In Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont takes on the challenging task of defending a normative conception of democracy that does not compromise on demanding ideals. Writing expressly against the pessimistic zeitgeist, Lafont starts by drawing a powerful parallel between some of the arguments advanced in the flourishing “voter ignorance” literature and historical arguments against women’s political rights. Numerous contemporary studies that document citizens’ biases and incompetence recommend that they should accept the status quo of current democracies and let themselves be ruled by others. This, says Lafont, is essentially what women were told before the introduction of universal suffrage. Yet, “only after changing the relevant negative conditions and institutions would it be possible to find out whether citizens can use political power wisely” (p. 6).

Following this plea for retaining a commitment to the ideal of democratic self-government even in the face of mounting evidence about citizen incompetence, Lafont then sets out a compelling interpretation of that very ideal (chapter 1). Drawing on a deliberative understanding of democracy and taking the perspective of democratically minded citizens as her baseline, she frames self-government as a critical standard that rules out being “required to blindly defer to political decisions that one cannot reflectively endorse” (p. 19). That is to say, having to obey decisions that one cannot support on the basis of reasons goes quintessentially against the ideal of self-government.

In subsequent chapters, Lafont seeks to demonstrate that self-government thus understood cannot be achieved via institutional “shortcuts” that are meant as more feasible alternatives to a properly deliberative public sphere, where citizens can justify political decisions to one another in a way that allows them to reflectively endorse those decisions. She first considers “deep pluralist conceptions of democracy” (chapter 2). These typically assume that citizens’ disagreements run so deep that achieving reflective endorsement through mutual justification is illusory, and so these conceptions resort to the shortcut of procedural fairness––roughly, free and fair elections plus majority rule––as a way out. As Lafont argues, however, this shortcut requires minorities to blindly defer to the majority with whom they may disagree. With the option of mutual justification off the table, and hardly any legitimate nonelectoral forms of contestation such as judicial review available, minorities are expected to simply accept having lost the vote.

Lafont’s next targets are “purely epistemic conceptions of democracy” (chapter 3) and “lottocratic conceptions of deliberative democracy” (chapter 4). The former assume that citizens cannot overcome their political incompetence and so suggest the shortcut of letting experts rule to ensure that decisions have high epistemic quality. The latter propose the shortcut of organizing deliberation in small-scale assemblies with a randomly selected sample of citizens (so-called mini-publics), instead of trying to improve the quality of deliberation in the broader public sphere. Often, moreover, mini-publics’ postdeliberation recommendations are thought to have “prescriptive force” (p. 119) for the wider citizenry.

Lafont argues that both approaches require citizens to blindly defer to others, thus sitting uneasily with the ideal of democratic self-rule. Although it is hardly surprising that she reaches this conclusion with respect to purely epistemic democracy, her arguments against lottocratic deliberative democracy are more unexpected. According to Lafont, citizens who endorse the recommendations of mini-publics are not actually endorsing the recommendations of their “better selves” who properly informed themselves about an issue and then deliberated together with others. Rather, they are endorsing the recommendations of random others, without being able to know whether their own postdeliberation opinion would have been the same as the opinion of that random group. This amounts to blind deference.

But if there are no plausible shortcuts to improving the public sphere, how can we achieve better macrolevel deliberation? Lafont begins answering this question by outlining “contestatory,” “vigilant,” and “anticipatory” uses of mini-publics that, instead of requiring blind deference, can kickstart and inform public debate by providing politically relevant impulses to citizens (chapter 5). These ideas are then tied to a “participatory conception of deliberative democracy” (chapter 6), in which the demanding requirement of mutual justification in the public sphere is “interpreted as giving expression to principles embodied in the institutions of constitutional democracies and citizens’ rights to political and legal contestation.” This requirement is met when institutions are in place that “enable citizens to challenge the acceptability of coercive policies to which they are subject … by requesting that proper public reasons be provided in their support” (p. 187).

In the book’s two closing chapters, it emerges that Lafont ascribes the most important role to citizens’ right to legal contestation, understood as the right to initiate legal challenges to the constitutionality of any policy or legal statute. By exercising this right, says Lafont, citizens can open or reopen a process in which “reasons and justifications aimed at showing the constitutionality of a contested policy are made publicly available” (p. 213)––which in turn can trigger principled public debates about policies or laws that can transform public opinion. So, in the end, it is the institution of judicial review that contributes most to the realization of a deliberative democracy “without shortcuts.” In fact, constitutional courts can even provide behavioral norms: democratic citizens should act like they would expect courts to act, scrutinizing and justifying laws and policies in conformity with the demands of public reason.

Trenchantly argued, ambitious, and full of surprising insights, Democracy without Shortcuts is a major contribution to contemporary democratic theory by one of the best political philosophers in the world. These are arguably difficult times for anyone who endorses demanding democratic ideals, but Lafont defends them without being unduly optimistic about the capacities of citizens or the workings of representative democratic institutions. Nor does she give in to the temptation of renouncing some of her commitments as unsuited for the current era. Along the way, she manages to say something new and relevant about topics that few theorists seem willing to take on anymore, most notably procedural democracy and judicial review. All in all, the book is a fantastic achievement.

I would still like to raise some questions about the central role and responsibility that Lafont ascribes to judicial review. I wonder, in particular, whether we should really entrust constitutional courts alone with doing the heavy lifting of ensuring that principled reasons for policies and laws are advanced in the public sphere. Without denying that initiating a procedure of judicial review allows citizens to “structure the public political debate in such a way that priority is given to the question of whether or not a contested statute violates some fundamental right or freedom” (p. 237), other democratic institutions and agents—especially movements or parties––may be able to perform this function, too. These may not have the decisional authority of courts, nor do they carry the aura of political independence––but they can put questions of fundamental rights or freedoms on the agenda and generate the sort of collective awareness that any public debate about constitutional fundamentals requires to get off the ground. And although the reasons they offer will be of a different kind than those courts provide, they need not be “non-public” reasons.

Now, of course, Lafont does not explicitly exclude any of this, although she argues that political parties’ ideological “predictability,” which she contrasts to the independence of judges, is potentially detrimental to the “constitutionalization” of political debate––a somewhat unexpected claim, given the predictability one has come to expect from many courts, the ideologically divided US Supreme Court being just the most prominent example (pp. 240–41). But neither does she attend to the many ways in which more “conventional” democratic agents like movements or parties can contribute to a more deliberative public sphere. This I found surprising, not least because one of the major aims of the book is to explore the possibilities of improved macrolevel deliberation. It feels like there is something missing from the picture.

Paying close attention to democratic agents and institutions other than courts seems important for at least two additional reasons. First, if it is desirable that citizens behave like they would expect courts to behave, arguably they first need to acquire the requisite reasoning skills. As Joshua Cohen, one of the pioneers of deliberative democracy, has famously noted, political organizations like movements or parties may offer inclusive spaces where citizens can engage on a regular basis in deliberative practices and become more proficient political reasoners, thus contributing in important ways to a more deliberative public sphere. Second, there exist well-functioning constitutional democracies with very weak traditions of judicial review. The Nordic countries are a case in point––and these eminently democratic states do not have defective public spheres, in which principled deliberation only rarely occurs. Rather, public justification is mainly channeled through parliaments and parties, instead of courts. Taking such alternative institutional configurations seriously seems important if one wishes to theorize from the perspective of citizens, as Lafont does. Ultimately, democratically minded citizens might interpret constitutional democracy differently, depending on their own democratic traditions. Very reasonably, they may not see public justification as intrinsically bound up with legal contestation, because other agents and institutions reliably prioritize public reasons when appropriate.