Substantiating democratic process

Daryl Glaser

Chapter 6 in The Substance in Liberal Democracy, 2026, pp 99-120 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: For some critics of liberal procedural democracy's formalism, the way to make democracy more substantial is by making it variously more empowering, more deliberative, or more developmental as a decision-making process. This chapter considers various institutional proposals to render democracy more direct, more participatory and more deliberative. In the process, it considers schemes such as referendums, assembly democracy, conciliar democracy and sortition. It explores the terms on which liberal democracy, conceived as ideologically open proceduralism, can welcome or accommodate such proposals. Liberal democracy can welcome, it finds, proposals that reproduce open procedural democracy's key elements within their own designs. This is termed ‘internal accommodation’. But liberal democracy can also ‘externally’ accommodate, on various grounds and terms, models that are not internally procedurally democratic. For liberal democratic theory, democracy is an institutionally plural field, allowing for a variety of competing democratic values to be expressed. Even so, there are reasons why electoral representative democracy (ideally based on proportional representation) should enjoy primacy within the field. Electoral representative democracy is the mechanism best suited to composite as opposed to parochial or sectional citizenship and hence the democratic form best equipped to handle ‘big’ ideological questions. Proportional representation is in turn the version of electoral democracy best suited to ensuring the fair representation of ideological opinion. Liberal democracy permits (even encourages) a plural institutional field, but the field is necessarily asymmetrically pluralist, with electoral representative democracy on top.

Keywords: Participatory democracy; Direct democracy; Deliberative democracy; Developmental democracy; Electoral representative democracy; Substantive democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035333011
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