Daily Dialectic

There are two essential conditions for a democracy to function - identity, the commonality between people as members of the same political community, and congruency, the right of those who are affected by decisions to participate. In modern democracies, the idnetity condition is privileged while the congruency condition is largely ignored, or at least subsumed. In other words, our democratic systems are almost always made by those who share a federal or state-level identity. This presents a challenge to the democratic functioning of government as people who are unaffected by decisions are eligible to vote, with no guarantee that those who are affected can participate meaningfully (if at all).

Using the congruency condition more strictly might increase the democratic outcomes in terms of accuracy of representation, but it presents a significant difficulty in determining who is affected. How do we know who is affected when functional systems are already monumentally complex?

A possible solution to this is to ask them, what is their “legitimate interest”. This is a modified version of John Burnheim’s “legitimate material interest”; any person who is affected, should be eligible to participate