Complementary Democracy

Democracy is on the run, and elected governments are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. Legislatures are increasingly seen as unrepresentative. To give legitimacy to democratic government, experts argue that we need more democracy and more opportunities for direct citizen participation. Representative democracy needs to be complemented by forms of direct engagement, such as referendums, popular votes, the recall, citizens’ juries, eDemocracy, etc. This is what we term Complementary Democracy. In this book experts from the worlds of practice and theory come together to explain – and occasionally critique – these complements to representative democracy. The volume provides an invaluable starting point for anyone who wants to know more about the new directions of democratic governance, and hopes to inspire those who seek to build stronger democracies.

We are taught in civics class that the Constitution provides for three basic branches of government: executive, judicial, and legislative. While the President and Congress as elected by popular vote are representative, can they really reflect accurately the will and sentiment of the populace? Or do money and power dominate everyday politics to the detriment of true self-governance? Is there a way to put &"We the people&" back into government? Ethan Leib thinks there is and offers this blueprint for a fourth branch of government as a way of giving the people a voice of their own. While drawing on the rich theoretical literature about deliberative democracy, Leib concentrates on designing an institutional scheme for embedding deliberation in the practice of American democratic government. At the heart of his scheme is a process for the adjudication of issues of public policy by assemblies of randomly selected citizens convened to debate and vote on the issues, resulting in the enactment of laws subject both to judicial review and to possible veto by the executive and legislative branches. The &"popular&" branch would fulfill a purpose similar to the ballot initiative and referendum but avoid the shortcomings associated with those forms of direct democracy. Leib takes special pains to show how this new branch would be integrated with the already existing governmental and political institutions of our society, including administrative agencies and political parties, and would thus complement rather than supplant them.

This Element argues for a complementarity principle – governance values should complement political values – as a guide for designing the structures and procedures of public administration. It argues that the value-congruity inherent in the complementarity principle is indispensable to administrative responsibility. It identifies several core democratic values and critically assesses systems of collaborative governance, representative bureaucracy, and participatory policymaking in light of those values. It shows that the complementarity principle, applied to these different designs, facilitates administrative responsibility by making the structures themselves more consistent with democratic principles without compromising their aims. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The author argues for a participatory democracy that is complementary to and competitive with the representative democracy of elections. Without direct citizen participation in addition to representation the principle of people's sovereignty erodes. Elected government becomes self-serving oligarchy. Regular surveys of excessive deviations from standards of distributive social justice and rationality in collective consciousness and collective conscience is the most cost-effective and efficient way of overcoming voter apathy and achieving citizens participation in government. A standing public policy of reversing such deviations can strengthen social bonds and bring closer Lincoln's dream of government by the people. No form of participatory democracy can replace the historic gain of elections. But it can counterbalance them similar to the way lower houses of parliaments historically counterbalanced upper ones. This book lays a foundation for two-track election-and-survey democracy with an advanced methodology of survey data analysis that is based on action frame of reference.

What if "liberal democracy" were a contradiction in terms? This book distinguishes liberalism (a logic of order) from democracy (a principle of disordering) to defend a Rancièrean vision of impure politics. Disclosing Rancière's refusal of ontology as political, The Lessons of Rancière enacts a critical theory beyond unmasking and a democratic politics beyond liberalism.

This book discusses whether democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary, or contradicting ideas. The rediscovery of classic republicanism a few decades ago made it clear how profoundly modern notions of democracy had been shaped by the republican tradition. But defining these two concepts remains difficult, and the views diverge widely. The overarching aim of this book is to discuss the extent to which democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary or mutually contradicting ideals / ideas. Pursuing this open approach to the subject means calling into question a widely used formula according to which modern democracy is composed of liberal principles such as individualism, the rule of law and human rights, on the one hand, and of republican principles such as focusing on the common good and popular sovereignty, on the other. This book will appeal to students, researches, and scholars of political science interested in a better understanding of political theory and political history.

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Liberalism and democracy have long been assumed to exist in a complementary relationship, if not always an entirely easy one. This book scrupulously investigates the reason for this alliance and the sources of its tensions, providing a lucid and succinct introduction to some of the subject's central concepts and concerns.