Collective Reason, the Rationality Gap, and Political Leadership

• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• Author: Vesco Paskalev
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12289

© 2020 The Authors. Ratio Juris, published by University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 33 No. 2 June 2020 (169–195)

Collective Reason, the Rationality Gap,

and Political Leadership

VESCO PASKALEV*

Abstract. The article discusses the implications of the well-known discursive dilemma. The

dilemma arises whenever a reasoned decision has to be taken by a collective decision-maker

and generates persistent contradiction between what is defined as collective reason and public

opinion. Following Philip Pettit, I argue that collective reason is normatively preferable and

that the role of existing constitutional institutions in contemporary democracies is to collectivise

reason. However, this makes the frustration of popular will a systematic by-product of any well-

functioning political process. I argue that the only way out is if individual beliefs are subject to

revision during cycles of public deliberations with the responsibility to lead this thrusted upon

elected representatives.

If you cannot persuade your country, you must do whatever it orders.

—Socrates

Socrates failed to persuade his fellow countrymen and lost his life. In our more civi-

lized times, politicians who fail lose only their jobs. In this article, I shall argue that this

is about as much as they ought to do—to lead their fellow citizens in a journey of col-

lective self-discovery, with their success definitively measured on the next election day.

1. The Problem with Elections

It is universally accepted today that political authority can be legitimate only on the

basis of some sort of electoral mandate. This assumption is undisputed even by ap-

parently authoritarian regimes which do hold elections even if they are in name only.

Yet it seems that the normative underpinning of this universal practice is more

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution,

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

* The author is grateful to the participants of the workshop Representative Democracy in the 21st

Century, held at the European University Institute, Florence, and especially to Rainer Bauböck,

Richard Bellamy, Thomas Decreus, John Eric Fossum, Matthew Hoye, Joseph Lacey, Michael

Saward, and Philippe Schmitter for helpful comments on a much earlier version of this argu-

ment. The final version of this paper benefited from the comments of the participants at the

conference Democratic Renewal in Times of Polarisation, held at KU Leuven (2019), with special

mention due to Lorenzo Buti, Donald Bello Hutt, John Parkinson and Ronald Van Crombrugge.

Finally, credit is due to the colleagues from Brunel University London for their probing questions

on my presentation at our staff research seminar (October 2019).

Vesco Paskalev170

Ratio Juris, Vol. 33, No. 2© 2020 The Authors. Ratio Juris, published by University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

apparent than real. This is even more striking given the abundance of literature on

what the representatives, once elected, should do. There is also considerable interest

in various nonelective forms of representation, but all of these are complementary to

electoral representation, the existence and necessity of which is hardly ever

questioned.1

In the age of Cambridge Analytica, this consensus begins to crumble. Studies

show that younger generations do not consider democracy and elections as import-

ant as they are for their parents and grandparents.2 Books announcing the end of

democracy become academic bestsellers. This article aims to contribute to this debate

by showing that the current malaise is not a contingent failure of certain institutions,

policies, or people but that electoral democracy breeds its own opposition on a sys-

temic basis. My point of departure is the claim that the proper inputs in the political

process are not people’s policy preferences but their beliefs about certain policy-rele-

vant facts, i.e., about certain reasons for action. The right collective action is to be

determined on the basis of these beliefs, yet the relationship is a complex one and these

actions are not a function of these beliefs. If this argument is correct, the majority will

is systematically frustrated by what is to be defined as collective reason. This is by no

means a new phenomenon, but it has become visible only recently. I argue further

that elected representatives are both the problem, as they have every incentive to

exacerbate the tension, and the solution, as they are the only ones who are able to

provide one. I posit that their proper function is that of mediation between certain

inputs in the political process and certain outputs thereof.

The article starts with a discussion of a well-known problem of democratic

decision-making to show that while collective decisions must take democratic in-

puts into account, the ultimate decisions should not be responsive to them (Section2).

Then I shall address the tension this creates (Section3) and shall suggest that elected

representatives can and ought to resolve these tensions, to conclude that elections

are instrumental in making them responsible to do so (Section4). The latter is, in my

view, difficult but possible, as elected representatives possess both the ability to track

the beliefs held by citizens and the ability to shape these beliefs (Saward 2006). In the

final two sections, I shall discuss two ways democracy degenerates when govern-

ments fail to carry out their responsibility to resolve the tension. These are technoc-

racy (Section5) and populism (Section6) respectively.

2. Responsiveness and Responsibility

Lincoln’s definition of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for

the people” provides as good point of departure as any, and Fritz Scharpf (1998)

famously elaborated on the meaning of the latter two components. According to

1 See, for example, the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which provides com-

prehensive and up-to-date review of the literature (Dovi 2018). Dovi notes that due to the em-

phasis on elections, discussions about the concept of political representation frequently collapse

into discussions of democracy and references Schumpeter, who considers competitive elections

as the criterion by which to distinguish democracies from the rest.

2 One survey made headlines around the world by finding that 46% of Americans aged 18 to 29

would prefer to be governed by experts (Wike et al. 2017). Another study found that a quarter

of the same group believes that “choosing leaders through free elections is unimportant” (Foa

and Mounk 2017) and the authors claim that results are similar across the globe.