Jour Fixe: Alice el-Wakil "Citizens as Agenda-setters in Democratic Systems"

The Zukunftskolleg invited everyone to the jour fixe led by Alice el-Wakil.

Alice el-Wakil (Postdoctoral Fellow / Dept. of Politics and Public Administration) discussed on Tuesday, 7 December the following topic: "Is voters’ incompetence a reason not to include referendums in democratic systems?".

Abstract:

In political and academic debates about whether referendums and initiatives should be included in democratic systems, an objection to these processes keeps coming up: voters are too incompetent or uninformed to cast their ballot on policy issues. Therefore, democrats should instead support the institutionalization of democracy through conventional representative institutions. This article revisits the normative basis for this enduring objection. It argues that the assumption on which it rests, namely that ordinary voters should be more competent or knowledgeable when casting their ballot in popular votes than in elections, is unjustified. None of the four reasons advanced in the literature – popular votes are more complex than elections; they undermine voters’ decision-making competence; they produce irreversible decisions; and they turn voters into legislators – stands up to scrutiny. Thus, unless democrats are ready to renounce elections, too, the incompetence or lack of knowledge of voters cannot serve to reject popular vote processes.

Literature related to her talk: