Abstract
Democracy and the argumentum ad baculum
Democracy is often said to be the one political regime that gives a central place to debate and argument. Yet those expecting straight-forward exchange of reasonable arguments will most likely get disappointed by real life democratic decision making. As it seems, political debate always has a taste of dishonesty and hypocrisy. Even when our politicians appear involved in highly principled debate, we suspect that under the surface of their arguments, nothing but crude power calculations and electoral opportunism are to be found. Naturally, our feelings of suspicion make us wish for a more honest dialogue, in which only “real” arguments are exchanged. Yet this smack of dishonesty might not be a feature of democratic public discourse that is merely accidental. In this paper, I will argue that power considerations are relevant to democratic decision making, and that, consequently, they cannot possibly be excluded from democratic debate. It is not a coincidence, then, that “argumenta ad baculum” can be found regularly in real life political dialogue. For instance, in fragments of parliamentary debate, one often finds attempts to coercion, the threat being a reference to one’s own voting power or to hypothetical electoral consequences. Power arguments, however, do conflict with the normative expectations of public discourse as public communicative action imposes certain obligations on its participants. Therefore, “argumenta ad baculum” cannot be used too often and too overtly. This then gives democratic debate its typical ambiguity. The continuous tension between a given power constellation on the one hand, and the rules of reasonable debate on the other hand, is what constitutes the particular genre of democratic debate.