The sites of substantive democracy

Daryl Glaser

Chapter 7 in The Substance in Liberal Democracy, 2026, pp 121-136 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: One respect in which liberal democracy is held to be narrow is that it is located exclusively in the state and kept out of the private realm. It is confined even more narrowly, on some accounts, to the elected part of the state, removed from the state's administrative and technocratic arms. In consequence, domineering hierarchies in the technocratic and personal realms go unchallenged. To what extent can liberal democracy be made more substantive by being extended into realms that liberalism normally considers off-limits, including state bureaucracy, the family and the economic enterprise? In respect of state administration, ideologically open proceduralism prefers to maintain a separation of the political and administrative, limiting administrative democracy to pluralistic industrial relations and horizontal accountability among professionals. It subordinates the bureaucratic to the political-democratic and bottom-up ‘community’ input to top-down democratic control. Open proceduralism welcomes or accommodates both decentralisation within the state and democratisation of realms outside the state where organisational members are subject to collective power without effective exit options: its expectation, in such cases, is that open procedural democracy be replicated ‘all the way down’, on all relevant sites and scales. This holds, for example, in the case of economic enterprises. On the other hand, formal-procedural democracy should not be required for realms where intimacy and negotiation are more relevant modalities than impersonal rule or where associations are genuinely voluntary. In such cases subordinate members of associations are better protected as rights-bearing members of a larger political community than by associational self-government. Democratisation of non-state realms should also not be mandated in ways that preempt ideological choices.

Keywords: Bureaucracy and democracy; Decentralisation and democracy; Democratisation of the private sphere; Economic and enterprise democracy; Boundaries of the political (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035333011
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