Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

concerns the level at which these attributes need to be present for a
polity to be democratic at all – how much participation is required, or
how much deliberation? – and relations among these virtues.
Here I am mainly concerned with the levels at which these attributes
are present, rather than their distribution. [4] Dahl’s main concern is with
determining what equality should mean with respect to the attributes
of democracy that he identifies. He focuses on assessing the extent to
which equality is or should be achieved along one or another dimension
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I will comment briefly on the distributive issue, to follow Dahl and the most frequent
discussions of what democracy means. What distribution of these attributes is sufficient
to warrant the term democratic? Does equality refer to floors, opportunities, or maximal
values? Equal participation could mean that everyone engages in at least a modest
amount of political action, and this is sufficient to define them as an actively participating
member of the polity. Or it could mean that there should be no formal obstacles to
participation, and everyone should have a decent practical ability to participate. Equality
could also mean that all members of the polity actually participate to the same extent
in a specified period.
Dahl at first seems to prefer the most explicitly egalitarian interpretation according to
which democracy would mean fully equal participation, agenda control, and so forth. On
this view, democracy means radical political equality among citizens and a thoroughly
egalitarian set of institutions and norms. Yet he does not sustain this stance. For the
most part he interprets democracy as requiring “substantial opportunities” along these
dimensions.
Voting equality is probably distinctive among the attributes that Dahl lists in varying
least from minimal to maximal interpretations of equality. This is so if one holds to the
narrowest reading of voting equality – everyone’s vote counts as 1. Beyond that, however,
voting equality is complicated because it refers to forms of representation and election
procedures in which everyone’s vote is counted as 1 but inequality of effects is common. (In
the United States, a vote for the Senate in Rhode Island and a vote for the Senate in Texas
do not count the same, although both count as one vote.) For Dahl there is at least one
clear result, but it is not sufficient to decide all the issues that are involved. Majority rule
is the least unacceptable way of interpreting voting equality, because other formulations
count some individuals’ votes as worth more than those of members of a majority.
With the other features, such as control of the agenda, the distance between a thin and
a maximal interpretation of equality seems larger. And the maximal interpretation
is sometimes difficult to spell out in any very clear way. To take agenda control as an
example - how could everyone share equally in controlling the political agenda? How
would we know when this had occurred? Any practical scheme aimed at maximal equality
of agenda control would certainly involve not only a radical dispersal of political power
but an even more difficult to imagine equality of interest in and commitment to politics
as against other forms of life. As he proceeds, Dahl tends to interpret the requirement
that these attributes be equally present across individuals as meaning that individuals
should have substantial capacities in each area (equality of opportunity), along with the
stipulation that large barriers to action not exist (equality as a floor).