Archon Fung
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For American Political Science Association meetings
Washington, D.C., September 1-4, 2005
Revision 1.0 (August 10, 2005)
Draft Only! Comments welcome, but please do not distribute or cite without permission.
A Method of Reflective Equilibrium for Democratic Theory
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I. Introduction
The method of democratic theory has been for the most part highly theoretical. Theorists
have developed internally coherent and useful conceptions of democracy based upon first princi-
ples, intuitions about democratic value, and sometimes disciplined by various stylized facts.
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shall discuss four of these: minimal, deliberative, egalitarian, and participatory conceptions of
democracy. There has been little movement, however, in adjudicating between these ideals. I
doubt that that the debates and arguments on offer have persuaded many, or perhaps any, Schum-
peterian minimalists to become participatory or deliberative democrats or vice versa.
In a Theory of Justice and other writings, John Rawls offers a method of reflective equi-
librium for moral theory in order to help adjudicate between conceptions of justice such as util-
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Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. email:
## email not listed ##
.
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I wish to thank Mark Warren, Dennis Thompson and the other participants of the “Theorizing Democratic Re-
newal” workshop at the University of British Columbia (June 10-11, 2005) for many ideas and suggestions that in-
formed the development of this paper. Discussions with Joshua Cohen regarding problem-oriented and conceptual-
analytic approaches to democratic theorizing spurred me to think about how the two might reinforce one another.
This paper utilizes ideas in another manuscript titled “Varieties of Participation in Democratic Governance.”
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This discussion draws from Cohen (2003).
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