When a majority is not enough: republican freedom and the contestability of power

That mere participation in the vote and majority rule were not enough to guarantee minimum requirements for non-dominance had already emerged in the British debate on the American Revolution. Richard Price made the point with a radical formula. If those who govern - he wrote - 'are not subject to any control by their voters, the very idea of freedom will be lost and the power to choose one's representatives will be nothing more than the power, held by a few, to choose at regular intervals a group of masters for themselves and the rest of the community' (Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas. Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 25). The lesson is clear: the right to vote alone is not enough to guarantee freedom.

Such an institutional system also presupposes a certain idea of citizenship. Republican freedom is not a condition that institutions can automatically guarantee. It also depends on the ability of citizens to use the available instruments of control. The republican tradition has summarised this requirement in a famous formula attributed now to Thomas Jefferson, now to John Stuart Mill, which reads: 'the price of liberty is eternal vigilance'. When citizens give up exercising this vigilance, when they stop analysing public decisions, stop asking for explanations, stop using the channels of contestation, then even formally democratic institutions can become instruments of domination. But what does it mean, concretely, to supervise power in a democracy? The republican tradition has often described this civic attitude through what Antonio Maria Baggio calls the singular 'triptych of democratic exercise': mistrust, suspicion and doubt. In democracy, distrust, suspicion and doubt are not vices to be eliminated, but necessary conditions of good governance. Distrust derives from the Latin 'fidare', preceded by the particle 'dis': it is not the negation of trust, but its testing. "To distrust" in fact means to demand reason, to force those who exercise power to explain and justify their decisions, that is, to prove themselves responsible ("respondeo", to answer for their actions). Suspicion comes from 'sub' 'specere', literally 'to look from underneath up'. It is the controlling gaze of those at the bottom towards those who have been elevated to power, and serves to ensure transparency and prevent private interest from prevailing over public interest. Doubt, finally, derives from 'dubium', and is related to the Sanskrit 'dvi', or 'two'. It indicates the suspension between different possibilities and is at the heart of the democratic method, because it opens up space for confrontation and pluralism. "Distrust," concludes Baggio, "turns out to be the condition of responsibility, suspicion the condition of gratuitousness, doubt the condition of trust. The 'triptych' distrust-suspicion-doubt, is a great cultural inheritance, built through the Greek philosophical dialectic, Roman law and the republican tradition, the liberal limitation of powers; it is the other side of the civic virtues hinged on the triptych trust-gratuity-responsibility, in that meaning that the two triptychs are given by a correct doctrine of democracy; the two triptychs refer to each other as, referring to the modern and contemporary contractualist debate, the principle of fear must be integrated with that of hope in building balanced political projects and institutions" ("In Praise of Distrust". New Humanity, 2011/6, pp. 581-596).

One understands, also in the light of these last considerations, how Philip Pettit's reflection offers a valuable lesson for interpreting the current moment. Political debate often contrasts two positions: on the one hand, those who defend the primacy of the will of the people and, on the other, those who insist on the importance of institutional limits to power. Republican theory suggests that this opposition is largely misleading. Without institutions capable of limiting and controlling power, even the will of the majority can turn into an instrument of domination.

Political freedom does not consist simply in deciding who governs. It consists in living in an institutional order in which no one, neither an individual, nor a group, nor the majority, can exercise arbitrary power over others. In this sense, freedom does not arise from the absence of rules. It arises from rules designed to prevent someone always having the last word.

Viewed from this perspective, the Italian public debate of recent years appears in a different light. Many of the conflicts that run through the country's political life, from justice reform to the role of independent authorities, from the 'security decrees' to the increasing concentration of executive power, can be read as so many variations on the republican problem of non-dominance.

Consider the debate on the reform of the judiciary and the separation of careers. Beyond political positions, the central issue is precisely the question of institutional counterweights. From a republican perspective, the independence of the judiciary cannot be seen as a corporate privilege. It is, in fact, a guarantee against the concentration of power. If the political power were able to exercise direct control over the judicial function, one of the main instruments through which citizens can challenge the action of the State would disappear. The same reasoning applies to the role of independent authorities. Bodies such as the Competition and Market Authority, the Communications Authority or the Court of Auditors are not mere technical apparatuses. In republican logic, they represent devices through which power is subjected to public scrutiny and made contestable. A similar discourse concerns the relationship between executive power and Parliament. In recent decades, not only in Italia but in many western democracies, there has been a progressive expansion of the role of the executive, often through urgent decrees or systematic recourse to parliamentary confidence. Here too, the issue is not simply technical. It concerns the ability of representative institutions to maintain an effective role of control and deliberation.

This is also evident in the absurd affair of the parliamentary supervisory commission on RAI, which has been blocked for months and is still unable to complete the election of its chair, with repeated black smoke and sittings without a quorum. On the eve of the referendum, such paralysis is by no means a negligible detail. It means weakening an institutional garrison that should guarantee control, pluralism and contestability with respect to public service.

All these examples show that republican freedom is not a theoretical abstraction. It is a fragile institutional condition, which depends on the balance between different powers and the ability of institutions to keep open spaces for contestation. This is why democracy cannot be reduced to the electoral dimension alone. Elections are essential, but they are not enough. Without independent courts, without a free press, without effective parliamentary opposition, without guarantee institutions capable of limiting power, the freedom of citizens becomes more exposed to the discretion of rulers.

Republics are born out of fear of unlimited power. But they only live on if that fear is not forgotten. Because every time institutional counterweights are perceived by those who govern as obstacles instead of guarantees, every time dissent is treated as a nuisance instead of a democratic resource, the risk of domination slowly returns. Freedom is not the negation of power: it is its domestication. It is the condition in which no one can feel authorised to rule without being accountable to someone else.