Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action

Abstract

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory.

Representative Democracy and Social Equality

“… 8 This concept of arbitrary power is similar to concepts traveling under the same name in the literature on republicanism (Ingham and Lovett 2019; Laborde 2008; Lovett 2010; Pettit 1997; 2012; Skinner 1998). My definition is not intended to pick out just the same concept republicans have in mind, although there may be significant overlap in the concepts’ extensions. …”

Good governance: Contemporary issues in political philosophy

“…Public control presupposes that it is the public that monitors, and makes sure that the government conforms to its will, whatever it is, determined in media res . Republicans face real difficulties in explaining how such control is possible by ‘the public’, without one part thereby dominating the rest (Ingham & Lovett, 2019; List & Valentini, 2016, p. 1063; Lovett & Pettit, 2018; Simpson, 2017, 2019).…”

Domination and enforcement: The contingent and non-ideal relation between state and freedom

“…Lovett and Pettit have responded to this challenge by arguing that the domination of a potentially coordinated collective depends on the collective’s having the capacity to interfere, and that a suitably ‘resistive’ people can have the capacity to control the state without having the capacity to interfere arbitrarily with any individual (2019; see also Ingham and Lovett, 2019). Thus, they think, domination can be eliminated (or reduced) when a republican state is controlled by its subjects.…”

“…It is not clear that it really is possible for a people to have the kinds of common awareness of commitment to the general good and strategies for pursuing collective control needed to adequately control the state without also having the counterfactual ability to turn these to use for more nefarious ends. If the people are poised to act against an unconstitutional government, on Lovett and Pettit’s account it will be ‘a matter of common awareness that protesters against such a government are likely to be backed by others and…[there will be] civic groups with the capacity to organize strategies of resistance’ (2019: 382). Such a common awareness will presumably be an awareness of a shared commitment to a constitutional republican form of government that adequately tracks the interests of the people as a whole.…”

“…This challenge, in claiming that domination is unavoidable, state or no state, would, if successful, show that the inevitability of domination in a stateless society does not demonstrate the necessary superiority of state society. Pettit and Frank Lovett (2019) have offered a response to this challenge, but, although it may save the coherence of the ideal of non-domination as such, it does not save the a priori defence of the state (see also Ingham and Lovett, 2019). Nevertheless, there is a way that republicans could respond to the challenge that might seem to identify a relevant difference between stateless society and state society.…”