Democratic Equality and Voting Rights: Should All Votes Count the Same?

There is a strong tendency to presume equal voting rights to be a prerequisite for a polity to qualify as a democracy. Is this presumption warranted? This workshop welcomes all papers that address voting equality, its normative justifications, its conceptual connections to democracy, and its empirical implications for contemporary democracies. The presumption in favour of voting equality guides empirical investigations of democracies and holds across different normative ideals about democracy (Dahl, 1989: 109; Riker, 1982: 52). Democratic theory tends to consider voting equality as a fixture of political equality (Dworkin, 1987: 9; Kolodny, 2014: 289; Christiano, 2008: 95). The specifications of voting equality vary, but these views share idea that citizens' equal standing requires equal voting power. However, this has raised empirical, conceptual, and normative challenges. Empirically, political scientists questions whether voting equality is realized in actual democratic institutions. Some have pointed out that certain federal institutions, such as the election of US Senators, are inconsistent with democracy because, by constraining majorities, they violate voting equality (Dahl, 1983; Kelemen, 2007). These empirical investigations tend to take for granted (1) that voting is a form of power that must be equally distributed, and (2) that equality of voting power is indeed a core feature of political equality. Conceptually, it is unclear what voting equality entails when we need to decide how votes must be counted, and what else is equalized in addition to the number of ballots per person. If voting is a form of power that citizens exercise and voting equality means an equal distribution of this power, how should this power be conceptualized? Is voting power a matter of a priori chance of being decisive (Kolodny, 2014) or actual preference distribution (Barry, 1980)? Voting equality has also been challenged from a normative perspective. Dworkin takes the tension between equal impact (the effect one has on the decision through her vote) and equal influence (the effect one has on the decision by others’ vote decision), as a compelling reason to reject any non-instrumental view of democracy (Dworkin, 1987: 17). Wall considers the link between equal status and equal voting power unwarranted (Wall, 2007: 417). Others have argued that democracy can be consistent with plural voting (Brighouse and Fleurbaey, 2010). Even more radically, some have challenged the very idea that democratic equality would require elections (Guerrero, 2014; Saunders, 2008). Thus, democratic theorists have offered views of political or democratic equality, which rejects a direct link between the equality of status and the equality of votes. These challenges have reshaped normative theorizing about the value of democratic equality and have raised methodological challenges for empirical political science. If voting equality is less essential to democracy than traditionally believed, then we need different measures to classify countries. More abstract measures of democratic equality may be harder to operationalize, whereas more readily operationalizable measures such as the equal number of votes or equal impact make such assessments easier and more amenable to comparisons across polities, but such measures may rely on shakier normative grounds.