Weale believes that we should justify democracy mainly in terms of its having consequences that we can defend as beneficial on principled grounds. In Weale's view, the main attraction of democracy lies in its ability to promote certain public interests under conditions of fallibility, in which no one occupies a privileged position with respect to their political knowledge or judgment, and in communities where people regard themselves as political equals. As he admits, quite a lot is packed into this thesis, that many will find contentious. Nonetheless, in my view it has the great virtue of stressing the important yet limited practical role of democracy. It acknowledges, for example, that there are circumstances in which expert adjudication, hierarchical decision making, or individual judgment might be preferable because fallibilism, equality, or public interests, respectively, do not apply. To that extent, his approach has decided advantages over those defenses that appeal primarily to its intrinsic merits in realizing a favored principle or principles, such as autonomy. Of late, theorists have tended to favor this tack. Yet it can lead to the assumption that democracy is either good in itself or good for everything. Different versions of deliberative democracy tend to fall into each of these traps. On the one hand, deliberation gets praised for its role in developing individuals as “political” creatures but in ways that make democracy sound like an educational seminar rather than a decision making process. On the other hand, democracy is expanded to all areas of social life, thereby threatening to overload the capacity of any system to make decisions effectively. In contrast, Weale offers a much more instrumental view that simply stresses that if collective decisions are adequately to reflect the different and often conflicting concerns of those to whom they apply, then we need a form of legitimation that nevertheless protects individuals from having their concerns be simply discounted. As he notes, this aim embodies the most practical interpretations of autonomy and consent arguments for democracy—namely, their antipaternalism and their stress on the importance of people sharing moral responsibility for collective decisions. Both notions can be derived from political equality and are far more suited to a pluralist society than arguments linked to more comprehensive justifications that link democracy to self-realization.

Weale's emphasis on the practical uses of democracy also leads him to give greater attention than many theorists do to the institutional arrangements needed to ensure that democratic processes operate in the desired way. He seeks to make what he regards as realistic assumptions about human motivation and social circumstances that avoid either excessive pessimism or utopian optimism. So he denies that knavery should be taken as a general rule and supposes that ongoing political communities embody a degree of reciprocity that cannot be entirely conceived as merely enlightened selfishness. However, path dependence sets limits on what institutions, no matter how well designed, can achieve in themselves. So representation must balance statistical representativeness against ensuring the accountability of the representatives, and the best mix will have to be sensitive to the complexion of the society concerned. Likewise with decision rules, with the majority principle needing to be modified to reflect a diversity of opinions and the likelihood that different majorities exist for different issues. Weale's advocacy of a Condorcet count to settle these kinds of problem is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

In most respects, I found myself broadly sympathetic to Weale's approach. My main criticism lies in his not pushing his argument a bit farther. For example, given the sort of instrumentalist line he takes, it is surprising that he gives no attention to contestatory mechanisms of the kind that Philip Pettit has recently insisted upon as vital means for ensuring that democratic decisions genuinely track the public rather than factional interests. Indeed, the republican concern with the avoidance of domination captures much of the reasoning behind his justification of democracy. Given the emphasis on democracy's practical value, I also found the final chapter relating his ideal to real-world situations frustratingly (if also interestingly) elusive. For example, he gives a brief discussion of the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union, a topic on which he has written at length elsewhere. This is the sort of issue where I feel his approach has real strengths, though, disappointingly, he fails to bring them out here. Many commentators adopt the sort of arguments criticized above, whereby it is simply assumed that because democracy is a “good thing,” the EU must have as much of it as possible. But this begs precisely the sorts of problems Weale's justification raises—namely, is this an area where collective decisions can appropriately be made? If so, concerning what? Are they likely to be better made democratically rather than by elites or technocrats? What forms of representation and decision rule will be necessary to secure political equality? These are rather concrete questions, ones surprisingly rarely posed by policy makers, and it is the merit of Weale's book to focus our attention on them.