Competitive-elitist democracy
Citizens: in competitive-elitist models of democracy, average citizens play a minimal and highly indirect role in influencing policy. Political entrepreneurs (usually parties) package policy bundles and compete for votes and other forms of political support.
As a relative matter, voters do not need to be highly informed in order to choose among those vying for their vote and, by extension, they do not have to display a high degree of cognitive humility in order for the system to run reasonably well by its own standards. Just so long as votes are not systematically perverse vis-a-vis relatively good policy (and voters do not empower authoritarians so that democracy itself fails), competitive-elitism can satisfy their theoretical and practical requirements.That said, citizens do have to evince a degree of conative humility in not empowering authoritarians or (what amounts to almost the same) in supporting democratically empowered elites who refuse the peaceful transfer of power upon electoral losses.We can construe such conative humility in self-referential terms (being a virtuous person), interpersonally (being a good democratic citizen), and vis-a-vis history (recognizing that sacrificing short-term authoritarian advantage to long-term democratic goods is generally a poor strategy).Officials: since elected officials are the first movers in competitive-elitist theories, they play a nearly determinative role in forming policy. They are broadly constrained by what they can sell voters, of course, but they stage political conflict in a way that sets the terms of debate. As such, the production of desirable deliberative and power dynamics in this system relies on them possessing more than a modicum of intellectual virtue, prominently cognitive humility. That said, the role of conative humility looms larger. Politicians willing to sacrifice social goods in the quest for a short- or even long-term hold on power have a lot of rope to hang all of us under this model of democracy.
There need not exist a single common good in order for politics to realize all manner of (near) consensually bad outcomes.While this system would be self-sustaining in that elites need not consider any public goods in order to replicate it, the competitive-elitist system of democracy could hardly produce fair decision-making dynamics without the presence of humility. Conative humility toward future generations, in particular, would seem to be a desideratum of officials in competitive-elitist models of democracy.Experts: since competitive-elitism places so few cognitive burdens on citizens, and only moderate ones on officials, it falls to experts to carry most of the cognitive weight of inputs into forming good public policy. As such, they would seem to need a higher degree of cognitive humility, depending on the structure of competition among policy experts. Similarly, since other democratic actors are not in a good position to challenge their cognitive contributions to the policy process, they would need a higher degree of conative humility in order not to exploit the slack in the system to their personal or collective advantage (again, conditional on the structure and degree of competition among elites—e.g., whether there is an overarching community of scientific experts, or whether they divided into think-tanks that roughly mirror the structure of partisan competition). Such exploitation is antithetical to the good democratic decision-making that humility is intended to buy us.
11.4
More on the topic Competitive-elitist democracy:
- Deliberative virtues
- Ruskin and the Emergence of Hobson’s New Liberalism
- POLITICAL ELITES IN THE NEW STATES