Social Equality and Democratic Authority

Abstract Recent social or relational egalitarian accounts of democratic authority attempt to vindicate the demand for an equal say in political decisions by appealing either to an analogy with valuable interpersonal relationships that include equal authority as their constitutive element, or to a bedrock judgment that inequality of authority and power absent mitigating conditions is morally objectionable. This paper argues that neither the positive view (as I refer to the first conception) nor the negative view (as I call the second) are successful on their own. The positive view provides a plausible account of when authority over collective decisions ought to be shared, yet it fails to explain why it ought to be shared on equal terms. By contrast, the negative view provides a convincing account of why authority ought to be shared on equal terms whenever it ought to be shared, its analysis of when authority ought to be shared is insufficiently discerning. Yet the paper also argues that the insights of the two approaches can be combined in a fruitful way that promises to vindicate democratic authority without rendering either approach redundant.