Reinvigorating Democratic Legitimacy Through Democratic Innovation and Protest

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Growing global interconnections are putting representative democracies under strain; they simultaneously undermine states’ capacities for action, and—by creating new collective action problems—increase the need for states to act (Mansbridge 2018). Within democracies, citizens’ feelings of being excluded from political and economic decisions are creating openings for populist candidates claiming to represent “the people” against “the elite.” The result is a crisis of legitimacy, where elections and conventional relations of representation between decision-makers and citizens no longer provide the legitimacy needed for democratic governance. In the electoral arena, politicians increasingly find themselves faced with political gridlock and unable to implement necessary public policies. In the field of governance, many existing institutions are similarly facing a crisis of legitimacy. Recognizing the importance of parent and community engagement, public school boards often have dedicated agencies for communicating to parents and stakeholders—but their engagement processes often suffer from low turnout, particularly among communities of color and low-income folks who do not always trust administrators and who face barriers to participation. A starker example of a public sector service that is increasingly losing public faith are police departments that have been unable—or unwilling—to enact meaningful internal reforms to stop the killing of BIPOC citizens.

Scholars and activists have clear suggestions for reforms that will improve governance and increase democratic legitimacy. With respect to policymaking, democratic innovations—such as deliberative minipublics or participatory budgeting—can be used to supplement electoral systems so that they function more democratically. By democratic innovations, we will mean (a) practices and institutions that function to deepen or widen democracy in one or more of its dimensions (empowered inclusion, collective agenda and will formation, and collective decision capacities), and (b) fall outside of the older, legacy institutions of representative democracy, particularly electoral democracy and ballot measures. Democratic innovations are effective for empowering the inclusion of citizens in policymaking, increasing public awareness and knowledge of issues and stake, and—in deepening democratic legitimacy—increasing decision-makers’ capacity to act on behalf of constituents. With respect to governance, school administrators tend to recognize the evidence that parent and community engagement works. Most schools and districts, particularly in urban centers, have an agency or office dedicated to communicating with parents and stakeholders—the challenge has been eliminating barriers to engagement, especially for people of color and folks of low-income households. With respect to policing, advocates have a list of actionable reforms, including banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants, body cameras, and greater accountability and punishment for officers who use excessive force.

The question is: How do we make reforms a reality and empower the inclusion of those most affected? While democratic innovations can deepen democratic legitimacy and—in so doing—increase elected politicians to act, elected politicians are often skeptical of participatory processes that threaten to expose them to people who are might be mobilized to show-up by anger or partisan campaigns to block policymaking. Furthermore, although democratic innovations can be effective vehicles for including the voices of those who are disempowered by social hierarchies, disempowered social group members are often the least likely to show up to participate in democratic innovations, even when they are invited. Finally, while advocates of police reform may have a list of actionable reforms, police bureaucracies might have little incentive to take up these reforms.

This panel brings together three papers that, together, offer insight into the question of how we can motivate elected politicians and unelected policymakers enact the kinds of reform necessary to reinvigorate democratic legitimacy. Our panel speaks directly to the Foundations call for proposals. Our panel addresses the question sources of threats to pluralism and proposes institutional and grass-roots political strategies for addressing these threats. Our panel includes both junior and senior scholars and represents a range of voices in the discipline: including co-authors, our panel is 50% women and 50% POC. Although theory-focused, our panel is interdisciplinary and links to the fields of political behavior (Collins’s analysis of public school engagement processes that improve low-income and minority parent participation includes an experiment) and ethnic and racial politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Why Might Elected Political Elites Reach for Democratic Innovations? - Mark E. Warren, University of British Columbia; Edana Beauvais, Simon Fraser University; Sule Yaylaci, University of Pennsylvania

• Can Deliberative Processes Improve Low-Income Minority Parent Engagement? - Jonathan Collins, Brown University

• Situating the Police in the Deliberative System - Brian M. Milstein, University of Limerick; Afsoun Afsahi, University of British Columbia

Chair

• James S. Fishkin Stanford University

Discussant

• Azucena Moran Tobar Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies