Democratic Innovation Beyond Contestation: The Realist Case for Authorial Empowerment

Res Publica https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-024-09681-z Democratic Innovation Beyond Contestation: The Realist Case for Authorial Empowerment Dominik Austrup1 Accepted: 21 August 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Liberal democracies face the challenge of elite capture. Mounting empirical evidence indicates that a small socioeconomic elite has vastly more influence on policy outcomes than ordinary citizens. In this essay, I explore how political reformers should address this issue by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. By placing empirics front and centre, I extrapolate two normative heuristics to guide democratic innovation. First, I maintain that reformers must increase the capacity of ordinary citizens to contest elite-biased political decisions—call this editorial empowerment. Second, ordinary citizens must be vested with additional lawmaking capacity to offset elite bias—call this authorial empowerment. While institutional innovations to advance the editorial power of ordinary citizens have been central to the realist debate on democratic innovation, authorial empowerment has not received adequate consideration. To address this shortcoming, I explore institutional mechanisms aimed at increasing the authorial capacity of ordinary citizens and assess their alignment with the broader realist vision of a new mixed regime. Keywords Realism · Elite capture · Democratic innovation · Tribunate · New mixed regime Introduction Contemporary democracies face the challenge of elite capture. Mounting empirical evidence indicates that policy decisions in liberal societies are skewed towards the interests of a small socioeconomic elite (Gilens 2005; Gilens and Page 2014; Bartels 2008). Familiar democratic institutions, such as competitive elections and universal suffrage, prove unable to sustain the power of the multitude (consisting of ordinary and poor citizens). These phenomena increasingly facilitate dissatisfaction with * Dominik Austrup 1 DFG Graduate Program ‘Collective Decision‑Making’, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Vol.:(0123456789) D. Austrup government performance—thereby undermining democratic stability (Jubb 2015, p. 689; Cagé 2020, p. xvi; Prinz and Westphal 2024). In this essay, I explore how democratic reformers may address the issue by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. I consider realism especially apt for this task as the paradigm aims to deliver direct action guidance for political leaders and reformers (Hall 2017; Cross 2024; but Ulaş 2022). Towards this end, Samuel Bagg suggests abstaining from ‘social system making’ or developing programmes of ‘fixed ends.’ Instead, action-guiding theory should start with an empirical evaluation of a given problem, followed by a thorough normative assessment of available political responses (Bagg 2022, p. 44). In line with these considerations, the main aim of my argument is to formulate mid-level heuristics to guide democratic innovation. By placing empirics front and centre, my analysis thereby focuses on two key mechanisms behind elite capture in Western liberal democracies. First, empirical research indicates that members of the elite can influence policies from outside the legislative system (external capture) via mechanisms such as (il)legal corruption, the manipulation of public opinion through privately owned media, and philanthropic activity (Winters 2011; Gilens 2012). In addition, political scientists increasingly point to the severe overrepresentation of affluent citizens in the legislative process (internal capture) as a relevant source of elite bias (Elsässer et al. 2021; Carnes and Lupu 2023). In response to these two mechanisms, I propose two heuristics to guide democratic innovation. On the one hand, ordinary citizens have to be vested with additional consultation, contestation, and oversight capacities—call this editorial empowerment. On the other hand, reformers must aim to improve the representation of ordinary citizens in legislative assemblies to offset internal elite bias—call this authorial empowerment. As I argue, both heuristics must work in tandem to inform effective democratic innovation. As I further demonstrate, both heuristics prove useful for elaborating a range of institutional innovations aimed at restricting elite capture and empowering the multitude. Alas, realist scholars have thus far focussed their institutional recommendations predominantly on raising the editorial power of ordinary citizens (McCormick 2011; Jörke 2016; Arlen and Rossi 2021; Prinz and Westphal 2024). As their argument goes, reformers should draw inspiration from the ancient Roman tribunate to tilt the balance of power away from accommodating elite interests towards answering the needs of the many by providing ordinary citizens with meaningful means of contestation. Although this is a good place to start, I maintain that these proposals hitherto overlook the dangers of internal capture and neglect the importance of authorial empowerment. To address this shortcoming, I expand the realist vision of a ‘new mixed regime’ (Arlen 2019, p. 408ff.; Arlen and Rossi 2021, p. 44; Prinz and Westphal 2024, p. 73) by introducing institutional mechanisms to increase the authorial capacity of ordinary citizens. In particular, I highlight the plebeian quarter and working-class party-list quotas as anti-elitist mechanisms that complement existing realist proposals. Overall, I maintain that a new mixed regime must incorporate both editorial and authorial mechanisms to reliably prevent elite capture. In line with a more Democratic Innovation Beyond Contestation: The Realist Case… action-oriented approach to political theory, I conclude by highlighting the potential of enabling devices as immediately available means to improve the status quo. Elite Capture In this section, I discuss the evidence for elite capture in Western liberal democracies. I follow this up with a brief explanation of why elite capture must be considered problematic from a realist perspective. The Evidence Elite capture is a specific form of state capture. The latter is characterised by Bagg (2018) as involving ‘the use of state power by a particular faction to achieve its partial ends at the expense of other groups’ (p. 895). This refers to a wide range of violations of the public interest, such as slavery, tyranny, and regulatory capture, that occur ‘whenever public power is made to serve the interest of some partial faction or private actor, at the expense of the public’ (Bagg 2021, p. 222). Elite capture, in particular, occurs when a small wealthy group within a population leverages its formal and informal power resources to steer policy decisions in favour of its particular interests. Empirically, this phenomenon can be observed in many Western liberal democracies. A mounting pile of evidence reveals that policy decisions in many democratic nations are disproportionally responsi (...truncated)