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19 results

  • Institutional Forbearance as a Mechanism of Democratic Stability

  • SEAN INGHAM
  • Journal:
    American Political Science Review , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 October 2025, pp. 1-13
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  • Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018). The article proposes a novel conception of forbearance as a mechanism of democratic stability. According to this view, public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of uncertain legitimacy, actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy’s constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions, by provoking divergent reactions among citizens, create uncertainty about the extent to which others are willing to resist breaches of democracy’s rules. This uncertainty undermines their ability to coordinate responses to genuine abuses of power in the future. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the “Democrat’s Dilemma” to illustrate the difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to practice forbearance.

  • Representative Democracy and Social Equality

  • SEAN INGHAM
  • Journal:
    American Political Science Review / Volume 116 / Issue 2 / May 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 October 2021, pp. 689-701
    Print publication:
    May 2022
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  • When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but they are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens.

Rule by Multiple Majorities
  • A New Theory of Popular Control
  • Sean Ingham
  • Published online:
    28 December 2018
    Print publication:
    07 February 2019
  • What does it mean to say that citizens have control over their leaders? In a democracy, citizens should have some control over how they are governed. If they do not participate directly in making policy, they ought to maintain control over the public officials who design policy on their behalf. Rule by Multiple Majorities develops a novel theory of popular control: an account of what it is, why democracy's promise of popular control is compatible with what we know about actual democracies, and why it matters. While social choice theory suggests there is no such thing as a 'popular will' in societies with at least minimal diversity of opinion, Ingham argues that multiple, overlapping majorities can nonetheless have control, at the same time. After resolving this conceptual puzzle, the author explains why popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.