What should democratic institutions look like? Should representatives be tied to geographical districts, or should legislative power be proportional to nationwide vote totals? Should everyone be required to vote, or should we be selective about whom we encourage (or even allow) to exercise political power? Should we shift power away from elected leaders altogether, instead empowering impartial experts, direct referenda, or deliberative bodies of randomly selected citizens?
These questions are the bread and butter of democratic theory, with various schools of thought offering contending sets of answers. There are majoritarians and pluralists; deliberativists and agonists; technocrats and populists; liberals and radicals; elitists and lottocrats—all of whom are engaged in Kevin Elliott’s excellent book Democracy for Busy People. In the end, however, he appeals to a different authority in judging which institutions are most democratic: his mother.
The proposal is more serious, and more plausible, than this tongue-in-cheek summary might suggest. Elliott’s mother serves as an avatar of the broader class of people whose concerns and dilemmas drive the book forward—namely, busy people. Even stated in this general way, of course, the problem of busy-ness might seem an odd one to serve as the foundation stone of an entire democratic theory. Should we really evaluate voting systems (say) primarily in terms of their impact on people who happen to have a lot going on? Yet over the course of the book’s seven chapters—an introduction plus two sets of three substantive chapters—Elliott uses this lens to generate a range of refreshingly counterintuitive insights.
Part I considers the question of how much time and attention we can expect ordinary citizens to devote to democratic politics. Taken together, its three chapters stake out an intermediate view between two extremes. On the one hand, scholars have articulated various reasons for embracing widespread political apathy: that we have a right to remain aloof from politics, for instance; that participation by underinformed citizens reduces the quality of decisions; and that a bloc of apolitical citizens serves to moderate and stabilize democracy. On the other hand, normative ideals often make extensive demands on ordinary people, which typically apply equally to all citizens.
The moral compass guiding Elliott’s efforts to carve a middle path between these poles is the figure of the busy person. Both for their own sake and that of others, he concludes, busy people like his mother should participate in politics. They have no right to withdraw completely from the activities that sustain free and democratic societies, and thus have duties to be at least minimally aware and informed. At the same time, he argues, those designing political institutions must meet them halfway, by making it relatively easy for busy people to fulfill those duties. Elitists are wrong to embrace widespread apathy, in other words, but so are radical, deliberative, and participatory democrats whose ideals require everyone to be constantly engaged in political action and debate. Instead, Elliott proposes the model of “stand-by citizenship” as a minimally satisfactory level of attention and participation that can and should be expected from all ordinary people (100–13)—at least where institutions are structured adequately to facilitate it. In short, citizens need not participate all the time or know very much about the details of policy, but they must at least be engaged enough to make meaningful judgments about when more active attention is warranted.
Part of Elliott’s case for this middle road lies in his rebuttals of opposing views on either side. And while many of these rebuttals are surely too quick to convince their targets, most are persuasive enough for a disinterested reader. Also crucial, however, is his positive case for treating “inclusion” as the first priority of democratic design. Contrasting this priority with the imperative of “political equality” foregrounded by many recent accounts—understood in terms of equal influence—he argues that we must “put inclusion first” (84ff.). Before we try to equalize the influence of those who already have a say, that is, we should ensure everyone has a say in the first place.
This intuition is central to the arguments of part II, whose distinctive answers to institutional questions—like those raised at the outset—are ultimately derived from the priority of inclusion. For instance, Elliott defends elections that are neither more (131) nor less (142–53) frequent than annual; mandatory voting (134–42); strong parties that can mobilize new voters, up to and including “machine politics” (159–63); and multiparty democracy, ideally through proportional representation—in each case because they are more “inclusive” than alternative electoral practices.
This same logic is also said to justify greater reliance on elections as such—that is, granting more power to the top-level leaders chosen through elections—relative to alternative means of making decisions. Most saliently, these rejected alternatives include the myriad deliberative mini-publics and other small-scale participatory institutions that have captured the imagination of reformers around the globe (180–202). More subtly, they also include the sort of federalism and subsidiarity often associated with low-salience off-cycle elections (131) and overly complex “long ballots” (133); as well as the sort of “pluralism” (126) that grants informal influence to organized groups other than big-tent parties, such as teachers’ unions (132).
Some of these conclusions are widely accepted, at least among Elliott’s target audience. To his great credit, however, many will be quite controversial among scholars and practitioners of “democratic innovations,” as well as the broader community of democratic theorists and political philosophers. On the whole, indeed, the book can be read as a rejection of numerous assumptions held dear by many in these fields—a rejection I happen to endorse, but which even less sympathetic readers will surely find to be well-evidenced and carefully argued. In sum, Elliott offers a vital defense of everyday electoral institutions, whose democratic virtues are all too often taken for granted or even dismissed as an ideological scam. Conversely, he also makes powerful critiques of the egalitarian and inclusive credentials of the deliberative and participatory schemes that drive popular agendas for reform—calling instead for renewed investment in broad-based mobilization by strong parties in an open, competitive system. For all of these reasons, the book deserves a wide readership among theorists and practitioners alike.
Still, I cannot follow Elliott all the way, in large part due to the outsized burden he places on the equivocal category of “inclusion.” In establishing the priority of this demand, Elliott invokes the catastrophic harms suffered by many groups—such as enslaved populations in ancient Athens and the antebellum US—who were historically excluded from politics (86–90). Yet these formal and absolute forms of exclusion are importantly distinct from those plaguing democracies today, which range from onerous voter identification requirements to time-intensive participatory institutions. And while he is right to insist that the latter are also real and worrying forms of exclusion, it does not follow that they deserve the same degree of priority on our democratic agenda.
One of the strangest implications of Elliott’s account, for instance, is that the problem posed by exclusionary voter ID laws in certain US states—which deter busy people from voting by raising its time costs—is “qualitatively more important” (93) than the pervasive stranglehold of oligarchic elites over the entire US political system. While some may be moved by this logic, I am tempted to see it instead as a reductio ad absurdum of the priority of “inclusion” in this sense.
As an exploration of what “putting inclusion first” would require, in sum, Elliott’s arguments about the stakes of contemporary institutional choices are quite compelling and insightful. By my lights, he successfully demonstrates that electoral institutions facilitate the inclusion of busy people more effectively than deliberative and participatory alternatives—and that certain electoral institutions do so more effectively than others. The book thus makes a major contribution, giving us genuinely weighty reasons to prefer practices that are more “inclusive” in this sense. It oversteps, however, in supposing that these reasons are decisive.
