I started to try to write a decent response to this and then I decided I don’t have the time, the energy, or perhaps the requisite ability. (I also don’t have The Priority of Democracy in front of me any more, because I returned it to the library. I did not buy it, which I’m sure will please the authors. [Sorry, bad humor.]) When a thread begins to feel like a cross between a maze and a treadmill, it may be time to check out. I note that the posters aren’t participating in the threads, which may or may not mean something, but I’m out of this thread.

In Chapter 9, Knight and Johnson hold that the pragmatist justification of democracy is as follows: “the conditions of causal efficacy are the same as the conditions of normative legitimacy”

That is the most complicated way of saying “the ends justify the means” that I have ever encountered.

Not necessarily, I don’t think, unfortunately. A good counterexample is the paradox of thrift–even if we communicate with one another plenty, and even if we all completely understand that a lot of private saving is a crippling economic drag in the aggregate, we’ll still go ahead and save pretty much the same amount (what we can afford and feel comfortable with). Valuing wealth at any social cost would be pathological, but we can hardly fault people for valuing their personal safety and protection from ruin.

Even once we recognize there’s a paradox-resolving solution achievable by state policy (I dunno, a public relief fund to replace the need for private savings), we have to make sure that (sufficiently many) policymakers feel it is necessary for them to make the change and provide that policy. If not enough of those policymakers feel personally responsible for seeing the change through, it still won’t happen (even if the policymakers feel inclined to support the policy).

And crap, ‘feel personally responsible for’ is much better than ‘scared to do less than’ at conveying the need for individual state agents to overcome the institutional inertia imposed by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, or whatever

It feels like “systematically ineffective” is a little ambiguous, in that it’s not clear to me how bad things would have to get before we identify the democratic process of election, rather than a particular sequence of elected governments, to be the problem. I guess there’s some kind of presentism underlying my feeling that we’re pretty much already there, but setting that feeling aside, I’m left completely clueless about where the threshold might be.

On Knight and Johnson’s account, there is no reason to grant democracy any special priority in such a case; its legitimacy derives from its causal efficacy, and when that falls short, a rival might and probably ought to take its place.

I’m not so sure. You usually get the best social-welfare-improving changes, and always get the best social-welfare-maintaining resistances to change, from a government that would be scared to do anything less. (My use of ‘would be’ feels pretty important, since it accommodates situations such as a newly-voted-in party, flush with new power, determined to make sweeping welfare-improving changes; those folks might not be consciously experiencing any fear/apprehension as they recraft policy, but they would be afraid of deserting their supporters and their cause, if for some reason they contemplated the possibility. Without the verb-tense pedantry, I’d have to swap out ‘scared’ for ‘motivated’ or something.)

The strange thing to me is that this fear-based assessment implies activists are up against government agents hostile to welfare, but the underlying principle still seems to be true even when each individual government agent has a strong genuine interest in promoting social welfare, is reasonably receptive to activists’ guidance, etc.

Democracy at least sets a floor for this scaredness, giving a constant thing to be scared by (getting voted out of power). So even if you’re not getting welfare-improving or welfare-maintaining policy from democracy, democracy still gives you some (nonviolent) leverage to scare policymakers with. Would any other form of governance set a floor (guarantee some nonzero minimum amount of leverage) in that way?

K&J argue that when everyone can make his/her voice heard and listened to — where there is ‘equal opportunity for political influence’ — the resulting ‘robust’ democracy will yield effective institutional performance. Short version: what justifies robust democracy is that it ‘works’.

There are at least two problems or questions with that. One problem is: how do you define “effective” and “works”?, which is the issue Bruce Wilder raised in his comment. The second problem, raised by Melissa Schwartzberg’s post, is: What if, on some reasonable definition of “effective,” a robust, inclusive democracy seems not to be so effective? From the OP:

Yet imagine, for instance, that the outcomes of a democracy at some point in time seemed to be systematically ineffective, giving institutional responsibilities to bodies that were incompetent or subject to capture by sinister interests. On Knight and Johnson’s account, there is no reason to grant democracy any special priority in such a case; its legitimacy derives from its causal efficacy, and when that falls short, a rival might and probably ought to take its place.

In other words, if you tie the legitimacy of democracy strongly to ‘effectiveness,’ and effectiveness fails, you have a problem, assuming you consider yourself a democrat (small “d”). You need another basis of legitimacy. Scott P suggested that “the legitimacy of democracy comes from the simple fact that no one is a better judge of a person’s self-interest than that person herself.” Another, not necessarily competing, basis of legitimacy might be some notion of individual equality in rights among Enlightenment-style “free and equal rational beings.”

So a question, Mao, would be: what do you propose as the basis of democracy’s legitimacy?

And there are many models where individual preference leads to suboptimal result for all. For example: people may prefer to live in a racially diverse neighborhood, but they may also strongly prefer not to be a small minority in their neighborhood. Well, it turns out, the most stable equilibrium in this case is a total segregation. Go figure.

The many (hoi polloi), of whom none is individually an excellent (spoudaios) man, nevertheless can, when joined together, be better than those [the excellent few], not as individuals but all together [hôs sumpantas], just as potluck [sumphorêta] dinners can be better than those provided at one man’s expense. For, there being many, each person possesses a constituent part [morion] of virtue [aretê] and practical reason [phronêsis], and when they have come together, the multitude [plêthos] is like a single person (hôsper hena anthrôpon), yet many-footed and many-handed and possessing many sense-capacities [aisthêseis], so it is likewise [like a single person with multiple excellences] as regards to its facets of character [ta êthê] and its intelligence [dianoia]. This is why the many [hoi polloi] judge better in regard to musical works and those of the poets, for some judge a particular part [ti morion], while all of them judge the whole [panta de pantes]. (Politics 3.1281a42-b10. Trans. C. Lord, adapted).

A prisoner’s dilemma arises mainly because the prisoners can’t communicate with each other (in the classic ‘one-shot’ version of the game). Democratic deliberation obviously involves communication, so when deliberation is operating reasonably well — an important qualification — a prisoner’s dilemma situation shouldn’t arise.

This doesn’t sound right. Every individual citizen is probably in a prisoner’s dilemma situation: what their, narrowly understood, ‘self-interest’ dictates is far, very far away from what their collective interest is.

You follow your ‘self-interest’, you lose. And it’s very easy to convince you to follow it, because to give it up you need to trust some people. And you probably don’t have a good reason to trust them.

If one believes that the object of good government is to act in the interest of all of its citizens as best as possible, then government has to be controlled by those who understand the self-interest of the citizens, which is each citizen, individually.