My research synthesizes political theory and empirical insights from different subfields of political science to explore questions of inclusion and performance in democratic theory, with particular focus on institutional design and political epistemology. I’ve addressed questions in the political ethics of democratic participation, the political economy of knowledge, epistemic democracy, political parties and partisanship in political theory, comparative institutional design (particularly regarding mandatory voting and deliberative mini-publics), and deliberative theory, among others. My past and ongoing research projects are detailed below.
I also maintain research interests in the areas of American political institutions, public opinion, political psychology, and American political development, particularly as they relate to political interest, participation, and the competence of mass publics. The sections below summarize my contributions to different research programs.
Research Projects:
Book: Democracy for Busy People
My book, Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press, 2023), concerns how to realize democratic equality when people are unequally busy with their lives. The problem is that not everyone likes politics, but democratic reformers and theorists often act as if they do. They tend to advocate reforms that place great demands of time and effort on ordinary citizens even though many would not choose to spend their time on democracy. If reformers’ plans were carried out, they would likely fail to empower those who are short on time and other key resources, and may even exacerbate existing inequalities.
I propose a fundamentally different approach to democratic reform that focuses on making the practice of democratic citizenship undemanding for busy citizens so as to achieve the highest possible degree of democratic equality. This approach emphasizes the institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties and voting rules like mandatory voting, rather than the deliberative institutions favored by many contemporary theorists and reformers. The first half of the book advances and defends a new ethics of democratic citizenship that adjusts our expectations of what makes a good citizen, yielding a model I call stand-by citizenship. The second half uses principles from the first half to design democratic institutions that can accommodate busy people.
Some preliminary ideas developed in the book appeared first in an article in Res Publica entitled “Making Attentive Citizens: the Ethics of Political Engagement, Political Equality, and Social Justice,” (link at Res Publica; ungated version). I argue there that citizens paying attention to politics is necessary for the fundamental liberal democratic values of political equality and social justice, and so that the democratic state must take steps to cultivate it in its citizens. The article develops the notion of stand-by citizenship and shows how it furthers political equality and the empowerment of citizens.
The Ethics of Democratic Citizenship
A considerable portion of my work concerns the ethics of voting and of democratic citizenship more broadly. In “An Institutional Duty to Vote: Applying Role Morality in Representative Democracy” published in Political Theory (link at PT; ungated version), I advance a new argument for there being a duty to vote based on the functional role of being an elector within electoral representative institutions. I argue that voting supplies input into those institutions without which they will fail to abide by their own internal normative logic, making voting an imperative of occupying the role of elector as a matter of the morality of that role.
In another article, I argue that good democratic citizens don’t have to know everything about everything in order to participate responsibly in democratic politics, but rather can justifiably specialize their interest and information in politics to just a narrow set of issues. It’s titled “A Defense of Specialized Citizenship,” and was published in the European Journal of Political Theory (link at EJPT; ungated version).
In researching mandatory voting for my doctoral work, I noticed that under certain conditions mandatory voting could work as a precommitment device for some and a nudge for others. In a paper entitled “Aid for Our Purposes: Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge” in the Journal of Politics (link at JOP; ungated version), I elaborate these conditions and argue that viewing mandatory voting this way neutralizes one of the most potent arguments against it, that it coerces political voice in violation of the right to free expression. Methodologically, this research exemplifies a mixed normative and empirical approach, combining public opinion evidence with philosophical analysis, comparative institutional design, and normative democratic theory.
I maintain a research interest in mandatory voting as an institution that can address a number of serious issues facing contemporary democracies, and have underway additional research on mandatory voting that will offer a round up and evaluation of the state of the literature.
The Performance of Democracy
Epistemic democratic theory justifies democracy on the basis of its capacity to make better decisions or realize better governing outcomes. In a series of papers, I examine important empirical and institutional dimensions of epistemic theory which have been neglected or misunderstood. In one article, entitled “Democracy and the Epistemic Limits of Markets,” I critically assess claims that markets outperform democracy epistemically and so should be substituted for democracy wherever possible. Using the tools of political theory rather than economics or its related disciplines, I argue that markets face severe epistemic limitations which drastically restrict the types of decisions markets can make well. This article has been published in Critical Review (link at Critical Review; ungated version).
Another article, “Democracy’s Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and Epistemic Performance,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (link at AJPS; ungated version), elaborates an issue public-based theory of democratic competence and defends it against several objections. On this theory, democracy can make better decisions when citizens specialize by directing their political attention to a few issues they find especially important and vote on the basis of parties’ or candidates’ performance on these issues. I offer a revisionary account of the empirical evidence on issue publics and explain why a democratic public divided into issue publics would be expected to perform well epistemically, drawing in particular on the power of deliberation.
Parties and Partisanship in Political Theory
Democratic theorists have recently taken an interest in political parties and partisanship, and I have so far completed a couple of contributions to this development.
My book, Democracy for Busy People, includes a chapter on political parties (Ch. 6: Engines of Inclusion: Political Parties in Competition) which emphasizes their invaluable role in extending the scope of democratic inclusion. This is not only because of parties’ direct mobilization work like get out the vote efforts, but mainly, I argue, because of how they render politics and the political world cognitively tractable for citizens who cannot devote much time to it. By packaging issues and policies and clarifying the stakes of electoral competition, parties make it possible for citizens to navigate the political information environment by giving it structure. Yet, in contrast to previous theorists of parties, I insist that parties’ salutary effects are strictly conditional on parties facing robust electoral competition. Without competition, parties can degenerate into cartels that capture power for narrow selectorates. Finally, the chapter considers whether multiparty systems or two-party ones are likely to be better in terms of promoting inclusion, and engages with Francis Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro’s recent defense of two-party democracy. Yet I conclude that multiparty systems are likely to generate more robust and thoroughgoing competition that is more legible to busy citizens, avoiding the demobilizing effects of party cartelization likely under more incomplete two-party competition.
I also published an article on partisanship, “What Is It Like To Be a Partisan? Measure of Partisanship and Its Value for Democracy,” in Perspectives on Politics (link at PoP; ungated preprint), that insists there is a plurality of ways that citizens relate to parties, against contemporary popular and scholarly discourse which obscures this plurality. This matters because existing approaches tend to falsify how citizens experience partisanship, suggesting that the only way to be a partisan is to identify with your party. Through critical analysis of the survey methodology used to measure partisanship, I show that democratic citizens relate to parties both in terms of identity, as is conventionally emphasized, as well as in terms of psychological proximity or closeness, which is systematically suppressed in discussions of partisanship in the United States. I demonstrate that the value of partisanship as theorized by Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, and Lea Ypi and Jonathan White often hinges on recognizing this plurality of partisanships.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
“A Defense of Specialized Citizenship.” European Journal of Political Theory. OnlineFirst.
Link to EJPT: https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851241305030
“What Is It Like To Be a Partisan? Measures of Partisanship and Its Value for Democracy.” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 22, No. 3: Special Section on Partisanship and Political Division (September 2024).
Link to Perspectives: https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272300289X
“An Institutional Duty to Vote: Applying Role Morality in Representative Democracy.” Political Theory, Vol. 51, No. 6 (December 2023).
Link to Political Theory: https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178519
“Democracy’s Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and Epistemic Performance.” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 64, No. 2 (2020).
Link to AJPS: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12486
“Democracy and the Epistemic Limits of Markets.” Critical Review, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2019).
Link to Critical Review: https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2019.1613039
“Making Attentive Citizens: the Ethics of Democratic Engagement, Political Equality, and Social Justice.” Res Publica, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 2018).
Link to Res Publica: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9383-0
“Aid for Our Purposes: Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge.” Journal of Politics, Vol. 79, No. 2 (April 2017).
Link to JOP: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/690711
Book Reviews and Other Academic Writing
“Being a Citizen in the Rubble of Institutions.” Political Science Quarterly, Forthcoming.
Link to PSQ: https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqaf056
Review of Hanging Together: Role-Based Constitutional Fellowship and the Challenge of Difference and Disagreement. By Eric W. Cheng. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 21, No. 3, Sept. 2023, pp. 1068-69.
Link to Perspectives: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723001871
“Inclusion and the Design of Democratic Executives in Steffen Ganghof’s Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP), 27(2), 274–281 (2022).
Link to CRISP: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2159664
“A Family Affair: Populism, Technocracy, and Democracy,” part of the Symposium on Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge, in Critical Review, Vol. 32, Nos. 1-3 (2020).
Link to Critical Review: https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2020.1851480
Review of Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, in Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 17, No. 2 Supplement (2018).
Link to Contemporary Political Theory: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0110-6
Kevin J. Elliott 