EQUALITY IN A LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Describe the Benefits and Limitations of Law Reform Promoting Equality in a Liberal Democracy

Describe the Benefits and Limitations of Law Reform Promoting Equality in a Liberal Democracy

Introduction

Democracy is a form of collective decision making that presupposes some form of equality among the participants. The term is used empirically and normatively, often simultaneously. It is often used to describe or distinguish one kind of political regime from another. A democratic system, for example, is one in which there are procedures and institutions for capturing the views of citizens and translating them into binding decisions. At the same time, however, these empirical descriptions often contain within them normative claims about the way institutions ought to be structured or behave. Thus, it can be said that one society (whether now or in the past) is more (or less) democratic than another. The ideal of equality is particularly important to the normative evaluation of democracy. A democratic political system, on this view, is one that manifests in its institutions and procedures a conception of its members as free and equal and thus owed equal respect.

Liberal Minimalist Theory

The appropriate text to begin is with Kenneth J. Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (1962). Arrow's is the seminal work of social choice theory. Although he does not address political issues directly, he identifies disturbing issues that trouble democratic theorists. Arrow's famous impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox, addresses a fundamental problem encountered by any political system that requires three or more choosers, or voters, to register their preference from a list of three or more alternatives in the formulation of public policy. Arrow presents a formal proof logically demonstrating the impossibility of creating any effective aggregation device. At the core of that proof is the second issue of cyclical majority's preference pattern. If we make the reasonable assumptions that voters have divergent preferences and that the issue that receives the majority of votes will win, the theory of cyclical voting reveals that the order in which issues are voted on will determine which issue wins. No matter what aggregation device is used, and no matter how far the system of aggregating individual preferences is, the procedure will always yield an irrational result. Therefore, any attempt to amalgamate the individual preferences of voters into rational social policy is bound to fail. (Yarbrough, 1979, pp. 61-95)

The preeminent exemplar of the influence of Arrow's thought on democratic theorizing is William H. Riker's Liberalism against Populism (1982). Riker is an influential proponent of rational choice theory in political science and a fervent critic of direct democracy. Understandably, then, his analysis of democracy originates from that specific methodological angle of vision. Riker evaluates the implications of social choice theory generally—and Arrow's paradox specifically—for democratic theory and practice. In Riker's view, democracy refers to both an ideal (participation, liberty, and equality) and to a method or procedure for aggregating individual preferences into collective social polity (voting). It has been assumed that the democratic ideals of participation, liberty, and equality could ...