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Contemporary approaches to democracy highlight the fact that, empirically, we face increasingly more challenges that affect democratic societies, ranging from failures to properly represent citizens’ preferences to crises that shatter the very foundations of democracy. Regarding the latter, the dominance in the literature of the twin concepts of democratic backsliding and democratic erosion highlights an issue that Collier and Levitsky had first mentioned in 1997: is “democracy-with-adjectives” really a signifier of the essence of democracy?

On the other hand, we have witnessed the emergence of a new literature, focused on the causes and forms of democratic resilience, reflecting the capacity of an institutional framework to insulate itself from the adverse effects mentioned beforehand.

A third recent direction in democratic theory starts from the premise that we can have multiple instantiations of democracy. Many of the research agendas associated with this direction emphasize the necessity of dealing with what Guerrero (2014) calls “the failure of responsiveness”, the incapacity of democratic systems to fulfill the vital function of representation. Replacing or supplementing electoral mechanisms with sortition, institutionalizing deliberative democracy, moves towards “open democracy” (Landemore: 2020), are all attempts to revitalize democracy and to strengthen the normative foundations of the concept. What they – together with many other empirical and normative approaches – have in common is the fact that they put forth the necessity of democratic innovations (be they citizen assemblies, mechanisms to develop civic culture, rediscovering institutions such as the Tribunate, or proposals to safeguard the conditions for democracy for future generations, to name just a few).

The present workshop reunites contributions that focus on such democratic innovations. It brings together political scientists, political philosophers and democratic theorists who analyze different aspects that could be considered novel directions in justifying and improving democratic processes.

PROGRAM

10.00 – 10.20 Opening address

Valentina SANDU-DEDIU, New Europe College
Andreas ZIVY, AMEROPA Foundation
Adelin-Costin DUMITRU, New Europe College

10.20 – 11.20 Panel I
Andrei POAMA (Leiden University) & Suzanne BLOKS (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Multiple Juries

Attila MRÁZ, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Philosophy
Protest Voting as A Democratic Innovation

11.20 – 11.30 Coffee break

11.30 – 13.00 Panel II
Anthoula MALKOPOULOU, Uppsala University
Ostracism, Political Exclusion and Democratic Self-defence Today

Zsolt KAPELNER, University of Oslo
Democracy Embattled: Reconciliation and Antagonism Under Democratic Decline

Ian ZUCKERMAN, Regis University
Deliberating in An Emergency: John Dewey on Economic Crisis and Democratic Security

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

14.00 – 15.30 Panel III
Anda ZAHIU, University of Bucharest
The Case Against Trust in Political Institutions

Arina COCORU, New York University, Abu Dhabi
Are Non-democratic Citizens Blameworthy for Supporting Their States?

Camil PÂRVU, University of Bucharest
Epistemic Asymmetries, Political Polarization and the Paradoxes of Digital Democratization of Expertise

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break

16.00 – 17.30 Panel IV
Alexandru VOLACU, University of Bucharest
Disentangling Electoral Rights

David DIACONU, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest
Deliberative Democracy? Voting Mechanisms and Collective Decision-Making in Commons Management

Adelin-Costin DUMITRU, New Europe College & National University of Science and Technology “Politehnica”, Bucharest
‘Leave it to the People’. Open Democracy and Inheritance Taxation

17.30 – 18.00 Closing remarks

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SHORT ABSTRACTS

Andrei Poama (Leiden University) & Suzanne Bloks (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Multiple Juries

Current single jury systems use jury deliberation to generate accurate verdicts (for criminal and civil juries) or policy decisions and recommendations (for citizen juries). However, the evidence concerning the epistemic credentials of jury deliberation is mixed. One of the main problems that underlines their mixed epistemic credentials is that single deliberative juries tend to be relatively large, which encourages free-riding: In large deliberative juries, it might be more rational for jurors to simply repeat or defer to what other jurors say rather than form independent judgements. Furthermore, individual jurors are currently subject to various epistemically suspect phenomena – for instance, reputational or informational cascades or dominant narrator effects – that are rendered possible and, in some cases, enabled by deliberative interactions. Some have argued that countering this epistemic problems requires eliminating or suspending jury deliberation. In this paper, we argue that neither elimination nor suspension are necessary to mitigate these epistemic problems. Instead, we argue that the problems can be better countered by replacing existing single jury systems with a multiple jury systems. On our account, a multiple jury system would consist in a composite jury that includes several (smaller) deliberative sub-juries whose decisions are aggregated following a unanimity rule (for criminal juries) or super-majority rule (for civil juries or citizen juries). Adequately designed, a multiple jury system would be both deliberatively justified (by tapping into the benefits of jury diversity and the interactions between jurors at the sub-jury level) and aggregately justified (by tapping into the additive benefits of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ at the composite jury level). More positively, we argue that a multiple jury system is epistemically better placed tracking the relevant standard of evidence for any particular juries (eg, the beyond a reasonable for criminal juries; preponderance of evidence for civil juries). The paper is structured as follows. In Section I, we review empirical research on free-riding, social loafing, reputational and informational cascades, and dominant narrator effects, and identify doubt-suppression as the wrong-making feature that characterizes these phenomena taken as a whole. In Section II, we present our multiple jury proposal, and argue (why) it fares better when it comes to doubt-suppression. In Section III, we answer some objections to our doubt-suppression argument and policy proposal – in particular, the insufficient deliberation objection, the disempowerment objection and the trust objection. Section IV concludes.

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Attila Mráz, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Philosophy
Protest Voting as A Democratic Innovation

Protest voting is often portrayed in public discourse as undemocratic—an abuse of the democratic functions of the franchise. In this paper, I aim to refute this judgment. I am not interested in whether protest voting can be morally justified in terms of general moral reasons— e.g., whether it is in conformity with natural duties of justice (cf. Maskivker 2019, Brennan 2011). (I assume it can be, under some circumstances.) Instead, I argue that protest voting is not an abuse of the franchise in the sense that it is not undemocratic to engage in it.
First, I will distinguish and elaborate on two conceptions of protest voting. Both understand protest voting as a choice made regardless of or despite the (lack of) its foreseeable effects on the election outcome. On the ‘political’ conception, this is motivated by the intention to use one’s ballot, together with other voters, to communicate a political view. On the ‘integrity- motivated’ conception, it is motivated instead by voters’ intention to protect their own moral integrity.
Second, I examine three paradigmatic approaches to the democratic value of the franchise: participating co-ruling, realizing political equality, and helping one another realize justice. I argue that political protest voting not only does not threaten any of these values but it also contributes to their realization. Further, I show that integrity-motivated protest-voting, even if it does not contribute to the realization of any of these values, does not unconditionally threaten them either. This is because integrity-motivated protest voters are often structurally impeded in contributing to these values with their franchise—i.e., while there is no democratic gain to their protest-voting, there is (unfortunately) no democratic loss either.
These arguments cumulatively suggest that protest voting is far from undemocratic, and in its typical occurrences, it is not an abuse of the franchise. My argument proceeds by elimination, defending protest voting as fitting with the moral function of the franchise in various theories of democracy and enfranchisement. Hence, the argument is inherently incomplete—but indicative of the defensibility of protest voting as a democratic practice; an innovation that addresses some of the morally significant shortcomings of democratic institutions and democratic party systems. While it does not follow that protest voting is all things considered morally justified, whether conditionally or unconditionally, my argumentation removes a significant obstacle to its justification.

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Anthoula Malkopoulou, Uppsala University
Ostracism, Political Exclusion and Democratic Self-defence Today

In ancient Athens, citizens had the opportunity every year to ban someone from the community for a limited time through a popular vote called ostrakophoria. The usual targets were politicians who, at different times, were seen as a threat to the demos and the wider public interest. Ostracism was a unique political tool, whose legacy is linked to the heyday of democracy in Athens. What can this forgotten institution teach us today? Some of the lessons that can be drawn from ostracism are that the determination of democratic enemies is contingent on social and political circumstances and must therefore be decided by the citizens themselves; that this decision must be protected from abuse and provide for reparation to the ostracised individual; that threats to democracy are recurrent, which must be reflected in the design of democratic self-defence institutions. Finally, ostracism suggests a new way of approaching political representation, in the negative, as an act of removal rather than installation. The lecture will discuss the logic of ostracism and political exclusion, its limits, possible institutional adaptations, and the general insights it can bring to contemporary democracy, not least to the project of democratic self-defence.

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Zsolt Kapelner, University of Oslo
Democracy Embattled: Reconciliation and Antagonism Under Democratic Decline                

Illiberal and antidemocratic political actors are on the rise in contemporary democracies. The project of advancing the democratic ideal today must take place against the background of a shrinking consensus on the desirability of this ideal. This brings to the fore the question of democratic self-defence: how can democratic institutions and practices ensure the resilience of democracy in the face of a growing antidemocratic threat? Discussions in the literature tend to focus on the permissibility of individual strategies and tactics, e.g., militant democracy, cordons sanitaires, and the like. In this paper I address a broader philosophical question about democratic self-defence, i.e., what kind of stance should defenders of democracy take toward antidemocrats. I distinguish between at least two possible stances: reconciliation and antagonism. A reconciliatory stance aims at the eventual reestablishment of ties of normal democratic relationship with antidemocrats. This stance constraints strategies of democratic self-defence to ones which do not make it impossible to eventually reintegrate antidemocrats into a stable democratic community. An antagonistic stance, by contrast, does not aim at reconciliation; it is indifferent towards reestablishing ties of normal democratic relationships with antidemocrats in the future. Although most of the existing literature on democratic self-defence adopts and implicitly or explicitly reconciliatory stance, I will argue that under contemporary conditions of democratic decline, an antagonistic stance is appropriate. Taking a reconciliatory stance when antidemocrats increasingly gain power risks injury to democratic relationships to fellow democratically-minded citizens, particularly members of vulnerable groups in society that antidemocrats target for exclusion and violence. These injuries also damage the value of the would-be stable democratic order reestablished through reconciliation. I will argue that there are no clear reasons to prefer a reconciled but damaged democracy to a democracy permanently embattled by antidemocratic forces. For this reason, we should be indifferent toward the aim of reconciliation; we should choose antagonism. I close the talk by discussing some possible institutional and individual implications.

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Ian Zuckerman, Regis University
Deliberating in An Emergency: John Dewey on Economic Crisis and Democratic Security

Democratic theorists have endeavored to respond to the attenuation of democratic representation by highlighting democratic practices in varied political fora outside the formal electoral system. This paper aims to contribute to this growing conversation on democratic innovations by recalling a previous generation’s effort to diagnose, and innovatively supplant, withering forms of democratic representation in crisis. In particular, I look at John Dewey’s sustained critical engagement with the emergency politics of the New Deal, in the 1930s and ‘40s in the United States, as an example of what may strike us today as a paradox. The paradox Dewey explored in his philosophical and public writings in this period is that emergency conditions, often thought of as an instance justifying the suspension of democratic forms of accountability, may both invite and require deepening and broadening practices of public deliberation and contestation that Dewey saw as the essence of democratic practice.

I develop this argument through an analysis of Dewey’s prolific interventions as a public intellectual during the New Deal, which I read in light of his classic works in political philosophy and the philosophy of education penned during this period. Dewey’s program for substituting the New Deal’s emergency politics with democratic renewal was threefold. First, Dewey the democratic theorist insisted on the inseparability of democratic means and ends. This meant that the logic of emergency in substituting executive discretion for deliberation was likely to fail at preserving the very security it elevated over other values. Secondly, Dewey the pragmatist philosopher insisted on the indispensability of the ongoing construction of collective public knowledge, not in opposition to top-down expertise but as the condition for it. And thirdly, Dewey the engaged civic activist skewered the tendency of Depression era emergency politics to portray events like unemployment or bank failure as disconnected and decontextualized episodes, detached from the circumstances and conditions from which they arose. Rather, Dewey urged, we should see the Depression not as an emergency but as a crisis, arising from conditions rooted in the status quo ante, and requiring systemic transformation rather than a resumption of the previous order.

In conclusion, I argue that with some modification Dewey’s model is not restricted exclusively to the historical experience of the Great Depression. Rather, his arguments can be applied to present experiences of emergency politics, allowing us to locate democratic innovations in the most unlikely of places: in the midst of emergencies.

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Anda Zahiu, University of Bucharest
The Case Against Trust in Political Institutions

In contemporary democracies, it is often assumed that citizens must trust political institutions if things are to go well. In recent years, the steady erosion of citizens’ reported trust in political institutions has increasingly started to be correlated with democratic backsliding. The rise of antisystem parties and extremism are some notable effects of this trend (Haggard & Kaufman, 2021).

I argue that we have empirical grounds to believe that the normative expectations we have in relation to trust are a primary vehicle in the rise of hyper personalistic regimes, instead of the latter being an effect of trust erosion. Hardin (1999) maintained that citizens’ trust in institutions is not a necessary component of democratic regimes. I will take one step further and, going back to James Madison’s arguments for checks and balances, argue that political institutions must be designed as an expression of anti-trust.

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Arina Cocoru, New York University, Abu Dhabi
Are Non-democratic Citizens Blameworthy for Supporting Their States?

The paper concerns the moral blameworthiness of citizens of non-democratic states for obeying the laws and norms of their states’ institutions. In particular, I focus on the epistemic condition of moral responsibility: if one assumes (with the literature) that supporting a non-democratic regime is morally wrong, I ask whether these citizens can know this moral fact, and, if not, whether their ignorance of it is blameworthy. In answering this question, I draw on the well-known debate about cases of widespread cultural ignorance, where evidence about the moral significance of an act exists, but it is scarce and obscured by cultural factors.

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Camil Pârvu, University of Bucharest
Epistemic Asymmetries, Political Polarization and the Paradoxes of Digital Democratization of Expertise

This paper examines the complex relationship between the democratization of knowledge through digital platforms and its paradoxical effects on political polarization in conditions of (radical) epistemic inequality. While digital technologies have dramatically expanded access to information and expertise, they have simultaneously created new forms of epistemic asymmetries and contributed to deepening political divisions. The paper offers a theoretical framework for understanding how epistemic authority is contested in digital spaces and proposes potential interventions to address the resulting democratic challenges.

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Alexandru Volacu, University of Bucharest
Disentangling Electoral Rights

The question of how voting rights can be justified, and possibly legitimately restricted (usually the basis of young age, intellectual disabilities, criminal convictions, and migration status), has been thoroughly addressed by political theorists in the past few decades. Comparatively little attention has been devoted, however, to another facet of electoral inclusion that is critical to representative democracy, which has been labeled as the “right to run for office” (Rehfeld: 2009), the “right to candidacy” (Johns: 2016), or the “right to stand” (Lever and Mraz: 2022; Lever: 2023). In this paper I aim to provide an assessment of this right, together with its legitimate restrictions, by focusing on its normative underpinnings and its correspondence with the right to vote.

First, I maintain that there are three views that can be taken in respect to the allocation of voting and candidacy rights: (1) a symmetrical view that requires that identical restrictions are imposed on both, (2) an asymmetrical view that imposes less restrictions on candidacy rights than on voting rights and (3) an asymmetrical view that imposes more restrictions on candidacy rights than on voting rights. I develop each view in turn and argue that all of them can be plausibly defended, depending on which aspects of democratic voting we focus on, namely on the political equality of autonomous members of the community, on the authority of the demos when it comes to fundamental political decision-making, or on the formation of relations of accountable representation between elected officials and electors. The upshot of this discussion is that the problem of allocating candidacy rights may ultimately lack a universal solution and can only be answered within the confines of a specific account of democracy and democratic voting.

Second, I turn to real-world constraints on candidacy rights that do not ordinarily correspond to similar constraints on voting rights in contemporary democracies, such as disqualifications due to occupational status (e.g. for military personnel), due to a previous exercise of the right to hold elected office (in case of term limits), due to lack of proven support (e.g. if there is a requirement to collect a number of signatures to be eligible to stand), or due to certain demographic characteristics (e.g. if there are reserved seats for ethnic minorities). I argue that, in various ways, these kinds of restrictions are justified by appealing to considerations of democratic quality, rather than on what democracy would necessarily require as a matter of institutional design. Unlike the case of voting rights, I maintain that candidacy rights can be legitimately restricted in pursuit of democratic quality, as long as the restrictions are non-arbitrarily enforced and there is compelling empirical evidence supporting them. While these conditions may not appear particularly burdensome, they raise serious doubts as to the legitimacy of some real-world practices, such as higher age thresholds for candidacy rights than for voting rights, or the exclusion of naturalized citizens from certain elected offices.

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David Diaconu, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest
Deliberative Democracy? Voting Mechanisms and Collective Decision-Making in Commons Management

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Adelin-Costin Dumitru, New Europe College & National University of Science and Technology “Politehnica”, Bucharest
‘Leave it to the People’. Open Democracy and Inheritance Taxation

The contribution that I bring in the present paper concerns the fact that the cord between preferences and policy-making is cut once inequalities become deep-rooted in a society. This is worrisome as it is the moment where individuals can no longer “meet each other as equals in the collective decision procedure” that their interests cease to be given equal consideration (Christiano: 1996, p. 80). Furthermore, there are good arguments to be made that a regime ceases to deserve the label of “democracy” once this happens, given that there is an implicit assumption within democratic theory –also upheld in what we might generally call the public sphere – that there ought to be a correspondence between laws and citizens’ preferences (Rehfeld: 2009, p. 214).

I propose that contemporary democratic regimes ought to experiment with sortition-based institutions –taking the form of deliberative fora – in order to decide an appropriate tax policy for inheritance. In the present paper I argue why inheritance would be an appropriate starting point, and why it would be important to confer such venues of representation decisional power.While the specific tax level and other substantive measures would have to be decided upon by the people reunited in such a mini-public, I offer some provisional considerations on this topic. This is motivated by the fact that deliberative approaches can and should include substantive principles, as long as these are treated as “morally and politically provisional” (Gutmann and Thompson: 2004, p. 97).

One of the premises of deliberative democracy is that “public decisions should be responsive to reasoned or considered views – those that survive a well-ordered deliberative procedure, that gives everyone a real opportunity to engage in the deliberative process” (Ferejohn: 2000, p. 78). My conjecture is that creating an appropriate deliberative framework is going to increase the citizens’ willingness to redistribute inherited wealth, although inheritance taxes are “among the most unpopular taxes in many countries” (Gross, Lorek and Richter: 2016; see also Dowding: 2008; see however Bastani and Waldenstrom: 2021 for a study in which people’s attitude to inheritance taxes changed after a learning process showcasing the bequests’ structural effects).

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This event is organized within the AMEROPA Fellowships program at New Europe College.