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Trust and democracy appear to be linked in a self-reinforcing circle whereby higher levels of trust are conducive to more desirable forms of democracy, and democratic institutions preserve trust relationships and allow them to thrive. However, the relationship between trust and democracy is less straightforward than it seems. Firstly, some have denounced a progressive decline of social and political trust in some democratic countries. Secondly, and more importantly, democracy and vertical trust, which is trust in political institutions and government, might be inherently at odds, insofar as liberal and republican traditions alike claim that citizens should distrust their rulers. At the same time, it is not clear how citizens can be considered co-authors of the laws (which seems a distinctive trait of a democratic regime) when their only role in the decision making is indirect and when they ought to distrust those who exercise that role directly. This chapter addresses two related questions. The first one concerns whether citizen trust in representatives is warranted. While this is, to a large extent, an empirical question, I argue that there are sound theoretical reasons for being sceptical about vertical trust in representatives. The second question examines what ensues from the fact that citizen trust in representatives is often unwarranted. In the following section, I briefly introduce the concept of trust with which I work. The third section applies this concept to political representation and explains why vertical trust in representatives is hardly justified. The fourth section illustrates the delegate solution and raises three objections against it. This proposal is not only unfeasible, as it has been argued, but also undesirable because it is based on a mischaracterisation of the representative process. The fifth section identifies two circles of trust, namely two self-reinforcing mechanisms that generate trust, and contends that we should not relinquish the language of trust because it serves to express public recognition of representatives’ discretionary power and citizens’ vulnerability under representative democracies. A language of trust is compat- ible with mistrust, which demands a certain degree of oversight of representatives’ activities, or so I claim. The final section wraps up the argument and concludes.

Sono ormai diversi anni che la democrazia è data per morta o morente/considerata in crisi e i recenti avvenimenti politici in Europa e negli Stati Uniti sembrano confermare questa visione pessimista. Un simile contesto richiede una più approfondita riflessione sulle istituzioni democratiche e sulle ragioni che ci portano o ci hanno portato fin qui a sostenerle. In particolare, occorre chiedersi se e fino a che punto le decisioni democratiche possano e debbano ritenersi legittime per il fatto di essere state prese democraticamente. Come è noto, ci sono due approcci alla giustificazione della democrazia: mentre il cosiddetto strumentalismo giustifica le procedure democratiche sulla base delle decisioni prese o dei prodotti collaterali di tali procedure, il proceduralismo conferisce valore intrinseco alla democrazia, indipendentemente dai risultati che questa produce. Entrambi gli approcci hanno meriti e difetti, tra cui spicca una mancanza di considerazione adeguata del fatto del pluralismo e dei disaccordi di varia natura che caratterizzano le società contemporanee. Lo scopo di questo articolo è proporre una giustificazione della democrazia come procedura di presa di decisioni collettive che possa superare tale difetto e costituire un fondamento saldo della legittimità democratica. La particolarità di questa proposta è costituita dal carattere prudenziale della giustificazione offerta, dal momento che la democrazia è da considerarsi legittima in virtù della sua capacità di soddisfare tre interessi di ordine superiore che tutti i cittadini condividono, al di là delle loro diverse idee della giustizia e del bene.

This paper aims to offer a critique of a rigidly moralistic temperament in public discourse from the perspective of political realism. It unpacks three types of moralism in public discourse, and for each, it explains why it is normatively problematic from a realist perspective: ‘Moralist Causalism’ is the belief that moral preaching is an apt way to affect the world for the better; ‘Moralist Manicheism’ is a dichotomous division of the world between good and evil; ‘Moralist Absolutism’ is the conviction that only morality matters when we answer the question, ‘What should we do?’. The paper then turns these negative criticisms into a positive recipe for how to look realistically at what is valuable in the world. First, there are not only multiple values in the world but also different sources of values (epistemic, instrumental, aesthetic…) which may conflict with one another. We call this requirement ‘Meta-Normative Pluralism’. Second, politics is pivotal because it is the sphere where the clashes among all other spheres of value are authoritatively resolved—a role which moralists usurp for morality.This paper aims to offer a critique of a rigidly moralistic temperament in public discourse from the perspective of political realism. It unpacks three types of moralism in public discourse, and for each, it explains why it is normatively problematic from a realist perspective: ‘Moralist Causalism’ is the belief that moral preaching is an apt way to affect the world for the better; ‘Moralist Manicheism’ is a dichotomous division of the world between good and evil; ‘Moralist Absolutism’ is the conviction that only morality matters when we answer the question, ‘What should we do?’. The paper then turns these negative criticisms into a positive recipe for how to look realistically at what is valuable in the world. First, there are not only multiple values in the world but also different sources of values (epistemic, instrumental, aesthetic…) which may conflict with one another. We call this requirement ‘Meta-Normative Pluralism’. Second, politics is pivotal because it is the sphere where the clashes among all other spheres of value are authoritatively resolved—a role which moralists usurp for morality.

Democratic electoral systems characteristically take a Count-and-Report Approach to enfranchised citizens’ failure to turn out in political elections: The number of non-votes is counted and publicly reported, but non-votes are given no effect in the allocation of political offices. We morally assess this model in the context of legislative elections, and argue that it is pro tanto less desirable than another, counterfactual model which we label Proportional Non-Voter Sortition. This model provides that citizens’ non-votes shall be legislatively represented by legislators who are selected by lot from the non-voting part of the demos, and whose share of seats is proportional to the aggregate rate of non-voting in the legislative election. Our assessment of the two models specifically turns on the claim that a democracy’s legislature should reflect the full diversity of political views that exists within its demos (legislative inclusivity), and it offers two reasons to expect that Proportional Non-Voter Sortition serves legislative inclusivity better than the Count-and-Report Approach: 1) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition uniquely incentivizes political parties to integrate non-voter views into their political agendas and mobilisation activities; and 2) Proportional Non-Voter Sortition additionally enables the legislative articulation and advocacy of non-voter views by placing people in the legislature who are descriptively representative of non-voters. Through our discussion of different models for the post-electoral management of non-votes, we contribute to a body of normative democratic theorizing about citizens’ non-voting, but raise a distinct question that so far has remained unexplored.

One strategy in defence of compulsory voting is based on what I call the non-instrumental value of high turnout: the idea that almost-universal participation in elections is valuable per se. This article argues that we do not have democratic reasons to value compelled turnout. First, thanks to an original analysis of the practice of voting, I identify three constitutive rules that make the physical acts of marking and casting a ballot count as proper voting. This preliminary analysis serves to illuminate the fact that the act of voting has democratic value if it is performed in a free and reason-responsive way. Second, I identify political equality and popular control as democratic values that high turnout expresses. Finally, the article rejects the non-instrumental case for compulsory voting because it cannot ensure that people vote in a reason-responsive way and, if they do not, high turnout lacks democratic value.

For political realists, legitimacy is a central requirement for the desirability of political institutions. Their detractors contend that it is either descriptive, and thus devoid of critical potential, or it relies on some moralist value that realists reject. We defend a functionalist reading of realist legitimacy: descriptive legitimacy, that is, the capacity of a political institution to generate beliefs in its right to rule as opposed to commanding through coercion alone, is desirable in virtue of its functional role. First, descriptive legitimacy plays an evaluative role: Institutions can fail to convince citizens that they have a right to rule and can be ranked by how well they do so. Second, descriptive legitimacy plays a normative role, because if an institution fails to convince subjects of its right to rule, this gives them a reason not to comply with its directives, even if it satisfies philosophers’ standards for possessing such right.

Disagreement among philosophers over the proper justification for political institutions is far from a new phenomenon. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that there is substantial room for dissent on this matter within democratic theory. As is well known, instrumentalism and proceduralism represent the two primary viewpoints that democrats can adopt to vindicate democratic legitimacy. While the former notoriously derives the value of democracy from its outcomes, the latter claims that a democratic decision-making process is inherently valuable. This article has two aims. First, it introduces three variables with which we can thoroughly categorise the aforementioned approaches. Second, it argues that the more promising version of proceduralism is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, and that extrinsically procedural accounts can appeal to other values in the justification of democracy without translating into instrumentalism. This article is organised as follows. I present what I consider to be the ‘implicit view’ in the justification of democracy. Then, I analyse each of the three variables in a different section. Finally, I raise an objection against procedural views grounded in relational equality, which cannot account for the idea that democracy is a necessary condition for political legitimacy.

This article argues that political realists have at least two strategies to provide distinctively political normative judgements that have nothing to do with morality. The first ground is instrumental normativity, which states that if we believe that something is a necessary means to a goal we have, we have a reason to do it. In politics, certain means are required by any ends we may intend to pursue. The second ground is epistemic normativity, stating that if something is (empirically) true, this gives us a reason to believe it. In politics, there are certain empirical regularities that ought to be acknowledged for what they are. Both sources are flawed. Instrumental normativity only requires coherence between attitudes and beliefs, and one can hang on to false beliefs to preserve attitudes incompatible with reality. I may desire to eschew power relations, and accordingly I may imagine politics to be like a camping trip. Epistemic normativity, on the other hand, operates critically, striking down existing normative claims. It shows us that politics is nothing like a camping trip, but it doesn’t tell us what we should do about it (beyond abandoning some false beliefs). We conclude by showing that if the two are taken together, they remedy each other’s flaws.

Contemporary normative theories of democracy generally aim to show that democratic outcomes are legitimate and hence they ought to be obeyed. As it is known, the battlefield is split between two major approaches: instrumentalism and proceduralism. Yet, many philosophers of both approaches seem to overlook one distinction that ought to be crucial in their reasoning - or so I argue in this paper. First, I highlight this distinction between the justification of outcomes on one hand, and their legitimacy on the other. If the justification of outcomes is unachievable given circumstances of pluralism and disagreement, their legitimacy derives from the procedures that bring them about. Hence both accounts present a justification of democratic procedures by reference to a criterion that is independent from the procedures themselves. Second, I propose to distinguish between instrumentalism and proceduralism on the basis of the connection that these approaches draw between the justifying criterion and democratic procedures. While for instrumentalism this is contingent and indirect, for proceduralism it is direct and necessary. Finally, I take into account two well-known taxonomies in epistemic democracy, which are provided by David Estlund and Fabienne Peter, and I argue that both blur the distinction between the justification of outcomes and their legitimacy and are thus unsatisfactory and misleading.

Jean Jacques Rousseau has attracted conflicting readings, being cast in turn as democratic champion, dangerous totalitarian, oligarchic republican, or illiberal thinker. These divergent judgments stem from passages in his works that appear contradictory and from the fusion of two heterogeneous traditions in his thought: modern contractarian natural law and classical modern republicanism. Historically both are essential for grasping his novel links between will and contract, community and freedom; analytically the task remains to reconstruct his political system while recognizing that emphasis on different texts yields opposite conclusions. This study therefore offers one textually faithful, though not exclusive, reading of popular sovereignty and its connection to the general will in the Social Contract.
The chapter addresses three questions, each forming a section: (1) Which political decisions count as legitimate for Rousseau? (2) How are such decisions reached? (3) Can procedurally correct decisions be substantively mistaken? Section 2 divides further into the principle of legal generality and the civic education of citizens; the final section doubles as the chapter’s conclusion. Tackling these questions aims to reconstruct Rousseau coherently and to show why he warrants classification as a democratic thinker.

This chapter argues that the egalitarian defence of lotteries rests on two versions of political equality that are at odds with each other. As some advocates of lotteries claim, random selection is supposed to achieve both equal opportunity for political influence and equality of outcome in the form of descriptive representation. This chapter shows not only that these two forms of equality are distinct, but also that sortition cannot realise both at the same time. As a matter of fact, equality of opportunities is only achieved if sortition is unweighted because this is the only way they can offer all citizens the same chance of being selected as members of a deliberative assembly. On the other hand, weighed lotteries, which constitutively give unequal chance to citizens of being selected, are necessary to have descriptively representative assemblies. This is easy to see by looking at two important factors. Firstly, the size of randomly selected assembly is too small to ensure that all relevant ascriptive features of the population at large are duly reflected in the assembly. Secondly, in so far as citizens can and do refuse to serve in office, pure randomisation ends up selecting for an assembly skewed towards those social groups that are more likely to be politically interested and active. The authors conclude the chapter by observing that randomly created assemblies have a democratically important role as complements to, though not substitutes for, elections, because they provide a useful way to engage citizens as equal deliberators in matters of public policy.

Contemporary democratic theory holds an ambivalent stance toward elections. While aggregative and minimalist models treat them as democracy’s core institution, deliberative and participatory accounts privilege public reasoning or cooperative action and often elevate sortition based assemblies as correctives. Advocates of random selection claim it realises political equality more effectively than voting. This article rejects that claim. Focusing on Arash Abizadeh’s influential defence, we reconstruct his argument that citizens, presumed equals with an identical right to office, should distribute the scarce good of political mandate by lottery. We then raise two objections. First, equality of access to office is only one dimension of political equality; agenda setting power, voice, and especially mutual accountability are equally essential, and sortition is structurally indifferent to them. Second, by isolating formal influence from civic agency Abizadeh severs equality from the capacity to deliberate and act. Equality and agency are inseparable; lotteries cannot convincingly supply one without the other.

Voting is central to contemporary democracies. After struggles for universal suffrage, the ballot remains their defining and most common form of participation. While theorists once privileged deliberation over voting, recent work has turned to the ethics of voting—the duties citizens bear as electors. These studies explore voters’ moral dilemmas but rarely clarify what a vote is.
This chapter defines the constitutive rules of voting. First, the act occurs within a collective choice that presents more than one option. Second, it records a person’s selection—its expressive side. Third, it contributes to determining the outcome—its instrumental side. If any element is absent, the act is not a true vote. Only when citizens express an individual choice among alternatives in order to help decide the collective result, it is appropriate to say that they are voting.

Elections punctuate representative democracies with scheduled public reflection, suspending ordinary governance so citizens can choose options shaping political, social, and economic futures. Only elections and referenda confer direct voice, anchoring democratic symbolism. Yet in large electorates a single ballot wields infinitesimal causal power: the probability of being decisive approaches zero. Downs labeled this “paradox of voting,” noting that individual costs exceed expected personal gains discounted by near‑zero decisiveness, rendering participation instrumentally irrational. Article 48 of the Italian Constitution, which frames voting as a civic duty, thus appears to mandate irrational action. This chapter confronts that charge. It outlines three answers to the paradox: (I) voting never affects outcomes; (II) voting as altruistic sacrifice; (III) voting as contributive influence. The analysis defends the third, demonstrating how a contributive account both justifies voting’s democratic importance and clarifies its limitations.

Elections punctuate representative democracies with scheduled public reflection, suspending ordinary governance so citizens can choose options shaping political, social, and economic futures. Only elections and referenda confer direct voice, anchoring democratic symbolism. Yet in large electorates a single ballot wields infinitesimal causal power: the probability of being decisive approaches zero. Downs labeled this “paradox of voting,” noting that individual costs exceed expected personal gains discounted by near‑zero decisiveness, rendering participation instrumentally irrational. Article 48 of the Italian Constitution, which frames voting as a civic duty, thus appears to mandate irrational action. This chapter confronts that charge. It outlines three answers to the paradox: (I) voting never affects outcomes; (II) voting as altruistic sacrifice; (III) voting as contributive influence. The analysis defends the third, demonstrating how a contributive account both justifies voting’s democratic importance and clarifies its limitations.

Democrats tend to take disagreement involving justice as relevant for democratic legitimacy. In this manuscript, I draw on political realists’ claim about the distinctive nature of politics and argue that democrats should also be concerned with disagreement involving what politics is for, because citizens uninterested in justice might fail to find a justice-based justification of democracy acceptable. Then, I lay out a prudential justification of democracy aiming to show that democracy is rationally acceptable as the sole regime that satisfies three second-order interests that all citizens have: in understanding, revising and pursuing their first-order interests. In so doing, I offer an innovative reconceptualization of the notion of interest as moderately subjectivist: interests are then a function of preferences and values, on one hand, and full factual information and rational reasoning, on the other. I conclude by responding to two possible objections to such a prudential justification.

Democracy is often conceived procedurally: an inclusive and egalitarian system for collective decision making. Exclusion of any subgroup or the unequal distribution of decision power converts self government into rule by a part over the rest. This procedural benchmark clarifies which institutions qualify as democratic and why democracy retains normative appeal; but it remains incomplete until the meaning of “inclusive” and “egalitarian” is pinned down. While recent scholarship debates who deserves inclusion, this article interrogates the deeper requirement of political equality. It proposes equality as equal impact: every citizen’s input must bear the same potential effect on collective outcomes. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, it situates the concept of equal impact within a broader theory of democracy. Second, it presents Ronald Dworkin’s twin objections, which question the coherence and feasibility of equal impact. Third, it rebuts those objections by separating equal impact from the nearby ideas of equal correspondence—the match between preferences and policies—and equal influence—the probability of shaping outcomes through strategic action. The article defends equal impact as the most demanding yet coherent expression of democratic equality and uses it to refine a minimal procedural definition of democracy fit for purpose.

Jean Jacques Rousseau’s political legacy is contested; commentators have labelled him totalitarian, liberal, republican, but seldom oligarchic. John P. McCormick revives the oligarchic reading by analysing the “Roman” chapters of the Social Contract, usually dismissed as descriptive digressions. He links Rousseau’s endorsement of Rome’s hierarchical voting procedures, hostility toward plebeian tribunes, preference for aristocratic government, and formally egalitarian yet sociologically blind citizenship to an underlying commitment to elite rule. Rousseau is thus placed within an aristocratic republican lineage—from Aristotle to Madison—that shaped modern anti majoritarian thought. This critique scrutinises McCormick’s four theses, especially the Roman claim, then re examines Rousseau’s distinction between government and sovereign, which situates Rome within a broader theory of popular sovereignty. The analysis proceeds in four stages: identification of McCormick’s theses; contextualisation of the Roman chapters; reconstruction of Rousseau’s theory of the people and critique of democracy; and assessment of the General Will’s force within the republican framework. Contextualising the Roman material inside Rousseau’s systematic framework challenges the charge of covert oligarchy and recovers his complex, ambivalent attachment to collective self rule. Overall, Rousseau emerges less as a covert oligarch than as a thinker whose vision of popular authority demands institutional safeguards, civic discipline, and constant vigilance against inequality.