Rule By Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

We propose an author-meets-critics panel on Sean Ingham's book, *Rule By Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control*, which is forthcoming as part of Cambridge UP's "Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions" series. An abstract for the book is below. Ingham's book engages with debates across philosophy, political science, and social choice theory, and should thus be of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, and it speaks directly to the theme for the 2019 APSA annual meeting. We feel that APSA would be an especially appropriate venue for criticial discussion of this important book.

We have secured commitments from Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University), Michael Neblo (Ohio State University), and Claudio Lopez-Guerra (CIDE in Mexico City) to serve as the book's critics, with Ingham providing replies. All three are leaders in contemporary democratic theory, and their diverse interests and approaches to the discipline will be an asset in the context of this panel.

Book abstract:
In a democracy citizens ought to have some control over how they are governed. How should one understand the concept of popular control? A traditional answer refers to the "popular will" or "the will of the majority"— citizens are said to have control if they can compel decision-makers to respect the will of the majority. Yet typically there is no majority of the population whose members share a common will. There are instead multiple, overlapping majorities—multiple subsets of the population constituting numerical majorities of the whole—none of which is likely to possess a collective will per se. Moreover, social choice theory has shown that the pairwise preferences of different majorities may be impossible to satisfy simultaneously. Citizens' preferences may be such that every feasible alternative frustrates the preferences of some majority, as when majorities’ preferences form "cycles."

The book explains how every majority can nonetheless have control, at the same time. A majority has control over a variable if the majority's shared preferences would constrain the variable provided that its members cared enough about it relative to other things they care about. This condition for control can hold for every majority subset of the population, at the same time, even if citizens' preferences fail to aggregate into anything resembling a popular will. The book's account of popular control does not require one to imagine "the people" as a singular noun, as a kind of group agent with its own beliefs and desires. It is rather an account of how citizens, pursuing disparate and even conflicting goals, their preferences aligning over only a limited range of options, and bearing little more resemblance to a singular group agent than a crowd of pedestrians at an intersection, can nonetheless have control over public officials, policy, and other variables. The people, in this account, are emphatically a ‘they,’ not an ‘it.’

The book thus shows how one can divorce the ideal of popular control from crude populism. Jan-Werner Muller argues that we should understand populism as “a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified. . . people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” The problem with populism is that, as Muller argues, “the idea of a single, homogeneous, authentic people is a fantasy,” and a dangerous one, at that (Muller, 2016, pp. 3, 19, 20). The argument in the book shows why we should reject not only the populist’s conceit of a fully unified people, but also the idea of a single, homogeneous majority, each of which are seen to be fictional characters, useful only for ideological ends. Any majority subset of the population is a heterogenous collection of citizens who may agree on some points but not on all, and its membership overlaps with other majority subsets, of which the same is also true. The book explains why it is therefore problematic, in most cases, to speak of “the will of the majority” and to identify popular control or popular rule with rule by the majority. Rule by _multiple_ majorities is, by contrast, a defensible interpretation of these important concepts.

After resolving those conceptual puzzles, the book turns to the implications for the explanatory and evaluative aims of political science and normative democratic theory. It argues that popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• David Wiens University of California, San Diego

Presenters

• Sean Ingham University of California, San Diego

• Claudio Lopez-Guerra Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas

• Michael Neblo Ohio State University