Political Equality in Deliberative Democracy and the Capability Approach

GARCÍA VALVERDE, FACUNDO

Lima, Perú

Congreso; Human Development and Capability Association Conference HDCA; 2009

Asociación de Desarrollo Humano y Capacidades HDCA

Egalitarian theories have been concerned with the justification of a distributive parameter that aims to equalize some relevant aspect of human beings, such as freedom, opportunities, well-being, etc. However, these same theories have not been concerned with the distribution of political resources in democratic societies or if they have done so, it was only to provide an instrumental justification of those resources (Dworkin 2002; Arneson 1993). These instrumental justifications of political equality are problematic in three major aspects. First, if a political system does not recognize the political equality of its citizens (government by professional elites, a benevolent dictatorship, etc,) but it is more efficient to protect or promote other dimensions of well-being or welfare, then there would be no basis against that system; second, in our every day moral life we often make a sharp distinction between claims to greater economic equality and claims to more political equality; this distinction would be absolutely blurred in instrumental justifications; third, if political resources are just like resources to well-being or to welfare, then we should accept certain trade-offs between these resources. Therefore, the aim of this paper would be to provide a non-instrumental justification of political equality that could take these resources as a special case. (Christiano 1996: 78-81)The recognition and fulfillment of the principle “one person, one vote” by most contemporary democracies would seem to minimize the relevance of this justification. However, the upcoming of deliberative democracy conceptions implies that principles of political equality should be redefined and reinterpreted because of their focus on the communicative process previous to the voting, the deliberations, as the place to look up for a moral justification of democracy. One of the most important authors of this conception, Joshua Cohen, distinguished between two dimensions of political equality in the deliberative process: on one side, citizens should be “formally equal in the sense that the rules of the ideal procedure must not choose the individuals for any advantage or disadvantage; every one who posseses the deliberative capacity has the same status in each stage of the deliberative process” (2001: 245); on the other side, citizens are substantively equals “so the existing distribution of powers and resources does not affect their chances of contribution to deliberation processes and that distribution does not give them decisive faculties.” (2001: 245)In this paper we would offer a non-instrumental justification for the second dimension of political equality. To summarize, this substantive dimension of political equality demands that every participant have a fair opportunity for political influence. In the first section, we reconstruct James Bohman’s position and we show that non-ideal contexts supposed by him, obscure our intuitions about political equality. The most straightforward way to clear those obstacles would be looking at theories developed in ideal contexts. In the second section, we show that rawlsian theory, designed under those contexts, justifies a demand of political equality on the grounds of self-respect; in order to clarify these grounds, we distinguish three of his possible interpretations each one related to an egalitarian metric and we show that institutions of political participation should guarantee not only opportunities or resources but capabilities to participate in deliberations; to put it differently, we show that the social basis of self-respect must be assessed in relation to capabilities and not to resources. In the last section, we attempt to show that is absolutely necessary for Senian and Crockerian account of agency the construction of one specific space for deliberative agency since there is a considerable danger of collapse into well-being metrics.