Public Choice (2005) 125: 471–475DOI: 10.1007/s11127-005-4602-1 C© Springer 2005

Book review

Gerry Mackie, Democracy defended. Contemporary Political Theory, ed. byIan Shapiro. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.xvi +483 pages. USD 85.00 (cloth); 30.00 (paper).

“Many people,” announces Gerry Mackie in his book Democracy Defended,“suggest that democracy is impossible. The main purpose of this book is toargue against that view” (p. 16). Mackie’s primary target is William Riker’sLiberalism against Populism. In that book, Riker did not attack democraticdecision-making procedures per se (voting for representatives, etc.), but in-stead argued for the superiority of one kind of theoretical grounding for thoseprocedures – liberalism – over another – populism. Mackie, however, arguesthat “What almost everyone means by democracy is what Riker calls pop-ulist democracy” (p. 3). For this reason, Mackie believes he is justified intreating Riker’s attack on populism as an attack on democracy as such. Thisis a defensible move. Riker clearly believed that the intellectual defense ofdemocracy that one accepted influenced one’s expectations of what democ-racy could and should do. Since Mackie takes certain of those expectations– expectations that Riker’s liberalism denies can be fulfilled – to be the heartand soul of democracy, it is understandable that he should regard Riker asantidemocratic.

Unfortunately, Mackie’s critique of Riker’s argument is hard to follow, andhis defense of populist democracy is weak. Indeed, Mackie seems to thinkthat his critique of Riker is sufficient to qualify as a defense of populism, eventhough it raises more questions than it answers. In what follows, I shall brieflyreconstruct what I take to be the heart of Mackie’s critique of Riker, notingpoints of confusion along the way. I shall then even more briefly describe thesort of constructive argument for which Mackie’s critique suggests the need,an argument Mackie himself does not provide.

Mackie accuses Riker of professing “democratic irrationalism,” the beliefthat “the rational individual opinions or desires of citizens cannot be amal-gamated accurately and fairly” (p. 3). Setting aside the question of fairness,however, it not at all clear as to what wanting to see opinions amalgamatedaccurately involves. Surely Riker was not denying that votes could be countedmore or less correctly, with no hanging chads, etc. Instead, Mackie believes

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that some amalgamation of the preferences is supposed to be an accurate mea-sure of something, and takes Riker to be arguing that democratic decision-making procedures cannot do this. Despite, however, Mackie’s repeatedlyexpressed desire to investigate “the possibility of the accurate and fair amal-gamation of opinions and wants” (Mackie’s emphasis; pp. 30–31), it is notuntil page 34 that he says anything about what this amalgamation is supposedto be accurately measuring, and then only in passing. There he points tothe goal of having “democratic decisions variably approximate. . . the generalwill or public good” (Mackie’s emphasis). The general will and the publicgood, assuming both can be clearly defined, are conceptually distinct, despiteMackie’s efforts to conflate them here. One can coherently say, for example,that a group willed to send a lot of money to Africa in order to help starvingchildren, and thereby acted against its own good for the sake of the good ofothers. Most of Mackie’s references from this point on, however, are to the“common good” or “public good” as the goal of the democratic process, andso it is reasonable to assume that he understands Riker to be denying that sucha process could yield an accurate measurement of the common good.

This interpretation of Riker is problematic. Granted, Riker appears to con-flate the common good and the general will very much as Mackie does, defin-ing the general will as “the objectively correct common interest of the in-corporated citizens” (Riker, 1982, p. 11). But Mackie attributes to Riker theview that democratic decision-making procedures cannot accurately measurethis common good. Riker did not argue this. If he did, he presumably wouldhave indicated what alternative procedures might ascertain the common goodbetter than democratic ones. Instead, he argued that there was no commongood for any procedure (democratic or otherwise) to measure. “Populism asa moral imperative,” says Riker,

depends on the existence of a popular will discovered by voting. But ifvoting does not discover or reveal a will, then the moral imperative evap-orates because there is nothing to be commanded. If the people speak inmeaningless tongues, they cannot utter the law that makes them free. Pop-ulism fails, therefore, not because it is morally wrong, but merely becauseit is empty (My emphasis; Riker, 1982, p. 239).

Mackie occasionally recognizes this fact, as when he claims near the endof his book that Riker surreptitiously makes use of the idea of a commongood in defining liberalism even while denying its existence when critiquingpopulism (p. 415). But if this is the correct way to understand Riker, thenMackie is simply confusing matters by claiming throughout the book thatRiker denies that democracy can be “accurate.” One does not spend timedenying the possibility of accurate measurement of something that one doesnot believe exists; one does not speak of measuring it at all.1

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Riker based his contention that no common good exists on the variousimpossibility results generated by social choice theory, especially Arrow’stheorem. Each of these results specifies a set of properties that a preferenceaggregation rule must possess before one could claim that it says somethingabout the common good, and then demonstrates that no rule possesses all ofthese properties. If populism requires that democratic procedures be valuedfor their ability to identify the common good, then the results of Arrow et al.suggest that populism cannot be the proper ideal against which to evaluatethese procedures. In its place, Riker would substitute the ideal of liberalism,which sees the value of democratic voting in its ability to remove leaders whoabuse their powers. It is this substitution that Mackie is concerned to combat.

To be sure, Mackie does expose some serious problems in Riker’s argu-ment. He does, for example, an excellent job of explaining just how big a losswould be incurred by embracing Riker’s rejection of populism and the notionof a common good. Those who reject populism, Mackie writes, claim

that our intuition that there is a public good is an illusion. They do notrealize that our moral intuitions are data of a sort that themselves we wantto fit into some coherent scheme, that are constrained by considerations ofcoherence. Thus they do not notice, that without the idea of the public goodwe become unable to say that one political institution is better than another– our moral world no longer makes any sense. To give up the idea of thepublic good leaves only nihilistic criteria such as superior force or blindtradition for the evaluation of political institutions (Mackie’s emphasis;pp. 384–385).

Any normative evaluation of institutions requires some idea of what is goodfor society. Indeed, as Mackie points out, Riker must make tacit use of somenotion of the common good simply to define the “abuse of power” central tothe liberalism he advocates as an alternative to populism – an alternative thatis supposedly to be embraced because there is no common good (p. 415). Thequestion democratic theorists must therefore face is not, as Riker believed,what should democratic theory say now that social choice theory has dispensedwith the notion of the common good, but instead, how should we understandthe common good in the wake of social choice theory.

If, as Mackie contends, people cannot function in politics without somenotion of the common good, then one of two conditions must hold. Eithersome property that social choice theorists have deemed essential to any rulethat could be said to reveal the common good is not actually essential, andtherefore some rule does possess all the truly essential properties; or else thecommon good is to be identified by some process other than the aggregationof preferences. An argument that successfully defends either condition wouldvindicate populism. Had Mackie offered such an argument, had he shown

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exactly how social choice theory failed to foreclose on talk of a “commongood,” he would have made an invaluable contribution to democratic theory.

Unfortunately, Mackie offers nothing so constructive in his book. Whilehe does provide extensive discussions of the impossibility results of Arrowet al., he never draws a clear answer as to how he believes the common goodis to be determined. Instead, he offers a veritable blizzard of critical pointsand undeveloped suggestions, none of which cohere together very well.

Mackie at one point claims that social choice theory is “indispensable evenif some of it is sterile and scholastic” (p. 27). He thus appears to endorse thesocial choice project of defining the common good (assuming it can be de-fined) in terms of preference aggregation rules possessing certain properties.But it’s unclear what, if any, properties he endorses, and why. He spends timedenouncing virtually every condition associated with Arrow’s theorem – boththe admittedly controversial independence of irrelevant alternatives condition(chapter 6) as well as the seemingly unassailable weak Pareto (pp. 92–93)and nondictatorship (p. 92) conditions. The same problem occurs when hediscusses the spatial model. He recognizes the potential instability of mostaggregation rules when preferences are set in a spatial model, but claims thatthis poses no problem because the median of medians is the obvious “norma-tively attractive point of aggregate subjective welfare” (p. 191). Unfortunately,he provides no clear argument either as to why the median of medians is nor-matively desirable or why anyone should expect voting procedures to achieveit.2 Moreover, he gives no indication as to whether the spatial model or themore general axiomatic treatment of preference orderings is the more rea-sonable way to discuss preference aggregation with an aim to achieving thecommon good. If Mackie wants people to believe finding the common goodis an exercise in preference aggregation, then he has little to say as to howexactly this aggregation should be done.

But Mackie does not even consistently endorse the standard social choiceframework of preference aggregation as a way of locating the common good.He occasionally speaks of maximizing the sum of social utility as a goal of thedemocratic process (p. 48). This requires that he admit cardinal rankings ofutility to enter into the preference aggregation process, in opposition to mostsocial choice theorists. Mackie recognizes this as a possible problem, but hisonly solution is to suggest that maximizing utility only occasionally should bethe social goal (pp. 67–68). The circumstances under which maximizing util-ity should be equated with the common good, and why it should be so equatedunder some circumstances but not others, Mackie never says. Finally, Mackieis ready on some occasions to abandon the preference aggregation frameworkentirely, and treat the democratic process as an exercise in aggregating epis-temic judgments a la the Condorcet Jury Theorem (p. 55). Again, Mackieoffers no defense for this view of democratic decision-making, and again hemakes clear that he does not believe that democracy is all about epistemic

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considerations (p. 64). But he never explains how or why the common goodis to be realized through an epistemic process under some circumstances butnot others. In short, Mackie’s book might convince a reader that a commongood exists, but it will leave that same reader none the wiser about how thedemocratic process might identify this common good.

Mackie’s book totals 483 pages, making it considerably longer than thebook it was written to critique – Riker’s Liberalism against Populism. Whilethe book offers some intriguing suggestions as to where Riker went wrong, itdoes not offer what one would expect from a book of such length – a coherentcritique coupled with a constructive alternative argument. Anyone desiringa successful vindication of populist democracy in the face of Riker’s attackswill have to look elsewhere.

PETER STONE, Political Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford,CA 94305–6044, U.S.A.

Notes

1. In fairness to Mackie, Riker is not always consistent in his own choice of words. At onepoint, for example, Riker says that “Populism is supposed to reveal a substantive will, aproposition with content. Yet if voting can fail to reveal such propositions accurately andif we do not and cannot know in any particular instance whether failure has occurred, thennone of the propositions supposedly revealed can be believed” (Riker, 1982, p. 291 no. 3;quoted by Mackie on p. 411). What Riker says here requires that he believe that there areindeed propositions that voting could more or less accurately reveal. This contradicts thethrust of the rest of his argument. (It’s also a rather silly point for him to make; by thelogic he employs here, statistical inference would be impossible. After all, even extremelyreliable statistical estimators can fail occasionally, and we “do not and cannot know in anyparticular instance whether such failure has occurred.”)

2. This is probably the appropriate place to mention that a huge portion of Mackie’s book –seven chapters, totaling 181 pages – is devoted to examining every single reported case ofpreference cycles in the social science literature, with an eye to demonstrating that none ofthem really involve cycles at all. Space prohibits me from discussing this part of the book,although it makes an interesting read. All I can say here is that if the theoretical issuesdiscussed here are not properly sorted out, then the question of the prevalence of cycling inmultidimensional space is moot. There’s no point in discussing the limitations of pairwisemajority rule as a voting device – which is the focus of the entire debate about cycles –without a clear understanding of what voting devices are supposed to do.

Reference

Riker, W. (1982) Liberalism against populism: A confrontation between the theory of democracyand the theory of social choice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.