VoiCED project

Challenge

Political scholars and intellectuals alike agree that today democracy undergoes major challenges and that we live under regimes that are in some relevant sense post-democratic. Among the worrying factors warranting this bleak analysis, one concerns how democratic citizens engage in politics. Complaints about citizens’ incompetence, malice and selfishness are as old as democratic institutions. However, in the last few years these complaints have been renewed and widely emphasised in the public discourse: citizens are considered ignorant and biased in a way that prevents them from fruitfully engaging in politics. If one looks at normative democratic theory for an answer, there are not many reasons for hope. In fact, most accounts have not only failed to take these concerns seriously, but also expected citizens to be endowed with crucial virtues, such as reasonableness or unfettered regard for the common good. What should we realistically expect of citizens?

Approach

The VoiCED project has attempted to answer this question by providing a diversified theory of political obligation for citizens, political parties and representatives. The reason for this comprehensive approach is that each of these three actors plays a different but connected role in actual representative democracies. By scrutinising the triadic relation among these three agents of democratic politics, it is possible to see whether and how the democratic ideal of collective self-rule can be fulfilled.

Objectives

Since voting is an essential, though by no way sufficient, part of any democratic process, a theory of citizens’ duties as lawgivers revolves around voting, the meaning and ethics of which it has to spell out. While recent approaches to the ethics of voting have focused on whether a duty to vote exists or not and according to what principles, such as justice or the common good, citizens should vote, I started with the following questions:

  1. How we should interpret voting (i.e., if it is an instrumentally rational action and/or expressive of individuals’ commitments)
  2. What kind of political equality voting represents (i.e., impact, influence or correspondence)
  3. If and why it is an essential component of democracy
  4. What options citizens have when they vote

The second objective re-joined recent works on the role of political parties and their motivational and epistemic functions in organising political competition, enhancing public deliberation, providing citizens with coherent party programmes, and setting the agenda in the public discourse. This objective asked:

  1. How to justify political parties in a way that is consistent with the broader democratic ideal of collective self-rule
  2. How parties’ capacity to fulfil their duties affects citizens’ obligation
  3. How parties should balance their obligations towards their fellow partisans, the citizens who vote for them, their constituency and the citizenry at large

The third and final objective aimed to specify more in depth the further requirements that newly elected representatives ought to satisfy, in light of their partisan commitments and in order to allow citizens to properly act as indirect decision makers. This objective was further pursued in my subsequent project at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Divided Loyalties: Partisanship and Trust in Democratic Elections) with particular reference to the issue of political trust and political actors’ trustworthiness.

Activities and outcomes

VoiCED’s ambition was to spark interest in democratic theory and stimulate reflection on the role that democratic citizens are supposed to play not only among an expert audience (political theorists are already well enthused) but also among a larger public of students and lay citizens. Several activities have contributed to this:

  1. The research work was presented at 11 international venues, including the Joint Sessions and the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Sciences Research, the Workshops of the Manchester Centre for Political Science Research (MANCEPT), the Conference of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (BIAPT) and the REDEM project Workshops.
  2. The project has organised a workshop titled What Should We Vote For? with an international participation of senior political scientists. It has also been part of the convenor teams of two other international wokshops.
  3. The research material has provided the basis for developing a full-semester undergraduate seminar on Political Theory and Democracy which was taught three times at Sciences Po Paris.
  4. Project contributions have led to two opinion articles published in collaboration with Cyrille Thiébaut, a French political scientist, for the French version of The Conversation.
  5. Project ideas and outcomes have led to a successful 3-year funding award starting in July 2025 under the REVoTED project which will continue and extend research of the VoiCED project.

Project Workshop: What Should We Vote For?

Motivation

Elections are pivotal moments in the life of a representative democracy. Political scientists have been concerned with voting procedures and voting behaviour since at least the Fifties. However, elections have so far eschewed thorough normative analysis, as political theorists tend to defend a richer and more demanding view of democracy than the one employed by political scientists. According to this view, elections are only the final step in an inclusive process of public deliberation and coexist with a more complex set of political institutions. Deliberative democrats, for instance, have rightly claimed that individual preferences are not fixed prior to the political game (contra social choice theorists) and that citizens also vote on the basis of considerations of justice and the common good. On the other hand, theorists of public reason have mostly focused on state institutions, defending the application of justice-related constraints to the justification of coercive laws and to public officials’ and candidates’ discourses. In so doing, both have failed to provide a thorough and convincing account of the normative requirements that citizens may be asked to fulfil qua voters.

As a result, citizens are either assumed to follow their preferences, whatever these are, or demanded, with little explanation, to vote for justice and/or the common good. These two opposing poles are troubling for different reasons. If citizens are narrowly self-interested and biased, electoral outcomes not only may threaten justice, but democracy itself. Conversely, if citizens can only be entrusted with voting power if they are knowledgeable and willing to foster the right conception of justice or the common good, the right to an equal vote, usually considered a pillar of democracy, may become the privilege of few competent and/or moral citizens. Furthermore, an exclusive focus on the common good may have unintended ideological effects. Firstly, it prevents people from raising legitimate local or group-related concerns that are unjustly ignored in the public discourse. Secondly, it seems destined to overshadow considerations of global and inter-generational justice, if priority is to be accorded to the good of our societies here and now. At the same time, voters seem to have different duties of justice towards different groups (i.e., our fellow citizens, fellow partisans, other countries’ citizens or future generations) and these duties may conflict with each other.

Objectives

This workshops objective were legitimate reasons that should feature in citizens’ considerations when voting. The event has therefore addressed, without being limited to, the following questions:

  1. Should citizens vote only on considerations of justice or the common good?
  2. How do these considerations differ, if they do?
  3. Are there other legitimate concerns citizens can factor in?
  4. Can religion or self-interest be included among these concerns?
  5. Is there a proper duty to vote for justice or the common good?
  6. Is it desirable to institutionalise such a duty in a certain way?
  7. How should we understand citizens’ political autonomy as voters?
  8. What interests, if any, should citizens have in mind when they decide how to vote? Their own, their party’s, their country’s, their generation’s, future generations’ or mankind’s?

Programme

Monday, July 12, 2021
  1. The Ethics of Strategic Voting
    Eric Beerbohm, Harvard University
  2. Blind Election: Tackling Electoral Discrimination
    Nenad Stojanović, University of Geneva
  3. Democratic Voting and the Mixed-Motivation Problem
    Jonathan Wolff, Oxford University
  4. Conceptions of Citizenship as Normative Foundations for the Ethics of Voting
    Julian Culp, American University Paris
  5. What Should Citizens Vote for? Defending an Institutionalist Approach to Democratic Legitimacy
    Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
  1. On the Practice of Voting
    Chiara Destri, Sciences Po Paris
  2. The Mixed Motivation Problem and the Division of Electoral Labour
    Valeria Ottonelli, University of Genoa
  3. Surrogate Representation
    Fabio Wolkenstein, University of Vienna
  4. Democracy in Selection
    Annabelle Lever, Sciences Po Paris