The State of Democratic Theory by Ian Shapiro

by Ian Shapiro

What should we expect from democracy, and how likely is it that democracies will live up to those expectations? In The State of Democratic Theory, Ian Shapiro offers a critical assessment of contemporary answers to these questions, lays out his distinctive alternative, and explores its implications for policy and political action.Some accounts of democracy's purposes focus on aggregating preferences; others deal with collective deliberation in search of the common good. Shapiro reveals the shortcomings of both, arguing instead that democracy should be geared toward minimizing domination throughout society. He contends that Joseph Schumpeter's classic defense of competitive democracy is a useful starting point for achieving this purpose, but that it stands in need of radical supplementation--both with respect to its operation in national political institutions and in its extension to other forms of collective association. Shapiro's unusually wide-ranging discussion also deals with the conditions that make democracy's survival more and less likely, with the challenges presented by ethnic differences and claims for group rights, and with the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.Ranging over politics, philosophy, constitutional law, economics, sociology, and psychology, this book is written in Shapiro's characteristic lucid style--a style that engages practitioners within the field while also opening up the debate to newcomers.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Science, Political Science

Paperback

First published August 18, 2003

About the author

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. In democratic theory, he has argued that democracy's value comes primarily from its potential to limit domination rather than, as is conventionally assumed, from its operation as a system of participation, representation, or preference aggregation. In debates about social scientific methods, he is chiefly known for rejecting prevalent theory-driven and method-driven approaches in favor of starting with a problem and then devising suitable methods to study it.

Reviews

[Will S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite finding Shapiro's introductory text, The Moral Foundations of Politics, the best of all introductions to political philosophy, I found this work disappointing. The book's scope is much much narrower than the title or description implies. The book is barely 150 pages, and of that, only the first 3 of the really 5 chapters (he counts his 6-page conclusion as a "chapter") are about the title of the book. That means in 68 pages (10-78) he is going to lay out the field of democratic theory as he sees it and then offer an alternative view. As one would expect from such an ambitious task, the discussions are routinely cursory and too often superficial. I am only going to review those 3 chapters on democratic theory because I lack the knowledge to make informed comments about the 4th and 5th chapters (The 4th is on democratic transitions and consolidations and the 5th is on why democracies do not lead to more redistribution of resources).

He surveys the entire state of democratic theory in the 1st, 25-page chapter(!). Far from the state of democratic theory writ large, the chapter is composed of replying to about 5 authors in the "aggregative" and "deliberative" traditions of democracy. The first section of that first chapter, which critiques aggregative democracy, was more satisfying to me because even though it did not engage with much literature, his critique of the tradition seemed to get at deep, structural problems for the very idea of democracy acting as an aggregative function. I am not a fan of deliberative democracy at all, but I found his discussion of deliberative democracy in the 2nd section deeply wanting. He has interesting things to say about the authors he discusses, but the idea that you have rebutted a view as broad and heterogeneous as deliberative democracy by discussing TWO books (James Fishkin's on deliberative polling and Gutmann and Thompson's Democracy and Disagreement) borders on lazy, especially since the bulk of the section on deliberative democracy is a copy-and-paste of a paper he wrote about Gutmann and Thompson's book from years before, "Enough Deliberation: Politics is about Power and Interests." It's a sharp critique, but only of their book.

His discussion of the value of deliberation from a realist perspective in chapter 2 is the most satisfying of the book because it is both (as far as I can tell) a genuinely novel and interesting view on the value of deliberation, and because the scope of the topic seems appropriate for the length of the chapter, which only chapter 5 came close to also achieving)

Chapter 3 presents his alternative to aggregative and deliberative democracy, but again, the discussion is so brief, so cursory, that I took away much less than I expected. He has several very interesting ideas about the way Schumpeter's conception of democracy thinks about political power in importantly different ways than liberal constitutionalism, but there is no detail. The disparity in detail and commitment between his view presented in 3rd chapter and the views he criticizes in the 1st chapter frankly struck me as an unfair double-standard. Gutmann and Thompson's book presents almost 400 pages of detailed argument about what they are committing themselves to and how it would play out via very concrete, actual cases. Shapiro in turn picks their argument apart (for good reasons) and then offers about 10 pages laying out an alternative with maybe 1 real example of his view, and nothing like the theoretical comprehensiveness of any of the views he criticizes. His view is so vague and nebulous that it is hard to know what to make of it outside of attending more concretely the danger of power in a theory of democratic politics. He spends more time in a chapter that purports to lay out his alternative conception of democracy on how to make sense of judicial review on his framework than the framework itself.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tremendously influential and important book, and if I hadn't read it so carefully and repeatedly, and written about (what i consider) its shortcomings at some length, I'd almost certainly give it 5 stars. This ranking is probably unfair. He's a leader in taking democratic theory in a far more productive direction than the ubiquitous "deliberative democracy" that's so popular with Germans and Ivy Leaguers these days.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book, well worth reading for any political scientist or student of democratic theory. I found his discussion of aggregative and deliberative democracy and democratic competition especially illuminating.