Gustaf Arrhenius
The focus of the project will be on the democratic boundary problem– Who should be eligible to take part in which decision-making processes? – and democracy understood as a theory offair distribution of power.The boundary problem is a fundamental issue in democratic theory. If nothing else, all thedifferent notions of democracy have one thing in common: a reference to a community ofindividuals, “a people” who are, in some sense, collectively self-governing. One of the aims of theproject is to find a principled solution to this intriguing and under-discussed problem.As I shall show in the project description, the boundary problem forces us to reconsiderfundamental questions regarding the theoretical status of democracy and opens up for a newexciting (albeit controversial) way of understanding democracy, namely as an ideal regarding fairdistribution of power. Roughly, the idea is that people’s power over a decision should beproportional to how each individual’s relevant interests are affected by the decision.The standard view of democracy (one person, one vote) is afflicted with a number of wellknownproblems: majorities may oppress minorities and infringe on basic individual rights;majority cycles may lead to inconsistent decisions; outcomes can be manipulated by control overthe voting agenda; etc. An interesting aspect of democracy as fair distribution of power is that itmay dissolve or substantially alleviate many of these classical problems.In addition, one can be dissatisfied with the focus in recent political philosophy on thedistribution of goods like material resources, welfare, capabilities, primary goods, etc, at theexpense of distribution of power. A theory of fair distribution of power, the main aim of thisproject, may remedy this situation as well as generating new interesting solutions to classicalproblems in democratic theory.