The democratic commitment of liberals seems to be robust and non-accidental. Even if Shklar (1989) is right in insisting that while “liberalism is monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy”, nonetheless “it is a marriage of convenience”, this is still a significant relation, and one that a full liberal theory will have to accommodate. Indeed, it is hard to see how all the liberal commitments might be realized in a non-democratic setting. So a defense of liberalism must also include a defense of democracy.

Liberal attempts to justify democracy – in equality-terms (e.g. Christiano 2010), or self-rule or autonomy-terms (Gould 1988) – have been with us for a while (see Kolodny’s 2014a critical review). But it’s not clear any of these are defensible, especially as a part of non-ideal theory: Given the negligible causal powers of an individual’s voting, all talk of self-rule can’t be taken literally, and there can be no trivial relation between individual autonomy and the justification of democracy. Although distributing political power equally is an appealing idea, it’s not clear how to cash it out or how to reconcile it with existing inequality in political power as in everything else. Furthermore, the thought that majoritarianism with a one-person-one-vote rule can secure significant equality (in political power or in the opportunity for political influence (Kolodny 2014b)) seems not merely naïve, but also possibly fallacious: Given background inequality, the thought of distributing votes equally as a means of approximating some ideal of equality, is probably vulnerable to the fallacy of the second-best (Lipsey and Lancaster 1956, Goodin 1995, Enoch 2018). Indeed, with background inequality, deviations from one-person-one-vote (such as assigning less weight to an individual’s vote the more rich or eloquent they are) might be more in line with a plausible equality ideal.

If democracy is still to be justified, different routes must be pursued. One such way might be to insist on grounding the justification of democracy in equality, but endorsing a non-distrbutivist conception of equality (of goods, or of political power), as primarily concerned about certain hierarchical relations (Anderson 1999, Kolodny 2023). Whether such an understanding of equality – sometimes labelled “democratic equality” – can be defended and whether it can ground democracy in the real world as we know it is, at this point, an open question.

Another possible way to proceed – possibly in tandem with endorsing democratic equality – is to reduce expectations. Perhaps liberals should settle for instrumental justifications of democracy, for instance because of the purported better track-record of democracies in promoting and defending human rights (Christiano 2006, section 2.1). It remains unclear, however, whether such a justification of democracy can be sufficiently robust. It doesn’t apply to circumstances in which a benevolent dictator does better, in terms of the relevant values (such as the protection of human rights) than the suggested democratic arrangement (Kolodny 2014a). Another, deeper problem is that such a justification of democracy severs the tie between democracy and the value of autonomy: even if we reject too naïve a picture of democracy as self-rule, still democracy preserves something from the idea that a people should govern itself, and perhaps also that people should govern themselves. The instrumental justification above does not respect that intuition. Once more, the liberal should deepen the understanding of the relevant value of autonomy. Here, for instance, a distinction that proves crucial is that between autonomy as non-alienation (that is, one’s life running in a way that is harmonious with one’s deep commitments) and autonomy as sovereignty (that is, one having the last word on the relevant issues) (Enoch 2017; 2020). A benevolent dictator who makes decisions based on polls about his subjects’ deep commitments may be as effective in securing non-alienation for his subjects as the best of democracies, but his regime is not democratic, and perhaps also unjustifiable, in so far as it fails to secure even a minimal degree of political autonomy understood as sovereignty. (Enoch 2022).

The role of this part within the larger research-project is somewhat unique, in that it is more heavily contingent: Despite the liberal aspiration for full universality when it comes to the underlying liberal values and principles, liberals of course acknowledge that on many matters the application of those principles and values to a specific society may depend on specific features of that society. When it comes to such things as the justification of democracy – and certainly, to the justification of specific democratic details, like election law – the liberal can happily concede that different answers are appropriate in different circumstances. Still, the hope is to put forward a justification of democracy that is at least consistent with, and perhaps even relies on, the understanding of autonomy developed throughout this project.