1. Vallier’s case for divorce

Public reason liberals believe that laws must be justified to each citizen to be legitimate and permissible to enforce. A law that meets this test is publicly justified. According to the so-called “consensus” interpretation of what this entails, the idea is that laws are publicly justified when they are justified with public reasons, reasons that every reasonable citizen does endorse or would endorse if reasoning well under appropriate circumstances (Quong Reference Quong2011; Rawls [1993] 2005; Watson and Hartley Reference Watson and Hartley2018). Typical examples of public reasons are appeals to fairness, freedom, and equality. The equal endorsement among citizens of these reasons, however, does not necessarily entail that every citizen supports the laws and policies justified with them.

The so-called “convergence” interpretation, on the other hand, takes public justification to entail that every sufficiently idealised citizen could accept the coercive laws that bind them. On this view, laws need not be justified with public reasons, citizens can accept laws for their own nonpublic reasons (Gaus and Vallier Reference Gaus and Vallier2009; Gaus Reference Gaus2011).Footnote ⁴

Among proponents of the consensus model, it is commonly thought that citizens who deliberate in public must offer one another public reasons in their political advocacy. In John Rawls’s (Reference Rawls1997) terms, this is the duty of civility. Others have called it a requirement of deliberative restraint (Leland and van Wietmarschen Reference Leland and van Wietmarschen2012) or a public-reason-giving requirement (Stears and Humphrey Reference Stears and Humphrey2012).

Kevin Vallier has recently argued that citizens should be allowed to appeal to whatever reasons they see fit in the public sphere. He provides two main arguments. First, Vallier argues that restraint requirements infringe on the liberty of citizens. Moral rules can objectionably limit and remove options from people. Second, he argues that restraint homogenises people. Instead of allowing a wide range of perspectives, Vallier (Reference Vallier2015, 146) says, a principle of restraint entails that people must become more similar to each other in the public sphere—“it prioritizes shared reasoning over diverse reasoning.” If we value liberty and diversity, Vallier argues, we should want to promote these ideals. It is costly to have social rules in place that limit freedom and diversity. By letting deliberative restraint apply to as few people as possible—that is, only legislators and other public officials—we minimise these costs (147).Footnote ⁵

It is important to note, first and in response, that it is perfectly possible to agree with Vallier that restraint is costly but still hold that the benefits of restraint outweigh the cost to liberty and diversity. To me it seems as if what is at stake is whether the costs are justifiable or not. Or, put differently, it should be uncontroversial to say that what we are interested in is how far-reaching the requirements of deliberative restraints can be.

Consider how it is commonly accepted that we (at the very least) should frown upon those who use derogatory language and insults in public debates. It is a good thing, for instance, that there are norms against using sexist and racist language in political speech. Vallier (152) recognises this, and so, in this way, he already accepts some limitations of the freedom and viewpoint diversity of citizens.Footnote ⁶ Having moral rules in place for avoiding insulting language contributes to the goal of a healthy and constructive public culture. Similarly, I take it that if it could be shown that further restrictions generate enough important goods, then these restrictions, too, are justified.

To conclusively make his case, Vallier would need to show that there are no benefits to restraint, or at least that the benefits do not outweigh the costs. Vallier’s strategy for doing so is to contrast individual citizens with legislators. The latter group has an “an obvious and direct impact on whether citizens are coerced” (154). Legislators “seek to legislate,” they “generally aim to coerce,” and their votes “make a predictable, substantive contribution to outcomes” (154). The same does not hold for individual citizens.

Vallier acknowledges that the votes of individual legislators often fail to change the outcome by themselves, but while one “in several hundred is a small contribution,” it is “many orders of magnitude greater than the contribution made by ordinary citizens” (154). The advocacy of individual citizens has “an extremely small effect on outcomes” (152). Therefore, individual citizens do not need to give public reasons (or, in Vallier’s case, they do not need to only advocate laws that are publicly acceptable). Since those who do not hold public offices “have no real impact” in determining which laws that should apply to them, they may as well offer whatever reasons they want.

I agree with Vallier that it is true that the opportunities individual citizens have for influencing policy are much smaller than the power that public officials wield. However, this by itself does not show that the opportunity is small enough to warrant a principle of restraint for public officials but not for individual citizens. The important question is whether individual citizens are over some influence threshold that makes their contribution salient, not whether public officials have an even greater influence.

In other words, even if the contributions of individuals are small, they might still be significant enough to ground moral duties for regulating political behaviour. As Boettcher (Reference Boettcher2019, 231) forcefully puts it, the rationale behind Vallier’s view seems

In the next section, I will argue that individual citizens are over the relevant influence threshold. The reason is that even if an individual’s contribution is small, the aggregate macrolevel contribution of all individuals becomes significant. A society’s public culture influences which policies are enacted and how politicians conceptualise what is at stake. Vallier (Reference Vallier2015, 152) anticipates this argument, but quickly dismisses it since the claim has “little empirical ground, given the complex social processes by which citizens’ advocacy is translated into legislative outcomes.” Defenders of restraint, Vallier (144) argues, “assume that if citizens comply with principles of restraint, private reasons will be effectively excluded for legal decision-making.” But this is wrong, Vallier claims, because the relationship between deliberative restraint among citizens and public justification is “likely to be a complex sociological question with no straightforward a-priori answer” (144).

I agree that it is a complicated question. However, recent empirical evidence at least suggests that there is a link between public opinion and the speech and policy positions of public officials. I discuss this next.

2. Aggregate influence

There is a growing literature that suggests that the aggregate views and political behaviour of citizens influence policy. Anselm Hager and Hanno Hilbig (Reference Hager and Hilbig2020, 921–22) have found that politicians who receive opinion polling on the views of citizens “become more responsive to the public’s preferences” and that “linguistic similarity between politicians’ speech and the public opinion reports increases.”Footnote ⁷ Similarly, Jeroen Romeijn (Reference Romeijn2020, 426) has found that there is a link between “public preferences and the positions of political parties.” The connection between public opinion and political action is not only demonstrated among elected officials. Casillas, Enns, and Wohlfarth (Reference Casillas, Enns and Wohlfarth2011, 74) have found that the “influence of public opinion on [US] Supreme Court decisions is real … [and] substantively important.”

Naturally, there is a further question about whether (and if so, to what extent) requirements of deliberative restraint would make politicians more likely to adopt an attitude of restraint themselves. However, the evidence suggesting that public opinion influences the speech, decisions, and reasoning of public officials at least points in this direction. It does not seem unlikely that changes in deliberative norms also produce corresponding changes in the behaviour of public officials.

3. Influential citizens

We thus have good reason to think that the aggregated actions of citizens influence politics. However, it is also the case that some individual citizens by themselves are powerful enough to make a difference beyond their contribution to the aggregative effects. Influential citizens often have a direct effect on politics. For instance, the journalists (and their team of researchers) who decide which questions to ask in political debates have a significant “agenda-setting” power (Benoit and Hansen Reference Benoit and Hansen2001). If they are allowed to consistently frame problems in nonpublic terms, this will most likely influence the way ordinary citizens see what is at stake in these debates. In the US context, it has been shown that presidential debates play a significant role in influencing people’s views about politics and candidates (Benoit, Hansen, and Verser Reference Benoit, Hansen and Verser2003). For these reasons, there seems to be something problematic, from a public reason perspective, if in every presidential debate the journalists framed all political questions from within a specific comprehensive doctrine. Vallier’s proposed view, however, cannot make this judgement.

We do not even have to go as far as to the people involved in presidential debates. Ordinary news media has been shown to structure “the overall tone” of debates, with a framing that can sometimes differ “from that of politicians and interest groups” (Callaghan and Schnell Reference Callaghan and Schnell2001, 183). It undoubtedly seems possible that this could translate into a clear and direct influence on policy. And so, a public political culture where journalists consistently frame political questions in a way that favours only one comprehensive perspective—for instance, the dominant religious view of society—could force public officials away from publicly justified policies and arguments.Footnote ⁸

Or consider wealthy people. Through buying advertisement space, and through other measures, they, too, can have a significant agenda-setting power (Arlen Reference Arlen2019; Arlen and Rossi Reference Arlen and Rossi2021; Winters Reference Winters2011). To take just one example, billionaire Bill Gates “gave millions of dollars to see a charter school law approved despite multiple failed ballot referendums” (Ho Reference Ho2018). Similar things can be said for community leaders, public figures, and celebrities. Indeed, when the singer Taylor Swift endorsed candidates for public office in Tennessee, a voting registration service received more registrations to vote in twenty-four hours than it had for the whole previous month (Nisbett and Schartel Dunn Reference Nisbett and Dunn2021). Similarly, evidence suggests that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama made a notable difference for the campaign contributions and votes he received (Garthwaite and Moore Reference Garthwaite and Moore2013).

If the requirements of restraint apply only to public officials, none of these influential citizens would be under a duty to limit their political advocacy to proposals that are publicly justifiable. In contrast to this, I propose that there are clear benefits of morally restricting the discourse of citizens if this increases the likelihood that politicians will advocate publicly justified policy positions.