Does Democratic Competence Require a Commitment to Electoral Democracy?

Standards of democratic competence are implicit in many areas of democratic theory, playing a role in debates about the responsibilities of citizens, civic education, and more. The importance of establishing minimal requirements for democratic competence that all those committed to democracy can endorse is thus clear. In recent work, Alexandra Oprea and Daniel J. Stephens argue that a democratically competent voter is one who both knows how to and intends to vote in such a way that, if the relevant candidates or policies were chosen, the predictable end of electoral democracy would not follow. In this paper I outline and discuss two complications for their account. First, I argue that in some cases a democratically competent voter may vote for an option that, if chosen, would bring about the predictable end of democracy. Second, I challenge their claim that democracy must involve the use of free and fair elections, urging instead that sortition—that is, the selection of public officials by lottery—can be legitimately democratic. Consequently, a democratically competent voter can intend to vote for an option that ends electoral democracy without intending the end of democracy entirely, provided that they intend to vote for a suitably democratic alternative based on the use of sortition.