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Maximizing Accountability to the Least Privileged: The Difference Principle, the Fair Value of the Political Liberties, and the Design of Democratic Institutions

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Abstract

Egalitarian-liberal theories of justice are in principle very demanding, imposing substantial epistemic and justificatory burdens on citizens and requiring substantial changes to social and economic structures. Yet existing democratic institutions show little tendency to manage such burdens well or produce egalitarian outcomes over the long run. I argue that these facts imply a principle for the political realm analogous to John Rawls’s famous “difference principle” in the economic and social realms: a political and legal order should be maximally accountable to the representative occupants of the most powerless positions defined by that order, consistent with the equal liberties and fair equality of opportunity principles. This principle may license deviations from the usual institutions of representative democracy in many non-ideal circumstances. I explore the implications of this claim by describing and defending an electoral system where voting power is inversely proportional to income.

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Notes

  1. Citations to A Theory of Justice (ToJ) below are to the 1999 revised edition: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For good discussions of the difference principle and its complexities, see Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 6; Philippe Van Parijs, “Difference Principles,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Samuel Freeman, Rawls (London: Routledge, 2007), chapter 3.

  2. See, for example, G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: the Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); John E. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  3. For example, basic income guarantees: Van Parijs, “Difference Principles”; workplace democracy and workplace republicanism: Nien-hê Hsieh, “Work, Ownership, and Productive Enfranchisement,” in Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, ed. Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson (Malden: Blackwell, 2012) 149–62; Nien-hê Hsieh, “Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism,” Social Theory and Practice 31 (2005): 115–42; Martin O’Neill, “Three Rawlsian Routes towards Economic Democracy,” Revue de Philosophie Economique 8 (2008): 29–55; corporatist arrangements: Waheed Hussain, “Nurturing the Sense of Justice: The Rawlsian Argument for Democratic Corporatism,” in Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, ed. O’Neill and Williamson, 180–200; limitations on work hierarchies and the forms a division of labor may take: Samuel Arnold, “The Difference Principle at Work,” Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (2012): 94–118; wealth ceilings: Jeffrey Edward Green, “Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged: In Defense of Reasonable Envy toward the Superrich,” American Political Science Review 107 (2013): 123–38; and more complete elaborations of Rawls’s brief remarks in ToJ (242–51) on “Property-Owning Democracy” and “Democratic Socialism”: Martin O’Neill, “Liberty, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009): 379–96; Thad Williamson, “Who Owns What? An Egalitarian Interpretation of John Rawls’s Idea of a Property-Owning Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009): 434–53; as well as the essays collected in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Malden: Blackwell, 2012).

  4. There are some partial exceptions, notably the work of Philippe Van Parijs. See, for example, Philippe Van Parijs, “The Disfranchisement of the Elderly, and Other Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 292–333; Philippe Van Parijs, “Justice and Democracy: Are they Incompatible?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4 (1996): 101–17.

  5. See, for example, ToJ, 198–99.

  6. Alan Thomas, “Property-Owning Democracy, Liberal Republicanism and the Idea of an Egalitarian Ethos,” in Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, ed. O’Neill and Williamson, 121–22.

  7. ToJ , 176. As Rawls noted in 1969, “there is often a wide variety of reasonable opinion as to whether the [difference] principle is satisfied,” since policy choices involving the difference principle are based upon “theoretical and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of concrete information, and all of this mixed with judgment and plain hunch, not to mention in actual cases prejudice and self-interest.” John Rawls, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1969] 1999), 184; see also John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2001), 48. These passages are also cited in Green, “Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged,” 128–29.

  8. ToJ, § 36; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6.

  9. As Juha Räikkä rightly argues in “The Feasibility Condition in Political Theory,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 27–40.

  10. Dean J. Machin, “Political Inequality and the ‘Super-Rich’: Their Money or (some of) Their Political Rights,” Res Publica 19 (2013): 121–39.

  11. Alexander A. Guerrero, “Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014): 135–78.

  12. John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Most of the proposals discussed by Van Parijs in “The Disfranchisement of the Elderly, and Other Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice” are also about as politically unfeasible as reverse censitary suffrage. In that article, Van Parijs examines a variety of proposals for voting systems that conflict with the commitment to formal voting equality but may be better able to secure intergenerational justice than do existing democratic institutions.

  13. On which constraints do in fact impose limits on political theorizing, see Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies 60 (2012): 809–25; David Estlund, “Utopophobia,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014): 113–34.

  14. Jeremy Waldron, “Political Political Theory: An Inaugural Lecture,” Journal of Political Philosophy 21 (2013): 1–23.

  15. Van Parijs, “The Disfranchisement of the Elderly, and Other Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice,” 299–301.

  16. ToJ, § 9, 42–45.

  17. For the distinction between interests, opinions, and perspectives, see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5.

  18. Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (2014): 564–81.

  19. Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 51–73.

  20. Pablo Torija, “Do Politicians Serve the One Percent? Evidence in OECD Countries” (Department of International Politics, City University London, 2013).

  21. ToJ, 199.

  22. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).

  23. Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson, “The Structure of Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution,” American Political Science Review 105 (2011): 316–36; Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 1.

  24. Van Parijs, “Justice and Democracy: Are they Incompatible?” 104–09.

  25. On turnout in developed democracies, see Pippa Norris, Count Every Voice: Democratic Participation Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Turnout in many countries is, however, generally uncorrelated with income, and the poor sometimes vote at higher rates than the rich; see Adam Przeworski, “The Poor and the Viability of Democracy,” in Poverty, Participation and Democracy: A Global Perspective, ed. Anirudh Krishna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 125–47.

  26. Michael X. Delli Carpini, “An Overview of the State of Citizens’ Knowledge about Politics,” in Communicating Politics: Engaging the Public in Democratic Life, ed. Mitchell S. McKinney (New York: Peter Lang, 2005): 27–40.

  27. Nancy Bermeo, “Does Electoral Democracy Boost Economic Equality?” Journal of Democracy 20 (2009): 21–35; Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84–92; Michael Ross, “Is Democracy Good for the Poor?” American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 860–74. There is also good evidence that the “great compression” of incomes in many democracies after WWII was historically exceptional, deriving from the enormous wealth shocks caused by the war and the competition with communist systems in its aftermath, conditions unlikely to be repeated; see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014), ch. 8.

  28. For an argument along these lines, see Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  29. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 297.

  30. David Schweickart, “Property-Owning Democracy or Economic Democracy?” in Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, ed. Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), 201–22; Joshua Cohen, “The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy,” Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (1989): 25–50.

  31. A. John Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38 (2010): 5–36.

  32. For a review of campaign finance arrangements worldwide (emphasizing the limited effectiveness of campaign contribution limits and public financing arrangements), see Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, “Financing Politics: A Global View,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 69–86.

  33. This is an instance of the political egalitarian’s dilemma; see Fabienne Peter, “The Political Egalitarian’s Dilemma,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (2007): 373–87.

  34. For example, it is possible that an economic system might maximize the position of the least privileged in the longer run without doing so in the short run. See Jason Brennan, “Rawls’ Paradox,” Constitutional Political Economy 18 (2007): 287–99.

  35. Rawls acknowledges this priority in his discussion of the four-stage sequence of the Original Position (OP): the selection of democratic procedures comes at the second (constitutional) stage of the OP, before the determination of which policies best implement the difference principle, which comes at the third (legislative) stage, because such determination requires us to draw on “the traditions and social institutions of a country and its particular problems and historical circumstances” and remains far more dependent on uncertain and contestable judgments made by reasonable citizens than the determination of what a workable democratic constitution requires. John Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and their Priority,” in Liberty, Equality, and Law: Selected Tanner Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. John Rawls and Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 53.

  36. On democracy as a second-order institution, see Jack Knight and James Johnson, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  37. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 336.

  38. Ibid., 328.

  39. Charles R. Beitz, Political Equality: an Essay in Democratic Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), xii.

  40. See Peter, “The Political Egalitarian’s Dilemma.”

  41. Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and their Priority,” 53.

  42. David Estlund, “Political Quality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (2000): 127–60.

  43. In elections to the U.S. Senate, for example, the 770,000 eligible Montana voters have about 30 times the voting power of the 23.7 million eligible California voters. For these estimates of eligible voters, see Michael McDonald, “2012 General Election Turnout Rates,” 2014 http://www.electproject.org/2012g; accessed June 2015.

  44. We could round down the votes to the nearest integer instead, which would be more intuitive, but rounding down to the lowest integer minimizes any concerns we might have about unfairness, since the poorest then never get more votes than their income shares allow.

  45. For this and the number for Norway, see “LIS Inequality and Poverty Key Figures,” http://www.lisdatacenter.org, accessed June 2015.

  46. Strictly speaking, (y10)/(y1) is equivalent to the 95/5 percentile ratio, which is not available in the LIS data. The 90/10 ratio slightly understates the relevant inequality, since it is the ratio of the minimum income in the highest class to the maximum income in the poorest class.

  47. For evidence that diversity of perspectives has many epistemic advantages, see Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  48. On system justification biases, see John Jost, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25 (2004): 881–919.

  49. In historical entitlement views—most famously defended in Robet Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1968)—the justice of a current distribution of “entitlements” (e.g., rights to property) depends on the justice of the process by which it came about in the past, not on any current properties of the distribution (such as the degree of inequality). In sufficientarian views what matters for the justice of a distribution is that the poorest have enough, not their relative position vis a vis the richest. See, for example, Harry Frankfurt, "Equality as a Moral Ideal," Ethics 98 (1987): 21–43.

  50. Rawls, ToJ, 4.

  51. As Green argues in “Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged.”

  52. The poorest by income at a given time form a heterogeneous group; some are merely people at the start of their careers, others have made voluntary choices to trade off income against leisure or chosen to engage in unpaid “care work” within the family despite having sufficient opportunity to perform paid work elsewhere in the formal economy, and yet others may be asset-rich but income poor for a variety of reasons (e.g., beneficiaries of trusts, though this last subset is likely to be quite small in most cases, given normal patterns of wealth inequality). Only a fraction of the lowest income categories may represent the genuinely disadvantaged. As presented here, reverse censitary suffrage makes no distinctions between these subgroups, but insofar as only the genuinely disadvantaged would remain within the lowest income categories throughout their lives, the mechanics of the system are not unduly affected; at worst, reverse censitary suffrage introduces a systematic bias towards the young and people who perform unpaid domestic labor, which may not be a wholly undesirable feature, even on purely Rawlsian grounds, in part because it may serve to ensure that the principle of “just savings” receives due consideration; see Van Parijs, “The Disfranchisement of the Elderly, and Other Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice,” 292–93.

  53. Thomas Nagel, “John Rawls and Affirmative Action,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (2003): 82–84; Robert Taylor, “Rawlsian Affirmative Action,” Ethics 119 (2009): 476–506.

  54. For a defense of such special representation, see Young, Inclusion and Democracy, chapter 5.

  55. It is worth noting that one of the reasons Rawls distrusted the welfare state (and preferred institutional schemes like “property-owning democracy”) was precisely because (in his view) the welfare state left real power in the hands of the well off. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 135–38.

  56. By contrast, violations of justice by the least powerful are typically self-correcting in any reasonably well ordered society, since the powerful, by definition, can use their control over the institutions of society to correct them. On republican political thought, see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

  57. Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” 14–15.

  58. Cf. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 54–55, 132, on the conditions that “burden” a society’s ability to produce just outcomes.

  59. Jonathan Wolff and Avner De-Shalit, Disadvantage, Oxford Political Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 7–8.

  60. Some of our best theories about the empirical stability of democratic regimes indicate that it is economic inequality (or at least certain kinds of economic inequality), rather than culture or the specific level of economic development, that most threatens their stability. See, for example, Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson, “Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective,” American Journal of Political Science 100 (2006): 115–32; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ben Ansell and David Samuels, “Inequality and Democratization: A Contractarian Approach,” Comparative Political Studies 43 (2010): 1543–74; Boix, Democracy and Redistribution. But even if inequality does not provide a complete explanation for the stability of democratic societies—the empirical evidence for a link is equivocal: see Mark Gradstein and Branko Milanovic, “Does Liberté=Egalité? A Survey of the Empirical Links between Democracy and Inequality with Some Evidence on the Transition Economies,” Journal of Economic Surveys 18 (2004): 515–37—it may still provide a better explanation for why what Rawls called “the priority of liberty” is difficult to establish in some societies than does Rawls’ gestures towards a sort of Millian version of modernization theory that assumes political will is always unburdened given high enough levels of economic development.

  61. Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and their Priority,” 72–74.

  62. In fact, in §37 of ToJ, Rawls suggests that Mill’s infamous “plural voting” scheme granting more votes to the more educated—John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, [1859] 1977), ch. 8—would be potentially justified even under ideal conditions, provided the inequalities of authority produced by giving more votes to the more educated actually did work to the benefit of all. For discussion of why the Millian scheme is nevertheless not justifiable, see Beitz, Political Equality: an Essay in Democratic Theory, ch. 2.

  63. Moreover, it is worth noting that under reverse censitary suffrage it is possible for citizens to gain more votes—should they see these as important—by voluntarily lowering their income, in line with Machin’s “imposed choice” argument—Machin, “Political Inequality and the ‘Super-Rich’: Their Money or (some of) Their Political Rights”—except the choice in reverse censitary suffrage operates on the formal rights to vote, rather than on the more controversial rights to political speech and political influence, whose limitation would require sometimes complex judgments. In this sense, the restrictions in reverse censitary suffrage would be less onerous than the restrictions on the speech or other forms of political influence of the very rich under Machin’s similar proposal.

  64. See his Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.III.28.

  65. By contrast, Mill’s classic proposal for giving votes to the more educated reinforces existing patterns of denigration given the positive correlation between wealth and education.

  66. David M. Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Estlund, “Political Quality.”

  67. Cf. ToJ §12, 57–65.

  68. See Note 3 for examples of this literature in the Rawlsian tradition.

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    Xavier Marquez

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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 meeting of the New Zealand Political Science Association meeting. I thank participants in that panel for their comments. I also wish to thank Stephen Winter, Kathy Smits, Simon Keller, David Bromell, Jeffrey Church, and Greta Snyder for detailed comments, as well as the students in my 2012 honours seminar on Contemporary Political Thought for spurring me to think of these ideas.

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Marquez, X. Maximizing Accountability to the Least Privileged: The Difference Principle, the Fair Value of the Political Liberties, and the Design of Democratic Institutions. Polity 47, 484–507 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.20

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