Book written by Hakan Erten – a Turkish Swiss businessman and author

Book Review: The complete book is at the moment available only in Turkish, English translation to follow, Inshallah

Democracy – Justice: How are they related?

Abstract

How are democracy and justice related? Comparing the democracy model introduced by the Democracy Barometer project with a simple justice model derived from the justice principles of John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness, I conclude that democracy is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for justice. However, I conclude further, that democracy becomes a sufficient condition for justice, if the two functions Equality of Civil Rights and Duties and Fair Equality of Opportunity as well as the principle Conditional Inequality of the justice model derived, either arise by themselves in time through the democratic process or are integrated into the laws and efficiently enforced. Based on the latter conclusion, I argue that a modern stable democracy entails justice in proportion to its quality, or in other words, that democracy and justice are in a direct linear relationship with one another for such democracies.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to democracy-justice.com, dedicated to explaining the relationship between democracy and justice, based on two specific models, one for each of these fundamental concepts of social sciences. The best way to surf this site is to follow the links in above menu from left to right. If you have any questions, comments, criticisms or any other contributions you wish to submit regarding the subject matter, please do contact me. My paper titled “Democracy – Justice: How are they related?” can be downloaded here. For my recently published book in Turkish language, please visit demokrasiveadalet.com. To go directly to the most cited part of this website, the chart showing the relationship between justice and happiness, click here.

Sections in this Chapter:

• Background Information
• Purpose of my Analysis
• Employed Method
• Plausibility Check
• Abstract

Background Information

Ever since Plato suggested in his masterpiece The Republic that people in just societies are happier, yet he failed to acknowledge that democracy, the preferred regime of Athens of his day, was the right system to build a just society, the question regarding the relationship between democracy and justice remained unanswered in the minds of many. Accompanying the rise of democracy to become the predominant political system in the world, social scientists and philosophers alike kept emphasising the fact that democracy and justice, two important concepts of societal life, were directly related, even though a clear path leading from one to the other was mostly not presented. One difficulty stemmed from the lack of a commonly accepted definition for justice; another from a clearly defined structure for democracy, which, when reduced to a mechanism for aggregating preferences of people, according to Brian Barry, lacked any moral value.

Barry argued that, considering the competitive nature of elections, we should generally expect unjust outcomes from democratically taken decisions. According to him, there is nothing in democracy that makes it just. Ian Shapiro and many others disagree with this view completely and say that democracy is inherently just, because it aggregates preferences in an impartial way. In addition, if not objectively then at least subjectively, the feeling of justice emerges in democracy, because decisions are taken by those affected. Shapiro argues further that democracy and justice are related concepts, which must be pursued simultaneously. He justifies his argument with the observation that, people pursue democratic ways to achieve justice and ask for more democracy when they face injustice.

Considering the aforementioned difficulty to agree on a definition of justice, Laura Valentini argues that, in the presence of deep reasonable disagreement about justice, democracy should be valued not only instrumentally but also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since this type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, she concludes that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy. One important step towards establishing a scientifically grounded relationship between democracy and justice was taken by Wolfgang Merkel and Mirko Krück in 2003, when they published the results of a comprehensive empirical study showing a wide ranging correlation between quality of democracy and social justice. The social justice model used in this study was based on a specific theory of justice, namely John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness (somewhat altered by the thoughts of Amartya Sen).

Wolfgang Merkel’s work was afterwards extended to become the social justice index of the European Union as published by the Social Inclusion Monitor Europe. Wolfgang Merkel, together with Daniel Bochsler and co-workers, went on developing an excellent hierarchical model for democracy, named Democracy Barometer (Ref. 1), that comprehensively describes it as a concept made up of diverse components, which can be measured. The Democracy Barometer therefore yields a score for the quality of democracy of a country, which means that theoretical conclusions can be verified by quantitative results. This tool opened up the way for many scientific investigations.

Purpose of my Analysis

On this website and in my short paper titled Democracy – Justice: How are they related? I try to explain the relationship between democracy and justice as understood according to John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness by introducing a slightly extended hierarchical justice model, more or less based on the above mentioned social justice index of the European Union, that is analogous to the democracy model presented by the Democracy Barometer project. Therefore, my simple analysis owes much to the work of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Merkel. By using a slightly extended model for justice, I try to depict the nature of the relationship with democracy at a very basic, theoretical level and try to show that with a specific model, it is possible to make clear statements for the relationship between these concepts.

Employed Method

1. I introduce the model used by Democracy Barometer, referring to their site for all details of the concept.
2. I introduce a model for justice, in analogy to the democracy model used by Democracy Barometer, referring to the social justice index of the European Union as the model for social justice.
3. I compare the models for democracy and justice to determine which components are common to both and which are not.
4. I draw conclusions regarding the relationship between democracy and justice based on that comparison.
5. I calculate the democracy and justice values for a limited number of countries to see if there is a contradiction with theory. I call this the plausibility check.

Plausibility Check

In order to check if there is an obvious contradiction between theory and reality, I calculated the democracy and justice values for the year 2014 (as this was the most recent year, for which indicators were reliably available) for the countries listed below (including explanations of the selection criteria):

1. Turkey as an example of a flawed parliamentary democracy;
2. France as an example of a flawed semi-presidential democracy;
3. United States as an example of a presidential democracy;
4. Switzerland as an example of direct democracy;
5. Scandinavian countries (averaged over the values of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark) as an example of the Nordic social system.

In order to further verify the plausibility of the justice model with an unrelated variable, I charted the calculated justice values against the happiness values of the corresponding countries as published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Read further in author’s website

A short article in English by Hakan Erten: Democracy and justice: How are they related?