Three Normative Models of Democracy

Abstract

I would like to sketch a proceduralist view of democracy and deliberative politics which differs in relevant aspects from both the liberal and the republican paradigm. Let me (1) remind you the opposite features of these two established models. I will then (2) introduce a new proceduralist conception by way of a critique of the "ethical overload" of the republican view. The last part of the paper further elaborates (3) the three normative models of democracy by comparing their corresponding images of state and society. (1) The Two Received Views of Democratic PoliticsAccording to the "liberal" or Lockean view, the democratic process acomplishes the task of programming the government in the interest of society, where the government is represented as an apparatus of public administration, and society as a market-structured network of interactions among private persons. Here politics (in the sense of the citizens' political will-formation) has the function of bundling together and pushing private interests against a government apparatus specializing in the administrative employment of political power for collective goals. On the "republican" view, however, politics involves more than this mediating function; it is rather constitutive for the processes of society as a whole. "Politics" is conceived as the reflective form of substantial ethical life, namely as the medium in which the members of somehow solitary communities become aware of their dependence on one another and, acting with full deliberation as citizens, further shape and develop existing relations of reciprocal recognition into an association of free and equal consociates under law. With this, the liberal architectonic of government and society undergoes an important change: in addition to the hierarchical regulations of the state and the decentralized regulations of the market, that is, besides administrative power and individual personal interests, solidarity and the orientation to the common good appear as a third source of social integration. In fact, this horizontal political will-formation aimed at mutual understanding

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