Does Public Reason Require Supermajoritarian Democracy? Liberty, Equality, and History in the Justification of Political Institutions

Abstract

The project of public reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they nevertheless select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, the paper argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise “neutral” democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for the departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus’ own preference for supermajoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.

Keywords: public-reason liberalism, democracy, coercion, political equality, majority rule, Gerald Gaus