ABSTRACT
The conclusion of the previous chapter is that Arrow gives a more accurate assessment of outcomes than Habermas, given the strict conditions both impose on participation. As a consequence of Arrow’s arguments, Riker claimed that we need to abandon all defences of democracy other than his own very thin ‘liberal’ concept. He supplied empirical examples, largely demolished by Mackie, to support the claim that democracy and rational outcomes are strangers to one another. At the bottom of Riker’s model of democracy is nothing more than an appeal to judicial retrieval; voters have the procedural capacity to produce a decisive result and remove office holders if they so choose. This is just about the ‘thinnest’ defence of democracy one can have. No attempt is made to foster support for democracy on moral grounds because Riker thinks it is not possible to morally defend results that are always potentially arbitrary, meaningless and unintelligible. The sole defence is that democracy is useful for preventing tyranny by promoting ‘negative’ liberty through a veto. Russell Hardin (1993) reaches a similar conclusion and suggests that we can only get stability if we limit choice through coercive means that are anti-democratic. Both theorists suggest that we have to abandon the attempt to defend democracy from a procedural point of view. Riker concludes that we should place our faith in market mechan-
isms rather than political institutions, given the inherent instability of the latter. But as Mackie rightly points out, the arguments of Arrow also apply to the marketplace. Riker is wrong to think that the market avoids the issues raised by social choice; most social choice theorists, however, recognize the general character of the theory and how it applies to social choices made in politics and in the market. Arrow himself states,
In ideal dictatorship there is but one will involved in the choice [and] no conflict of individual wills is involved. The methods of voting and the market, on the other hand, are methods of amalgamating the tastes of many individuals in the making of social choices. (1963, 2)
And when Arrow is specifically discussing voting, he says that no method can remove the paradox of voting, and ‘[s]imilarly, the market mechanism does not create a rational social choice’ (1963, 59). The rather pessimistic conclusion that many have drawn from such comments is that democratic outcomes lack legitimacy.
