Can Citizens be Democratic Realists?

Some democratic realists claim that democracies operate in ways that are unrelated to traditional democratic ideals (equality, autonomy, etc.) and argue that the value of democratic practices lies elsewhere. While democratic realists give different explanations of what this value is, most agree that it should be attributed to certain useful consequences that these practices have proven capable of realizing. To give one prominent example, elections should be valued not because they recognize the political equality of citizens or because they enable them to shape the policies to which they are subject but rather because they prevent elites from entrenching their powers and/or because they facilitate a peaceful transition of power. In this article, I argue that this revisionary realist strategy is self-defeating. The useful consequences of democratic procedures that realists construe as their real value should, I claim, be seen as desirable by-products that flow from citizens’ orientation to the very ideals that democratic realism seeks to dispense with. Citizens, for instance, can continue to participate meaningfully in elections and thus contribute to producing the abovementioned valuable consequences only on the assumption that they have some capacity to steer their community in a particular political direction and that this capacity (above some minimum threshold) is equally shared among them. By contrast, if citizens were to follow democratic realists in abandoning these orientations and accept that the value of elections is reducible to certain useful consequences, they could no longer meaningfully display the behavioral dispositions and provide the kind of inputs from which these useful consequences flow. As a theory of how democracies ought to operate, democratic realism, therefore, fails the test of transparency: it presupposes that citizens assign a different—and following democratic realists—mistaken value to democratic procedures because only under this condition will these procedures actually have the kind instrumental value that democratic realists want to turn into their main purpose. On the basis of this criticism, I defend a new form of realism that I refer to as reflective democratic realism. This form of realism is more plausible because it recognizes how traditional democratic ideals cannot be dispensed with if democratic procedures are to produce the useful consequences that realists conceive of as their real value. In this context, I also develop the hypothesis that the closer democratic procedures come to realizing their constitutive aims, the more robust their capacity to produce certain useful consequences will be. The takeaway lesson is that realists who are concerned with securing the instrumental value of democratic practices should reorient their efforts around how to ensure that these practices come closer to realizing their constitutive ideals.