The State of Democratic Theory.

By Ian Shapiro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 200p. $19.95.

This wide-ranging and nuanced book offers nothing less than a reconceptualization of the basic purpose of democracy. Ian Shapiro's core argument is that the aggregative and deliberative approaches are misguided in viewing the purpose of democracy as the expression of a “general will that reflects the common good” (p. 3). Rather, democracy is best thought of as a call to limit or minimize domination. While such a refiguring of democracy might seem to inevitably push Shapiro to imagine democracy in terms of a popular practice or ethos, he succeeds in keeping his focus on institutions and regime design. Given this reconceptualization of democracy's purpose, he goes on to provide a principle for guiding democratization efforts: “Democratic systems are most likely to reduce domination to the extent that they bring decision making into better conformity with the principle of affected interest and strengthen the hands of those whose basic interests are vulnerable in particular settings” (p. 147).

With great insight and nuanced judgment, Shapiro weaves together three literatures—normative democratic theory, the empirical literature on democratization, and debates over the nature of power (and domination). And the book ranges even farther than that: The facility with which the author incorporates economic theory, ethnographies of impoverished communities, and constitutional law is extraordinary. His reframing of democracy's essence is extremely appealing. It reconnects debates over democracy to theories of power and domination, a relation that had become attenuated, and it situates democratic theory in a context—not some power-free vacuum in which people choose the best form of government, but in the real-world context of hierarchies and power disparities. This means, as Shapiro writes, that “democracy is now judged not by the either/or question whether it produces social welfare functions or leads to agreement, but rather by how well it enables people to manage power relations as measured by the yardstick of minimizing domination” (p. 51).

At the heart of Shapiro's argument for democracy as a domination-limiting enterprise is a defense of political competition in Chapter 3. In this line of thought, the author presents a reevaluation of Joseph Schumpeter's often-critiqued theory of representative democracy, as well as an argument for using antitrust tools against the contemporary U.S. two-party system. For him, rhetorics of bipartisanship and consensus on Capitol Hill are not pipe dreams covering over a more troubling reality; rather, they are in and of themselves signs of unhealthy collusion and “the quasi-monopolistic dimensions of the system” (p. 108). Provocatively, he argues that American democracy does not suffer from the putative “thinness” of the Schumpeterian conception, but from its failure to fully realize robust elite competition for power.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Shapiro brings real-world insights to the debate over deliberative democracy, supplementing the many critiques of others that are based on more abstract theories of language and power. Using the Clinton-era health-care debate, he explores how vast disparities in wealth and power shape the terms of deliberation. Furthermore, he points out that deliberation can often lead to wider and deeper disagreements, not consensus. Still, he concludes with a qualified defense of deliberation as valuable in certain circumstances for protecting vulnerable persons whose basic interests are at stake, while also remaining attuned to the potential for deliberation to exacerbate unjust hierarchies. The goal of “enhancing the voice of critically weakened democratic participants” (pp. 75–76) orients Shapiro's very convincing approach to judicial review as well. Rather than seeing judicial review as liberalism's check on the excesses of democracy, he argues that it be understood as a self-correcting feature of democracy. This is more than a terminological point: It means adopting more judicial restraint than the Supreme Court exercised in creating the elaborate trimester framework in Roe v. Wade, but at the same time embracing an activist commitment to preventing, or correcting for, the domination that occurs within the democratic process.

Chapters 4, “Getting and Keeping Democracy,” and 5, “Democracy and Distribution,” seem less well integrated into the “democracy and domination” framework, but they contain some notable insights nonetheless. For instance, engaging the empirical literature on democratization, Shapiro makes an important contribution to the debate over whether political communities with deep cultural divisions can sustain democracy. “Consociational” systems of power sharing are often instituted in such situations in place of competitive representative democracy, reflecting a pessimistic and “primordialist” view of intractable group identities. He rejects primordialism and criticizes antidemocratic solutions, such as partition for deepening cultural conflict and people's investments in exclusionary group allegiances. He argues for experiments in democratic institutional design, to see how far it is possible to nurture electoral competition and cross-cutting coalitions in divided societies.

In the introduction, Shapiro writes that “hierarchical relations are often legitimate, and when they are, they do not involve domination on my account” (p. 4). Unfortunately, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate hierarchy is undertheorized. The book's approach to domination might have been strengthened by greater engagement with certain theorists of power, such as Michel Foucault, who are dismissed rather quickly for holding a view that power is omnipresent and for offering little by way of advice for designing institutions to deal with the problem. More detailed engagement might have helped pin down Shapiro's understanding of “domination.” Finally, it is intriguing to think about how The State of Democratic Theory fits with some of the more abstract “agonistic” democratic theory, such as Chantal Mouffe's critique of both the aggregative and deliberative approaches to democracy in The Democratic Paradox (2000). Shapiro's defense of competition over consensus, and his vision of democracy as resistance to domination, share a real affinity with the agonistic approach and could, I think, be viewed as offering a pragmatic, institutionally focused development of some of the core commitments of the agonistic approach.