Chapter 6: Institutional Designs as Conversation Starters: Ask Citizens, Not Philosophers!

My overarching aim is to propose a radical proceduralist account of democratic legitimacy that bridges the gap between abstract proceduralist theorizing and concrete, constructive proposals for democratic institutions. In Chapter 5, I outlined three ideals that characterize a radical proceduralist account of democratic legitimacy. These ideals – “inclusive participation,” “openness as reflectiveness,” and “open-endedness” – jointly articulate a discursive interpretation of the radical proceduralist core claim, i.e. the claim that political results are legitimate if and only if they are brought about by fair and inclusive procedures. This interpretation is founded in my understanding of autonomy as “full autonomy” (see Dryzek, 1996; Rostboll, 2015) and a “deflationary,” empirical reading of the core anthropological claims of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. One key characteristic of this radical proceduralist account – that I developed against the background of the “touchstones” for radical proceduralism [RP1]-[RP4] (see Chapter 2) – is that it bears limited implications with regards to specifications of concrete democratic norms and institutions. If “armchair political philosophy” or theorizing was the only option for radical proceduralists, their critics would indeed be right: there would be no (non-circular) way to “bring substance back in” and to outline action-guiding standards or recommendations for democratic politics. In short: radical proceduralism would be “of no use in our world” (PL 285).