Democracy – Justice: How are they related? by Hakan Erten
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.
I hope you find this site informative and thank you for stopping by.
Hakan Erten
Sections in this Chapter:
How are democracy and justice related? Comparing the democracy model introduced by the Democracy Barometer project with a corresponding justice model derived from the justice principles of John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness, I conclude, that quality of democracy and level of justice are in a direct linear relationship with one another for a Western style, stable democracy. Numerical calculation results support this theoretical conclusion.
Ever since Plato suggested in his masterpiece The Republic that people in just societies are happier, yet 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 toBrian 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 Kruck 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 principle as the basis for distributive justice, namely the difference principle derived by John Rawls.
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.), 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.
On this website and in my short paper titled “Democracy – Justice: How are they related?” with the same content, I show that, while disagreements on issues regarding the correct theory of justice or the correct structure of democracy may persist, there is a direct relationship between democracy and justice, if Democracy Barometer is used to define the structure of democracyand John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness is used as the theory to define justice. I do this by introducing an extended hierarchical justice model similar to the model presented by the Democracy Barometer, extending the above mentioned social justice model of the European Union, to fully cover John Rawls’ Justice as Fairness. With specific models comprising similar structures at hand for democracy and justice, it is possible not only to make clear theoretical statements for the nature of the relationship between these concepts by simple comparison, but also to test these statements with data calculated based on the two models.
- I introduce the model used by Democracy Barometer, referring to their site for all details of the concept.
- 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.
- I compare the models for democracy and justice to determine which components are common to both and which are not.
- I draw conclusions regarding the relationship between democracy and justice based on that comparison.
- I calculate the democracy and justice values for 28 Western countries to see if there is a contradiction with theory.
MORE: http://blog.imtpublishing.com/democracyandjustice/DJ001.htm
Categories: Democracy, The Muslim Times, World