Liberal democracies seem to be at a crossroads. On the one hand, they stand accused, now more than ever, to be vulnerable to lay citizens’ poor decisions, untampered passions, and short-term planning. On the other, they are also blamed for not being democratic enough, for surrendering too much power to technocratic elites who pay lip service to the idea of popular sovereignty while being irresponsive to the citizens in whose name they are supposed to rule. This project has taken care of the first accusation (while future research aim to address the second): are citizens inadequate for truly democratic government? While this is an empirical question to ask, it relies on a previous normative issue: what should we realistically expect from citizens in the first place? Only if this latter question is spelled out in all its implications, we can hope to address the former.
If we turn to philosophy and political theory, we realise that they have often failed to raise to the challenge, because they tended to either ignore or even deny citizens’ possible incompetence as political scientists have largely presented it. Some have even endorsed a technocratic form of government (a contemporary and science-based remake of Plato’s philosopher king).
By contrast, VoiCED answers the normative question (what should we realistically expect of citizens in a liberal democracy?) by developing a diversified theory of political obligation for citizens, political parties and representatives. In so doing, it offers an original account of democratic obligation by looking at the specific duties that citizens have not only as subjects but also as authors of the law, according to the democratic ideal. For this reason, it focuses on the role citizens have as voters because through elections they select and authorize their representatives who are affiliated with various political parties.
VoiCED further advances the recent trend of an empirically based political theory in two ways. First, it explicitly acknowledges citizens’ indirect role in the law-making process by considering also political parties and representatives as fundamental actors alongside citizens. In a nutshell, the project reckons that we cannot determine what citizens should do to support a democratic system if we don’t adopt a comprehensive outlook that includes organisations structuring political competition and officeholders tasked with law making. Second, the project is sensitive to citizens’ diverse interests and more compatible with their persistent disagreements, as it offers reasons that democratic citizens may find acceptable, thereby motivating them to discharge their political obligation, which is necessary for the proper functioning of democracy.
The project also contributes to three literatures. Firstly, it advances the small but growing literature on the ethics of voting: while a proper justification of compulsory voting seems missing, the proposed account of citizens’ duties qua voters has focused on identifying citizens’ competence requirements for electoral participation. Secondly, VoiCED contributes to the literature on political parties by exploring the overlooked relations between parties’ functions in electoral campaigns, their internal structure and campaign finance regulations. Thirdly, the project highlights the importance of trust in the relation between citizens and their democratic representatives, as the researcher's future project aims to show.
