])—see the main roots of these crisis phenomena in lay citizens’ incompetence to adequately deal with this complexity. Consequently, he demands reforms that strengthen the role of experts and reduce the influence of “ordinary citizens” on collectively binding decision-making. One main foundation of this argument is its assumption that incompetent, ignorant, and/or overly passionate citizens (in Brennan's terms, “hobbits” and “hooligans” instead of rational “Vulcans”) make up the majority of lay citizens (also see John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy [Cambridge University Press, 2002]).

On the one hand, Julia Maskivker's The Duty to Vote provides a timely answer to scholars arriving at the conclusion that citizens should have less participatory opportunities and may under certain circumstances even have a duty to abstain from voting. Yet Maskivker's core aim is certainly more ambitious: she wants to defend the claim that citizens have a positive duty to vote. Consequently, she needs to take on another claim: the prevalent position among political philosophers as well as “popular wisdom” suggests “that voting [is] a freedom that citizens have a right to exercise or not to exercise.” This “minimalist” or “libertarian” position does not impose any moral obligation on citizens to engage in what arguably constitutes one of the most essential means of self-governance in contemporary democracies: the ballot (34–36).

Maskivker offers a meticulous analysis of these philosophical discourses and carefully unfolds her understanding of citizens’ participation in democratic elections as a “Samaritan duty to vote with care.” Both elements of this phrase—the analogy to classical Samaritan duties and the requirement to exercise the right to vote with care—are crucial to her argument and her responses to the above-mentioned discourses. Samaritan duties are obligations that apply when helping or providing a service to others in need is not “unduly costly” for the individual—the standard example being a bypasser rescuing a drowning child. Maskivker argues that by voting in democratic elections, citizens fulfill a Samaritan duty: they can thereby contribute to “just” or “good” governance (4, 35–46). Furthermore, this task comes with “no significant cost”; it is “not heroic”—citizens can “utiliz[e] the ballot without jeopardizing [their] self-interest” (38–45). Maskivker clearly sees the danger featured by Jason Brennan, for example: voting can also have harmful consequences. Citizens therefore must exercise their duty with care, that is, “consistent with [their] most conscientious opinion of the common good” and being sufficiently informed “about facts necessary to assess the superiority of one electoral option over another” (80).

Maskivker offers a powerful counterproposal to political philosophers and theorists who assume that citizens’ voting behavior actually tends to be harmful to their societies as it is likely to decrease the quality of political results. First, she rightly points out that empirical analyses allegedly demonstrating “ordinary citizens’” incompetence are frequently based on empirical analyses (e.g., surveys) conducted under structural conditions which tend to promote citizens’ uninterest, disengagement, and ignorance about politics (also see Fleuß, Radical Proceduralism [Emerald, 2021]). Accordingly, such analyses hardly prove that lay citizens are incompetent by nature (82–83). Second, the author convincingly argues that “good voting” does not require citizens to be highly rational and informed “Vulcans” after all. Making good electoral choices does not require “expert knowledge” or extraordinary cognitive capacities. It merely demands that citizens be clear about “valuable” political goals and the basic characteristics of electoral procedures and candidates (106–12).

However, by defending a duty to vote, Maskivker not only needs to demonstrate that citizens are generally able to make sound electoral choices and that voting with care is not unduly demanding or “costly.” She also needs to take on the mainstream position defending citizens’ right to abstain from elections. Consequently, the author needs to answer the question: What is the reason for and source of a duty to vote? Her response to this question is based on the above-mentioned analogy to commonsensical cases of Samaritan duties to aid.

Yet the validity of this analogy raises two main objections: first, it is presupposed that voting with care “help[s] society prevent injustice and ensure decently good governance.” This deceptively plausible claim, however, presupposes a standard for what constitutes a “just society” and “good governance.” But particularly in modern, “postmetaphysical” societies that are characterized by deep and perennial political disagreements, we can expect arguably neither one reasonable answer nor an overlapping consensus about these matters. Maskivker unambiguously acknowledges that citizens in modern pluralistic societies may not have a shared understanding of “the good (life)” or “good governance” (36). She nevertheless refers to a broadly Rawlsian understanding of (un-)reasonable disagreement, fairness, and impartiality (95). While the book engages with well-known issues that may arise when applying this understanding of reasonableness to concrete political decisions (the problems of “inconclusiveness” and “indeterminacy”) (98–99), it fails to address a broad range of contemporary criticisms raised by feminist, decolonial, and radical democrats, highlighting the exclusionary, potentially paternalistic implications of allegedly impartial “reasonableness” and “fairness” standards (see again Fleuß, Radical Proceduralism; also Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy [Oxford University Press, 2002]).

Second, the good Samaritan rescuing a drowning child has a direct, immediately observable impact on the child's well-being. Individual citizens’ votes, however, have an infinitesimally small (if any) impact on electoral results. Maskivker offers an extensive and careful discussion of the well-known voting paradox's implication for her line of argument. Her main response to these concerns is to consider “our single vote [as] valuable because it is part of a collective process whose final outcome is valuable” (50–51). The author's emphasis and careful framing of voting as a “collective exercise of power” provides a helpful strategy for rebutting this second objection against the analogy to Samaritan duties (Maskivker makes this case in her earlier work). Nevertheless, her instrumentalist justification presupposes not only an impartial notion of “the common good,” but also a clear understanding of how exactly collective voting is supposed to promote societal justice and good governance. Concrete answers to these questions, however, will largely depend on the respective political-societal context, for example, on how general elections are embedded in opinion- and will-formation processes and on the design of the electoral system in particular democracies.

At this point, I do not mean to argue that Maskivker's account is generally incapable of dealing with such issues. Yet the overall argumentation of her book remains at a fairly high level of abstraction and therefore leaves the reader with no clear answer to the question: Why and how precisely do I, as a citizen of a particular democracy, contribute to societal justice and good governance by voting—and, hence, have the Samaritan duty to vote? Finally, Maskivker asks citizens to aim at “impartial” electoral choices and to put themselves in each other's shoes. I do not assume that this is necessarily—and for any form of democratic politics—overly demanding. Yet owing to contemporary liberal party democracies’ competitive character and “market logic,” voting nurtures and oftentimes even requires political agents’ partisan behavior. This means that it is an aspirational goal for citizens to refrain from “predominantly self-centered and overly sectarian reasoning” (105). However, this goal presumably does not align well with the logics of competitive party politics. At the end of the day, one may therefore argue that citizens only have Maskivker's “Samaritan duty to vote” if they are not exposed to such boundary conditions that actively promote and reward political choices that are primarily rooted in self-interest.