On the Egalitarian Value of Electoral Democracy

Abstract

Within democratic theory, electoral competition is typically associated with minimalist and realist views of democracy. In contrast, this article argues for a reinterpretation of electoral competition as an important element of an egalitarian theory of democracy. Current relational egalitarian theories, in focusing on the equalization of individual power-over, present electoral institutions as in tension with equality. Against this view, the article contends that electoral competition can foster equality by incentivizing the equalization of cooperative power. The article develops the normative category of equal opportunity to access cooperative power and shows how it can generate an egalitarian defense of electoral competition. Yet this ideal is not an affirmation of the status quo. Rather, it points to the need to reform electoral systems to make them more competitive and so more likely to foster cooperative power, as well as reforms to provide direct support to associations like unions that equalize cooperative power.

Introduction

While, on paper, consolidated democracies continue to have working electoral institutions, observers have identified deep rot in the effective functioning of those institutions. American political scientists point to an oligarchization of democracy, as political parties seem systematically biased toward the interests of wealthier voters, who also enjoy unequal access to politicians and other channels of informal influence (Gilens and Page 2014; Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013). European critics, in turn, have long worried about the “cartelization” of political party systems and the shift toward “post-democracy,” characterized by high levels of political disengagement and apathy combined with ritualized but circumscribed electoral competition (Crouch 2004; Mair 2013). In response, democratic theorists continue their long infatuation with extra-electoral modes of political empowerment, such as recent calls for non-electoral models of “open democracy” (Landemore 2020). Behind these worries is the deeper sense that electoral competition is an inherently elitist mode of organizing political power. Not surprisingly, then, there has also been a renewed interest in elitist critiques of electoral democracy (Piano 2019).

Notably, this skepticism about the relationship between democracy and electoral competition has been fueled by some of the most ambitious recent defenses of democracy. A range of theorists have argued that democracy is valuable because it realizes a demanding form of relational equality that requires the equalization of political power (Anderson 1999; Brighouse 1996; Christiano 2008; Ingham 2022; Kolodny 2014a, 2014b; Viehoff 2014; Wilson 2019). While advocates of this egalitarian interpretation of democracy attempt to derive a theory of representative democracy, critics have argued that the real-world power differences between representatives and ordinary voters pose a decisive problem for egalitarian interpretations of democracy (Landa and Pevnick 2018, 2020). Whatever electoral competition is about, then, it is not equality. Rather, competition realizes some other value, like agency (Kirshner 2022), or its significance resides in its instrumental value, whether that is the rotation of political power, the resistance to capture and concentrated power, or the selection of elites that can deliver good policy outcomes (Bagg 2018b; Landa and Pevnick 2020; Przeworski 1999; Rosenbluth and Shapiro 2018).

In contrast, this article argues that while electoral competition between political parties is typically associated with minimalist and instrumentalist accounts of democracy, such competition can importantly contribute to the realization of relational equality. For relational egalitarians, the value of democracy resides in how it prevents the formation of social hierarchies by equalizing the distribution of political power. I contend that theorists of the egalitarian structure of democracy fail to fully grasp the equalizing features of electoral competition because they have an unduly narrow and individualist conception of power. The article contends that in shifting from the equalization of power at the level of individuals to the equalization of power at the level of groups, theorists can better discern the egalitarian features of electoral democracy. With an expanded understanding of the sort of power democracy is meant to equalize, electoral competition need not necessarily be a deviation from an ideal of equal influence, a second-best compromise. Indeed, electoral competition can, under certain conditions, augment political equality beyond the formal equalization of power implied in voting rights. While equal voting rights realize political equality by providing an equal probability of being the decisive voter, thereby ensuring that no other individual exercises power over you, electoral competition, suitably structured, can help in the equalization of cooperative power.

To get at this, the article builds on recent work on the concept of power, challenging the reduction of political power to individualized power-over (Abizadeh 2021b, 2023; Klein 2022). It then proposes a normative criterion to supplant that of equalizing power-over: equal opportunity to access cooperative power. Based on this, the following argues that electoral competition can itself incentivize the ongoing organization of societal interests and, so, the renewal of democracy’s infrastructure.

The article proceeds as follows: first, it examines egalitarian justifications of democracy and the recurrent challenge the egalitarian justification faces in defending electoral competition. It then shows that this is because egalitarian democrats reduce power to individual-level control, neglecting the importance of cooperative power. The article then uses the idea of cooperative power to articulate the egalitarian value of electoral competition, which provides incentives to political actors to foster cooperative power. It then discusses the extent to which this perspective can critique existing electoral democracies and the sort of reforms to electoral competition that follow.

What Does It Mean to Equalize Power?

There is a puzzle at the heart of much current democratic theory. A body of recent work has argued persuasively that democracy is valuable, in part, because it is an important constituent of social equality (Anderson 1999; Brighouse 1996; Christiano 2008; Kolodny 2014a, 2014b; Viehoff 2014; Wilson 2019). Democracy—and especially one-person, one-vote—enshrines a principle of equality at the heart of the organization of political power. While there is some disagreement about how exactly to connect equal voting rights to social equality, the most compelling argument points to the idea that equal voting rights ensure that no one exercises certain forms of power over others, such that laws are not shaped by the superiority of one individual or group over others (Viehoff 2014). These views, then, can explain the intrinsic value of democratic procedures and show how democracy lends authority to the law.

This work has productively clarified the conceptual and normative basis of democracy’s value (Ziliotti 2020). Furthermore, it has refocused democratic theory on the problem of the organization of power. Rather than hoping to transform power into reason through deliberation (Bagg 2018a) or viewing power as something that must be contested and challenged rather than exercised (Medearis 2015), the egalitarian interpretation of democracy has emphasized that a core aspect of democracy is the relatively equal distribution of political power. However, the egalitarian view runs up against the obvious fact that individuals in democracies almost never exercise equal direct influence on political outcomes. This work seems to redeem democracy only at the expense of dismissing almost all actually existing democracies—with their elections and political parties—as falling markedly short of the ideal (Landa and Pevnick 2018, 2020). This is not to say that egalitarian democrats do not endorse various forms of representative and electoral democracy in their work. Rather, the worry is that their underlying theoretical commitments undermine that explicit endorsement in ways that have only recently been addressed, although with mixed success.

In democracies, individuals very rarely, if ever, vote directly on laws. They elect representatives with wide latitude to exercise their own power in determining the law. This is not just an empirical departure from an ideal of delegate representation because of weak mandates or unequal forms of access and influence (although they are also that too). The very structure of representative government militates against the sort of equality that democracy is meant to realize. It is unclear, as a result, in what way the principle of one person, one vote, when exercised in a representative democracy, helps to realize relationships of equality among citizens.

So, while these relational egalitarian views have presented justifications for things like equal suffrage and one person, one vote, they have not generated a distinctively egalitarian justification for organizing democracy around electoral competition between political parties. By distinctively egalitarian, I mean a justification according to which such electoral competition independently contributes to some sort of equal relationship among citizens. In most accounts of party democracy, electoral competition is framed as a necessary departure from the egalitarian features of democracy, one dictated by certain features of the modern state and modern politics. Thus, Manin (1995) argues that election is a type of “mixed regime” combining elements of democracy and aristocracy. Some scholars propose that electoral democracy represents a hybrid of epistocratic and egalitarian principles (Landa and Pevnick 2020). In general, electoral competition is associated with “realist” theories of democracy that downplay democracy’s egalitarian character in favor of principles like the rotation of power.

Current egalitarian theories of democracy cannot provide a positive justification for political parties and electoral competition because they focus on equalizing only a narrow type of power. My contention is that if we adopt a more expansive understanding of power, then we can provide a more positive, egalitarian justification of political parties and electoral competition as institutions that help equalize a certain type of power. Namely, political parties and electoral competition are institutional mechanisms that contribute to the equalization of cooperative power, which in turn is an important part of sustaining relationships of equality.

Before getting to that alternative, we should be clear on how egalitarian democrats connect social equality to equal power. In the first place, they do not contend that equality requires equal political power, simply speaking. The idea that an equal distribution of effective power, understood as the ability to realize one’s aims in a social context, is necessary to live in an egalitarian society has faced two sorts of challenges. One is about the desirability of the ideal itself. The other is whether it can be realized in contemporary societies.

First, the feasibility. Think of those inequalities that arise because some are more charismatic or eloquent. In a democracy, such individuals will be able to exercise disproportionate power. What are the mechanisms that can eliminate such inequalities? How could a political community feasibly ensure that no one is born more eloquent or charismatic or that they cannot translate those inequalities into differences in political power?

Second, the desirability. Surely, the argument goes, some sorts of inequality of power are unobjectionable. There is nothing objectionable, for example, about those who are more knowledgeable about a topic ending up with a disproportionate influence as a result of their persuasion. Moreover, to fully equalize such power would entail unjustified restrictions on free association and free speech. Part of a democracy is that some people will acquire more power by, for example, speaking at protests and so on, and so ruling out such inequalities will require restricting activities that, in other ways, we deem necessary and valuable in a democratic society.

In response to these problems, advocates of an egalitarian interpretation of democracy have abandoned the idea that democracy requires equality of power simpliciter. Rather, democracy, they say, requires equal opportunity for influence over political decision-making (Brighouse 1996). This is compatible with some individuals having more power due to their qualities or, moreover, their disposition to take advantage of these opportunities. This requires, first, that certain background inequalities are not so stark as to systematically deny individuals equal opportunity for influence. Second, it requires one-person, one-vote voting procedures that ensure every individual has an equal probability of being a decisive voter (Kolodny 2014b). This protects equal opportunity for influence even though the actual probability of influencing a decision is near zero. Yet, while this shift rescues the egalitarian defense of democracy from the previously mentioned feasibility concerns, it appears to lead to a new one insofar as it seems that any form of representative or party democracy will undermine the equal opportunity for political influence. Under any reasonably realistic description of representation, elected politicians will possess a wide latitude of power over political decision-making, thus undermining equal opportunity for political influence.

Here, though, we should distinguish between two questions that an egalitarian theory of democracy could answer. First, what is the value of equality, and how do democratic institutions realize it? And second, how does the realization of the value of equality explain our obligation to obey the outcomes of a democratic decision? For authors like Kolodny and Viehoff, part of the appeal of the egalitarian view of democracy is that it can explain our obligation to obey the law. In contrast, they argue, instrumentalist views of democracy fail to explain why we should obey the law when disobeying it will help maximize justice. The fact that certain procedures constitute the value of equality explains the authority and legitimacy of a legal order, even if it does not fully meet some external standard of justice. And this explains why they focus on individual-level equal power: for me as an individual to have obligations to obey the law, procedures must treat me as a free and equal citizen whose views are individually chosen and not the result of group membership.

My argument only assumes that equality is valuable, and we have an interest in realizing equality. Put differently, we can have reasons to support democracy because we care about equality that is independent of our reasons to follow the law. While I am skeptical that democracy also explains our obligation to obey the law, my argument does not hang on any particular view of the sources of legitimacy and authority. As a result, my view can avoid some of the worries recently expressed by Kirshner (2022). Kirshner argues that egalitarian theories are flawed for their unrealistic focus on individual-level equality of influence, as do I. But he then concludes that, when examining electoral competition, we should move away from equality altogether, instead focusing on how electoral competition and the practice of political opposition help realize the value of agency. Yet this comes with serious costs, especially insofar as it seems many forms of political agency, such as the ability to express your political views in public, can be achieved in systems where ordinary people lack any effective power—agency without teeth. By separating out the question of legitimacy from the question of equality and by shifting from individual-level agency to group-level cooperative power, we can then see how electoral competition can help realize political equality.

Advocates of the equal opportunity for influence view have attempted, in a variety of ways, to reconcile it with electoral competition. The most straightforward approach is to argue that representatives should act like delegates, which is proposed by Kolodny (2014b). Yet the delegation view fails for several related reasons that extend beyond its idealized assumptions. These all have to do with the fact that electoral outcomes implicitly bundle together multiple, different decisions over time. Indeed, an ideal of strict mandates would be incompatible with the reality of electoral competition between parties, where the parties, to some extent, bind individual politicians via their internal decision-making procedures. But more fundamentally, delegation models fail to contend with the fact that representatives will be making choices over multiple future decisions. Thus, it is unclear how delegation preserves a relationship of equality between both those who voted for a delegate candidate and those who voted against them, when those who voted for the candidate will be more likely to realize their wishes, not only over a single decision that has been delegated, but over a series of only loosely defined future decisions.

Egalitarian democrats have thus generally moved away from the model of delegation. Lovett (2021) proposes that we can reconcile egalitarianism with electoral competition insofar as representatives are under popular control. The idea is that the public has a broad view of political issues. They can exercise virtual control over representatives insofar as representatives tend to track those broad views of the public. This is realized through electoral sanctions if representatives stray too far from the popular view. This argument is too permissive. First, as Lovett admits, the public often, at a high level of aggregation, does not have determinate views on many issues. As a result, we just have to ask whether politicians would have been under their control if the public had a view (what Lovett calls virtual control). But this gives politicians wide latitude to ignore interests and issues if they are not fully articulate and neglects the question of whether electoral institutions are encouraging such ongoing organization of interests. Second, Lovett then downplays the value of central ingredients of electoral democracy, such as party discipline, which can contribute to coordinating individuals’ political choices so that, overall, they are more empowered (as we will see momentarily). Lovett (2021) notes evidence from the United States that, while more liberal districts elect Democrats and more conservative districts elect Republicans, “conditional on legislator party, there’s very little association between constituent ideology and how legislators vote” (192). However, it is unclear that it is most empowering for each individual representative to be maximally responsive to the individual policy views of their constituents. This neglects the empowering effects of national party coordination that can rank policy goals and make it more likely that some subset of individuals’ policy preferences will be enacted.

As an alternative to popular control, Ingham (2022) suggests that what is important for social equality is equality of arbitrary power. Elected politicians, on this view, could potentially exercise non-arbitrary power so their additional effective power does not create a problematic social hierarchy. Power is arbitrary when it can be exercised at the discretion of an individual, while power is non-arbitrary when “the constraints on an agent’s power suffice to produce a shared expectation that the agent will adopt an impersonal strategy—i.e., a strategy that is guided by shared and public choice criteria and not idiosyncratic personal preferences” (Ingham 2022, 6). Ingham argues that there are several possible ways in which representatives could be constrained such that their power is non-arbitrary, including that “there may be a common expectation that the elected official will follow a strategy of doing whatever the constituents want,” that the representative may be responsive to retrospective voting such as to choose “whichever actions he believes will lead to the outcomes associated with good governance” and therefore encourage reelection or even a trustee model: “if the incentives are strong enough to create a common expectation that the elected official will act as a trustee—supporting decisions if and only if, in their sincere judgement, the decision advances the common interest—then all the better, and in that case the representative’s power is adequately constrained” (Ingham 2022, 10).

Yet again, this is too permissive. As Ingham admits, under a political meritocracy or aristocracy, political leaders may, at least in theory, be similarly constrained by things other than electoral sanctions to pursue an impersonal strategy. Ingham’s theory thus severs any constitutive connection between democratic institutions that distribute power relatively equally and social equality. One result of this is that Ingham’s principle of equal arbitrary power may be best realized not by reducing the arbitrariness of elected officials’ power but by reducing the scope of anyone’s arbitrary power—such as through supposedly anonymous mechanisms like markets and the rule of law. Indeed, this problem besets all theories that focus on equalizing individual-level power understood as the equal probability of being decisive or equal arbitrary power, which would be realized as much by a random lottery that selects a single voter and makes them decisive as by majority voting procedures (Saunders 2010). Some relational egalitarians, then, have proposed abandoning the idea of equalizing political power altogether in favor of other concerns, such as equal due consideration (Wilson 2019).

The Importance of Cooperative Power

Egalitarian democrats, then, start with a demanding ideal of the equalization of political power but then face a dilemma: either abandon electoral institutions as hopelessly inegalitarian or water down the ideal such that it loses its critical force. Yet, I want to now argue that this debate has begun from an unduly restricted understanding of the meaning of power and that it is the narrow, individualized model of power that leads egalitarian democrats into this bind. By taking power to be primarily individualized control, egalitarian theories of democracy have too quickly moved past the ideal of equalizing power in general and toward the narrower focus on equalizing opportunity for influence or equal a priori decisiveness via voting procedures. At the core of the individualized conception of power is the idea that we should evaluate an individual’s power as the ability to influence or control an outcome, holding constant the preferences and actions of others. To take a classic example, Brighouse (1996) defines the “influence” of an individual (which I take to be interchangeable with power) as “the probability we would assign to their getting their way, if they and everyone else engaged in political activity, and we knew nothing of what any other citizens wanted” (119). Put differently, an individual has power to the extent that their ability to realize their goals is modally robust to counterfactual worlds in which other participants acted differently. The extent of an individual’s power refers to their probability of realizing their goals even in potential worlds where they face resistance or counter-vailing power.

Such views rule out the idea that being assisted by others increases your power, unless one can determine whether that assistance occurs. That is, according to this view, one does not become more powerful just because others happen to assist you in realizing your goals. Rather, you can only be rightly described as having more power if you can intentionally control other people’s propensity to assist you. Yet, there are good philosophical reasons to think this narrow view of power is incorrect. Abizadeh (2021b) has recently argued that this “standard view” of power fails to account for the causally overdetermined exercise of power. Those are scenarios where each individual’s contribution is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause the outcome yet causally contributed to the outcome. For example, if it requires two people to move a rock, and three people together move the rock, no individual’s contribution was either necessary or sufficient to move the rock (if they stopped, the other two would successfully move it). As a result, no one individual exercises control over moving the rock, yet each individual gains the power to move the rock by working together. This insight can be extended to voting scenarios where individuals are all collectively disposed to vote for a common outcome even without explicit joint intentions—in such cases, another individual who also supports that outcome will see their power increased given the increased probability of realizing their desired outcome.

Similarly, I have argued that there is a form of power that arises from cooperation and the organization of collective activities (Klein 2022). Such power cannot be distributed at the individual level as it will not be modally robust to the activities of others—rather, it presupposes some ongoing willingness of others to aid with shared goals or, more weakly, shared purposes. Thus, I argue for the need to conceptualize equal power at a more systemic level regarding whether the broad structure of political institutions and social cooperation contribute to egalitarian feedback loops that enhance such cooperative power. In contrast to Abizadeh’s theory, I contend that such cooperation requires, in the long run, the ability of cooperators to influence the terms of cooperation, even as in the short run those terms may be given. Abizadeh goes further in arguing someone can have power just in virtue of social structures being organized to benefit their interests. For this reason, while the following develops the recent turn toward theorizing power at the level of groups, I emphasize the need for active cooperation.

If this is correct, then the relational egalitarian defense of democracy has too quickly abandoned the problem of equalizing power. It may be that equality of individual-level power is both infeasible and undesirable. But that does not mean we should turn to equalizing a priori decisiveness or arbitrary power in collective decision-making. In fairness, egalitarian defenders of democracy also oppose the existence of large inequalities in resources that may translate into inequalities of power and influence. Such other inequalities must be sufficiently small so as not to compromise the forms of equality realized by electoral institutions.

But my suggestion is that part of the relational egalitarian character of democracy resides in how it equalizes cooperative power. This egalitarian aspect of democracy is compatible with political parties and electoral competition in a way that equal a priori decisiveness is not. It does not have to resort to empirically unconvincing models of delegated authority or popular control to move from individual-level equal distribution of power to representation and electoral competition.

Concerns about this sort of equality are a familiar part of everyday political vocabulary. Thus, we speak of the power of corporations or the rich and the relative powerlessness of everyday people, despite the existence of formally equal voting rights. In America, racial hierarchies are sustained by, among other things, forms of coordination and cooperation among white Americans that enhance their effective political power. Or we recognize the power of certain highly organized interest groups, such as the pro-gun lobby in America. In none of these cases do we seem to be talking about power as something like a priori equal decisiveness or equal arbitrary power. Now, one could plausibly object that this is because the members of some groups have additional wealth or resources that undermine equal opportunity for influence. Because of their access to additional wealth (or perhaps social resources such that their views are taken more seriously), individual members of those groups would have additional influence regardless of what other members of the group choose. But that seems implausible as an exclusive explanation. Members of those groups—the wealthy, white Americans, the National Rifle Association—also gain power because of the ongoing willingness of others to cooperate with them in their endeavors. Yet, it would be a mistake to focus on the individual level. Individuals gain power as members of these groups, and so individual-level power is always partially determined by their relevant group affiliations and social locations. Similarly, workers, black Americans, or gun regulation advocates may gain power through their own cooperative endeavors, thereby becoming more equal both with each other and with members of other groups.

So, it seems participants in politics have an intuitive understanding of this sort of equality, if only via experiences of inequality. How should we conceptualize the sort of equality of power that is obtained through cooperation? Broadly, we can say two individuals have equal cooperative power if the politically salient groups to which they belong have equal opportunity to coordinate their members’ political choices and so equal relative ability, on the whole, to realize political outcomes that track their members’ interests and goals.

A few things to note about this definition: as with equality of influence, the relative form of equality here is opportunity to access cooperative power. Political equality requires individuals to have roughly equal opportunities to politically cooperate with others, which entails having an institutional context in which such cooperation is facilitated (more on this later). But unlike equal opportunity for influence, equal, cooperative power is not goal insensitive. That is, it does not give people equal probability of realizing their goals, whatever they may be, if they choose to take advantage of the opportunities for influence afforded them. We cannot say two people have equal cooperative power if they both have equal chances of realizing their goals, whatever they may be, through the cooperation of others, as that would seem to require some sort of positive duty of others to cooperate with individuals with idiosyncratic goals. Thus, while equal a priori and individualized voting power seem to be valuable because they are goal-insensitive, cooperative power gives an individual power only relative to certain goals or outcomes—namely, those where they can find cooperators. Rather than a priori potential decisiveness over an indeterminate range of outcomes, you gain a posteriori effectiveness over a specific set of outcomes in part determined by others’ beliefs and desires.

How do we determine which goals are relevant for equalizing cooperative power? Here, as Abizadeh (2021a) argues, we can examine individuals’ location in the social structure, which will determine what goals and interests they will be likely to value and pursue. But in contrast to Abizadeh, I do not think it is right to say an individual has power just by virtue of benefiting from structural processes to which they make no causal contribution. Rather, in my view, they gain power through their active participation in a cooperative endeavor, although they may gain power that is disproportionate to their contribution precisely due to the cooperative structure of the activity.

Because of this emphasis on the goal relativity of cooperative power, advocates of an individual-level opportunity for influence or a priori decisiveness could argue that while having people cooperate with you to realize shared goals may be helpful, it cannot be a constituent element of democratic political equality. As we noted previously, one of the arguments made by advocates of individual-level equality is that, by equalizing individual power, democratic institutions treat us as free and equal citizens, and so we have obligations to follow the outcomes of such procedures. Yet this cannot be a decisive counterargument because equality of individual-level power itself depends on certain forms of cooperative power as a background condition and so would itself be vulnerable to the same worry.

To see this, consider the structure of the equal opportunity for influence view. People relate as equals if they all have the equal opportunity to influence an outcome, which translates, in a collective decision-making procedure, to everyone having an equal probability of being the decisive voter. This ensures that the legal norms that structure social relationships are grounded in relations of equality rather than subordination and hierarchy (Viehoff 2014). In those situations, we can say everyone has equal power because everyone’s position, regardless of what it is, has equal a priori probability of becoming law, and so their individualized equal power is not dependent on the cooperative efforts of others. Of course, the actual effectiveness of individuals will be determined by coalitions, bargaining, and so on. But the point is that their underlying equality is preserved by the structure of one-person, one-vote.

For a priori equal decisiveness to preserve relational equality, we have to assume that the outcome of a fair procedure will be enforced as law simply because it is the result of the procedure. Yet more realistically, the possibility of enforcing laws requires widespread voluntary cooperation with the legal order, and that willingness to cooperate will, therefore, set limits on which laws could be feasibly passed by an equal voting scheme.

Imagine, for example, a system where individuals were randomly assigned to be the decisive voter (thus being consistent with a priori equal probability of being the decisive voter (cf. Saunders 2010)). ¹ The winner of the lottery, for whatever reason, supports an 90% marginal tax rate. Even if the law is passed, we could plausibly expect widespread defection and noncompliance, which de facto tilts the effective operation of the voting procedure towards policies that can be sustained by voluntary cooperation. Does this, therefore, undermine the lottery winner’s standing as an equal? Those committed to the idea such equality requires goal-independent equal opportunity for influence would have to say yes, given the reluctance to accept goal-dependent forms of cooperative power as an object of equality. Yet this strikes me as implausible. It seems more plausible, rather, to say that equal standing through the equalization of power occurs within a context of ongoing cooperation with the political system as a whole, and the implicit terms of such cooperation will constrain the plausible goals one can deploy one’s power to pursue. Thus, the goal-specific structure of cooperative power does not rule it out as an object of equalization via democratic institutions. Rather, we would need to refer to broad, perceived social facts about the historical exclusion of different sociologically identifiable groups to understand when a lack of cooperative power objectionably undermines relational equality and when it is unobjectionable. While a lack of opportunities for those with eccentric tastes may undermine their a posteriori ability to realize their goals through cooperation, it would not objectionably undermine their equal standing.

This section has argued that equal access to cooperative power, rather than equal a priori decisiveness or equal opportunity for influence, is the more relevant basis for an egalitarian interpretation of democracy. I now turn to how that enables a distinctively egalitarian interpretation of electoral competition.

The Egalitarian Structure of Electoral Competition

With an expanded understanding of power, we can see that the value of electoral competition may reside, at least in part, in its egalitarian character. This section will begin with a relatively idealized model of electoral competition to show how it may enhance equality. The basic intuition is that, even as electoral competition may entail a departure from equal a priori power, it produces incentives for political parties to enhance cooperative power. The claim, however, is not that electoral competition will always and everywhere maximize equality. Rather, my claim is that electoral competition can help realize equality and that we can provide an egalitarian interpretation of electoral competition. A focus on group-level power will require more comparative analysis of different political institutions in their sociological context. I highlight the egalitarian incentives of electoral competition to show that my analysis will be robust over a range of different possible institutional arrangements (Kirshner and Spinner-Halev 2023). Even as more comparative analysis is required to figure out how, in a different context, electoral competition can be best organized, the following refutes critiques of the egalitarian defense of democracy that present it as inherently unrealistic and unworkable outside simplified models.

While my goal is in part to redeem the egalitarian credentials of electoral democracy, there is a risk of complacency. Advocates of an equal a priori voting power view may respond that, far from being ideological, their argument provides a standpoint from which to challenge the failings of electoral democracy. Thus, in the next section, I will show that this view nonetheless places demanding requirements on the organization of electoral competition, even as the exact institutional details will depend on the structure of underlying societal interests.

As I take it, the ideal structure of electoral democracy looks something like the following: political parties compete to win elections. This can either be through a proportional system or a constituency system—for the sake of argument, I assume that constituencies are equal sizes. Either way, people exert the same voting power at the time of election. The policy positions of each party are set through an internal process that balances the ideological desires of party members with the desire of party elites and political candidates to win elections. Depending on the electoral system, winning power may mean appealing to a broad enough coalition to win an absolute majority in a legislative body, or it may mean sufficiently mobilizing your constituents to be part of a coalition government. During the election, political parties make public statements about their intentions when in government. At the same time, parties deploy a variety of methods to motivate their supporters and potential supporters to vote. This will involve mobilizing volunteers to contact those supporters and encourage them to vote, activities to reduce the cost of voting (such as transportation to polls), and working with civil society groups or interest groups who are allied with the party (such as unions) to encourage their membership to vote. All this will typically involve a large organizational apparatus centered on winning the election. After the election is over, voters go home and elected politicians legislate. This then involves complex bargaining between party leadership, rank-and-file elected representatives, interest groups, civil society advocates, and party members—all with an eye to electoral success at the next election.

In what way is such a system egalitarian? Most obviously, at the moment of an election, everyone has an equal probability of being a decisive voter. Moreover, equal electoral suffrage is a powerful symbol of equal political membership (Christiano 2008). It represents a valuable equalization of power as compared to a restricted franchise or unequal voting system like the Prussian three-tier voting system that existed before the German Revolution. Yet, insofar as voters are electing a politician, and not voting directly on legislation, the system entails a dramatic inequality in a priori voting power between voters and politicians. Politicians will enjoy wide latitude to vote at their discretion on bills—insofar as they are bound, it will be by party leaders rather than their constituents. They will also have the power to set the agenda of what legislation will be considered, to shape legislation through committees and amendments, and to influence the implementation of legislation once passed. From this perspective, it seems, advocates of the egalitarian value of democracy must condemn representative government. There remains a gap between the egalitarian ideal and electoral democracy.

But this gap is closed significantly if we examine not just the equalization of a priori voting power but also of cooperative power. The intuitive idea of cooperative power can be seen if you imagine departing from a voting situation in which someone has no knowledge of or communication with other voters. In that case, we can measure their voting power using things like the Penrose-Banzhaf measure, which assumes individual voters’ preferences are uncorrelated (Abizadeh 2021a). But now imagine a situation in which voters can coordinate their preferences through communication and bargaining or on the basis of shared identities and interests. Under such circumstances, their a posteriori probability of success could go up (it will be more likely there will be a permutation of votes in which they achieve their aims) even as their a priori voting power remains the same. ² One can become more powerful even as you relinquish the potential to be decisive, as it is more likely that the outcome of voting will realize your preferences.

But equal, cooperative power cannot mean an equal probability of actually getting your way, as discussed previously. Some people have eccentric preferences. Equal, cooperative power cannot mean that, say, nudists should have equal overall effective power as other groups. But it does mean that all individuals should have access to proportionality equal to institutional means of organization and coordination, such as through political parties and civil society groups.

Electoral competition is a way of supplying these means of cooperative power. And when electoral competition is organized with principles of fairness in mind, it will then help to equalize cooperative power. It helps to equalize it by providing incentives to party elites to enhance the cooperative power of their supporters and so can, under certain conditions, lead to the overall equalization of cooperative power. As a result, participants in electoral democracy can benefit from enhanced power insofar as they coordinate their political activities through groups like parties.

This means, first, that like-minded individuals can coordinate their votes to make it more likely, overall, that they will realize their policy goals. For example, through the production of party policy, individuals can benefit from negotiation and bargaining that sets an agenda. This makes it more likely, all things considered, that some portion of their policy preferences will be realized than if there was a situation of uncoordinated voting where everyone just voted for the policy they preferred the most or were limited to the idiosyncratic preferences of their local electoral candidates. Second, electoral competition enables the coordination of goals and preferences over time. Parties embody a political project that requires ongoing cooperation and solidarity to realize, rather than a single policy preference at a single moment in time. And third, of course, electoral competition powerfully incentivizes political parties to ensure their supporters vote.

One objection to this line of argument is that what we still care about here is something like individualized power. Groups like parties are egalitarian only insofar as they reflect an underlying equal distribution of power among individuals—that is, we would want groups to be effective only insofar as they reflect the aggregation of underlying individual equal power. Group equality would then be reducible to individual equality: we would want the effectiveness of groups to track the total number of members involved in them. Of course, there is some truth to this—when groups that represent minority interests exercise disproportionate power (as with the NRA), we have strong egalitarian objections. In many cases, a focus on individual power and a focus on group power will lead to the same conclusions. Yet, in other cases, our intuitions will come apart. This is the case, particularly when it comes to leadership within groups. The point is that certain institutional arrangements that would empower leaders (such as elections, whereby some leaders gain certain forms of institutional power vis-à-vis legislation and the state) will undermine individual-level equality while potentially enhancing group-level equality. This is because leaders can often engage in risk-taking activities that overcome collective action problems and enhance cooperation. From their perspective, power is a “variable-sum” phenomenon—even as they must be aware of zero-sum competition over power, they recognize that certain forms of leadership can realize positive-sum gains (Read and Shapiro 2014).

If all this is true, then an idealized model of electoral competition is egalitarian insofar as it helps to equalize cooperative power among groups. The inequality in effective voting power between elected politicians and ordinary voters is compensated for by the equalization of cooperative power enabled by political parties. This tracks the more general point that unequal formal voting rights may enhance cooperative equality if it enables disempowered groups to enhance their cooperation. Furthermore, this becomes a robust mode of realizing equality under nonideal circumstances insofar as it provides incentives to political actors to enhance the capacity of citizens to coordinate their activities and so enhance their cooperative power. The desire to win elections—the competitive process of electoral politics with the potential spoils for party leaders—gives them an incentive to ensure their potential supporters’ votes. To get those people to vote, political elites and members together over time construct elaborate institutional systems—political parties—that exist in large part to enable cooperation among like-minded or similarly situated individuals.

Equalizing Cooperative Power Through Electoral Competition

Of course, that is an ideal model of electoral competition. My goal has been to show that there is a plausible egalitarian interpretation of electoral democracy if one focuses on the equalization of cooperative power and not just individual voting power. The worry is that this view is too permissive. Think, at the extreme, of the justification of paternalistic corporatism. Under such a regime, the political system is organized through corporate bodies that claim to represent the interests of groups that are structured according to their common social location, such as workers and consumers. If cooperative power resides, in part, in the fact that it increases the probability of realizing your goals, then one could interpret such a corporatist system as realizing the cooperative power of the members of such organizations, even if there are no actual systems of formal political equality such as voting. Thus, most radically, this view of electoral competition can imply that one is empowered politically even if they do not cooperate nor participate in the political system insofar as one shares interests or values with political parties that are pursuing those aims.

This follows, in particular, from how Abizadeh conceptualizes the equalization of a posteriori political power. Someone is powerful, in his argument, just by virtue of being part of a group that is a majority, which he calls “the greater agential power of one who finds himself the member of a persistent majority through no power of his own” (Abizadeh 2021a, 752). Thus, one can become empowered not through agency but by virtue of being part of a group that can then be represented as in the corporatist case: “Sometimes people, by subjugating themselves and their preferences to other group members, may nevertheless (correctly) feel empowered in virtue of their consequent ability to act in concert with them” (Abizadeh 2021a, 752).

Recall, further, that the reason we can evaluate such forms of empowerment of a posteriori power without having to equalize it across all potential political value stances is that we can refer to the underlying structure of interests within society. That is, in arguing that a certain institutional arrangement enhances someone’s “power-in-numbers,” we appeal not to “the content of the power-assessee’s actual preferences . . . but information about the correlation between her preferences and other voters. This is because such information is based on information, not about the content of her preferences but about the social structures that shape both her and others’ preferences” (Abizadeh 2021a, 750). In other words, one enjoys power in numbers because one’s group is empowered, and this can empower an individual by virtue of a shared underlying social structure that causally explains the shared preferences. Thus, a system such as a paternalistic-authoritarian model of representation could enable “power in numbers.”

Extending this to electoral competition, the worry is political parties can claim to contribute to equality by representing the interests of various social groups while fostering passivity and clientelism. This is particularly a worry given the evidence that political party formations can become one of the social structures that influence the content of individuals’ actual political preferences. If party elites are causing their followers’ goals and then claiming to empower them by increasing the chance that those goals become realized, then this notion of equalizing cooperative power could just provide cover for party oligarchy.

The solution is to move toward a more probabilistic understanding of the relationship between underlying social structure and policy preferences, as well as a narrower understanding of cooperative power. In this view, cooperative power cannot just be a matter of finding yourself in a politically powerful group that causes your policy preferences. It also requires actual opportunities to cooperate with similarly situated individuals, such as to help to articulate the interests and policy preferences that are conditioned, but not caused, by the underlying social structure—to move from uncrystallized to crystallized interests. These issues have been fruitfully explored in scholarship on representation, particularly group representation (Mansbridge 2003). My point is just to see them in light of equalizing cooperative power and as adding to the egalitarian justification of electoral democracy.

Realizing cooperative power requires more than just benefiting from structural patterns as a member of the group. Abizadeh’s conception is overly broad in that it makes no reference to the potential agency of beneficiaries of cooperative power. Rather, exercising cooperative power requires some commitment to potential action on the part of all cooperators, even if many participants are often in a more passive role in a cooperative endeavor. There is a significant difference between saying you gain the power to move a rock through cooperation when everyone pushes, even if that action is causally overdetermined and saying you gain the power to push the rock because you happen to want to move it and others happen to push it. And part of the significant difference resides in one’s relation to the long-term trajectory of cooperation. Even as, in the short run, you may largely be a more passive beneficiary of cooperation, cooperative endeavors imply a long-term commitment to a shared project in which one will then have the ability to shape, in the long run, the course of that endeavor. This intertemporal perspective stands in contrast to the focus among some egalitarian democrats on the momentary exercise of power in the act of voting. But it also implies that cooperative power is a subset of the sort of structural power with which Abizadeh is concerned.

From this perspective, while electoral competition in its idealized model is a way of furthering cooperative power, in practice, it falls well short. It fails to live up to its own internal standards and so often tends to mirror or even reinforce power inequalities in society, even as it then produces the power inequality between party leaders and party members noted by many egalitarians. However, the oft-noted decline of mass membership-based parties with their dense linkages to trade unions and civil society organizations also calls into doubt the assumption that electoral incentives alone are sufficient to encourage the equalization of cooperative power. Thus, even as it provides a possible vision of egalitarianism in more complex institutional settings than equalizing a priori power, the ideal of equalizing cooperative electoral power can also ground many intuitive misgivings about the state of electoral competition and guide potential reforms.

In contrast to popular control or equalizing arbitrary power, the perspective of equalizing cooperative power points to numerous flaws in current electoral systems that go well beyond a mismatch between public opinion and enacted laws. It provides a framework for articulating important complaints about the cartelization and oligarchization of political parties, the increasing use of gerrymandering and entrenchment, and the disconnect between political parties and society. All of these undermine social equality and so the value of democracy by reducing opportunities to organize cooperative power. And by focusing on opportunities to organize cooperative power, we can attend to the specifically “post-democratic” character of this “hollowing out” of democracy. Observers like Crouch (2004) refer to these trends as post-democratic as they coexist with the persistence of election by universal suffrage. They do not mark a direct retrenchment of democratic institutions but the decreasing effectiveness of those institutions in realizing their aims. My framework allows us to criticize these trends as a failure internal to the system of electoral competition rather than its logical result as in elitist theories, such that electoral competition needs to be supplemented by other principles such as deliberative or open democracy (although we may have additional reasons for exploring such supplementation).

These trends are part of a more general weakening of the incentive to enhance cooperative power provided by electoral competition. Enhancing cooperative power can be costly for party elites. It requires resources but also entails a more complex system of internal party democracy. Thus, they face countervailing incentives to structure elections, such as to minimize the need for cooperative power.

We can see this in trends toward entrenchment (more characteristic of first-past-the-post electoral systems) and toward collusion (more characteristic of proportional electoral systems). Examples of entrenchment include gerrymandering and general efforts to maximize the number of safe seats and minimize the number of competitive races. Such efforts can be difficult to criticize from the point of view of one person, one vote and may still be compatible with competitive elections at the national level and so the rotation of power. Nonetheless, in reducing the number of seats political parties must contest, entrenchment reduces incentives for parties to mobilize cooperative power. This thus provides grounds to criticize gerrymandering on political equality grounds, which is harder if we focus just on a priori voting power (Beitz 2018). Collusion is a pathology of proportional systems, where parties know that they will enter into coalition negotiations after the election and so seek to minimize the number of issues or cleavages in the election. Moreover, given the public funding for political parties in many countries with PR systems, collusion can lead to a “cartelization” of party systems, where parties survive off of public funding without extensive social foundations (Katz and Mair 2009).

Thus, we have strong grounds to seek to increase the competitiveness of elections to strengthen the incentives parties face to enhance cooperative power. But I think the previously noted pathologies also point to the limits of just relying on the incentives provided by electoral competition. This incentives-based mechanism, established on the threat of exit via voting, could be supplemented by more positive institutional recognition of and material support for the role of organizations in democracy. Something like this was once proposed by Schmitter (1993). ³ He argued for a system that would turn interest associations into “secondary citizens.” And this requires, he argues, a system of public material support for organizations: “For organizations to participate democratically in political life, they must first have the necessary material and human resources to make their case effectively, and these must be distributed on a basis that is not systematically skewed by pre-existing social and economic inequalities . . . this requires they be cut loose from exclusive dependence upon voluntary contributions. They must also enjoy regular and assured access to public authorities, and this, too, must not be biased in favor of preferred clients or sponsors” (Schmitter 1993, 156). To realize this, he calls for a system of vouchers that could be distributed by individual citizens. Implementing a proposal like Schmitter’s would thus enact a public commitment to equalizing access to cooperative power as an important element of democracy. It could complement the incentives-based approach and more directly overcome the inequalities of access to the vehicles of cooperation that plague contemporary democracies. It would then be justified on the same grounds as electoral competition: as fostering the equalization of power and most centrally cooperative power. But we could also then think about how to integrate this idea with electoral democracy, such as by redirecting the public funding of political parties toward organizations that are then formally affiliated with such parties.

Finally, this approach can provide additional grounds for the internal democratization of political parties. Wolkenstein (2019) has provided one of the most sustained arguments for internal party democracy. He presents a compelling argument for intraparty deliberative democracy as a pathway toward answering the critics of parties while retaining their essential role within democratic politics. Yet, while Wolkenstein discusses the question of the relationship between parties and broader societal interests and structures of power, the focus of his argument is the internal structure of party procedures, especially viewed from the perspective of party activists. Building on the idea of organized collective power, Bagg and Bhatia (2022) provide a perspective on internal party democracy that focuses on how such internal democracy can prevent the capture of political parties by wealthy elites. Very often, such internal party democracy is framed as part of a trade-off with party elites forging broadly appealing electoral agenda, as more internal party democracy means that party elites will be beholden to their more ideologically extreme members (Rosenbluth and Shapiro 2018). Where individual citizens lack extra-party organizational networks, intraparty democracy can undermine cooperative power by catering to the niche or marginal views of highly engaged individuals. But this is a symptom of a more general decline of parties’ incentives to foster cooperative power, which means their internal organizational structure has increasingly shrunk to the most devoted partisans of their cause.

Conclusion

Why is democracy valuable? In part because it helps realize certain types of equality among citizens. Yet, in some interpretations of what such equality entails, electoral democracy is an inherently oligarchic or aristocratic system, one that creates a caste of elected politicians that stand above the public. Of course, that is often the case, but such approaches take it to be true tout court of electoral democracy. In contrast, an approach that focuses on equalizing cooperative power and opportunities to access cooperative power can articulate the equality-enhancing qualities of electoral democracy. Yet such a perspective does not lead to an affirmation of the status quo. It rather points to reforms in at least three directions: restoring the competitiveness of electoral democracy, positively fostering cooperative power in civil society and through civil society-party linkages, and through supporting internal party democracy.

My view also has implications for how we view voting as a democratic practice—and particularly about the potential limitations of taking individual voting rights to be the centerpiece of a democratic ideal. Against the idea of voting as an individual right, one through which people unconditionally express their preferences, the article points to the collective dimensions of voting as an organized practice. Indeed, while relational egalitarians take voting to enshrine a principle of equality at the individual level, many legal scholars examining issues such as vote dilution in the United States point to the importance of voting as an aggregate right (Gerken 2001; cf. Beckman 2017). From this perspective, the significance of voting is unavoidably connected to how the structure of voting affects the organization of cooperative power. Because of its wide accessibility, inclusivity, and voluntary nature, we can identify voting as a particularly important mechanism within democratic societies for ensuring that cooperative power can “communicate” with the political system (Habermas 1998). But my view resists seeing voting as an individual right akin to something like free speech. Indeed, scholars have recently called attention to how the desire for enfranchisement was tied not to an individualized notion of rights but to a broader ambition to restructure large-scale collective forms of domination such as colonialism (Duong 2021). Focusing on voting as a moment of unconditional, individualized power-over misunderstands the importance of voting for equality, and invites the objection that voting is both ineffective and unjustifiable (Brennan 2016). Rather, my argument has been to see voting as a key moment in and mechanism for the organization of political cooperation, one that should be complemented by other, more radical reforms that would ensure the equalization of cooperative power and so prevent any individual, or group, from overpowering their fellow citizens.