Who decides what we are allowed to decide?

A town meeting of one hundred people is convened to decide how to use ten million euros from the municipal budget. There are two options: to build a car park or to regenerate a high street. Everyone can have their say, each person has one vote, the majority decides, and the decision will be binding on the local council. It is hard to imagine a more inclusive and egalitarian procedure. But forty citizens would like a third option: to refurbish a school. That proposal, however, never reaches the vote. Who, then, exercises the power? The hundred citizens who choose between a car park and regeneration, or those who, even before the vote begins, have determined that the choice is limited to those two alternatives? The power to choose is visible. Far less visible is the power to decide what the choices might be. It is this distinction between the power to decide and the power to shape the space of decision-making that takes us a step further into the nature of the collective ‘we’ that we have been exploring for several weeks through the thinking of Raimo Tuomela. We saw first of all that one can cooperate with others whilst continuing to think as separate individuals, in ‘I-mode’, or adopt the group’s perspective and act in ‘we-mode’. We then distinguished between a simple convergence of desires and a genuine ‘group goal’. One problem of no small significance, however, remains unresolved: whilst a group may have common aims, intentions and even a common will, in practice it is always individuals who act. When we say that ‘Parliament has decided’, ‘the government wants’, or ‘the trade union has determined’, we attribute to a collective entity actions carried out by specific individuals. What justifies this logical and normative leap, from the action of a few to the action of all? When can a decision taken by specific individuals become the decision of a ‘we’?

Tuomela’s response begins with a seemingly simple distinction. Being members of the same group does not mean occupying the same position within it. Sufficiently structured groups have roles, tasks, rights and relationships of authority. Some members are authorised, in certain circumstances, to carry out actions that can be attributed not simply to themselves but to the group. These are what Tuomela calls ‘operative members’, as distinct from ‘non-operative members’. These are not necessarily two permanent categories of people. The distinction relates to the functions performed. One may be an operative member with regard to one decision and a non-operative member with regard to another. What matters is not so much who one is, but the position from which one acts and the authority that position confers. Already in *The Importance of Us* (Stanford University Press, 1995), Tuomela builds his analysis of group action precisely on this mechanism. A group performs an action when the operational members, exercising the relevant system of authority and carrying out ‘their social tasks in their respective positions’ (p. 244), produce, through their joint action, the result attributed to the group, and the other members, under certain conditions, recognise that action as an action of the group. Take a parliament, for example. If three hundred people gather in a theatre and raise their hands to approve a proposal, they have not passed a law. If those same people, vested with parliamentary authority, vote in accordance with the prescribed procedures, the outcome may instead become a decision of the state. It is not the movement of the hands that is different. It is the normative structure within which that movement acquires its meaning. Tuomela defines this structure as the ‘authority system’. In its most abstract formulation, an ‘authority system’ represents the process through which the members of a group form a ‘group will’, based on their own individual wills or those of the operational members, and in relation to specific matters of common interest. The ‘authority system’ thus operates as a mechanism for normative transformation. Through procedures, roles and authorisations, a plurality of individual wills can become a will attributable to the group as such. This point is important because it shifts the focus from people’s identities to the positions they occupy. A minister can make a commitment on behalf of the government that the same individual, sitting at their own dining table, could not make. A vice-chancellor can sign a university document that a professor, whilst fully agreeing with its content, cannot sign on behalf of the same institution. The power to act on behalf of the group does not simply derive from wanting what the group wants. It derives from an ‘authorised position’. This ‘position’ is what makes the action of complex organisations possible. No state could function if millions of citizens were to make every decision directly. The division between active and non-active members is therefore not necessarily a flaw in the group. It is often the very condition of its ability to act. The problem arises, however, when we ask ourselves how that division is determined.

Here, too, the difference from Margaret Gilbert becomes apparent. Gilbert had shown us how the bond of ‘we’ comes into being. Through joint commitment, separate individuals become parts of a plural subject and acquire obligations, claims and responsibilities towards one another. Tuomela poses a different question. Once the ‘we’ exists, how is it organised internally? Who can speak on its behalf? Who decides and who carries out the decisions? Collective commitment remains important in her theory too, but the focus shifts from the constitution of the plural subject to the distribution of positions, tasks and authority within it. Once the ‘we’ exists, in fact, not everyone who is part of it does the same thing, has the same tasks or exercises the same authority. This structure acquires meaning through what Tuomela calls ethos – that is, the set of aims, values, beliefs, practices and traditions that constitute the group. Ethos tells us something about who we are and what we do together. And it is precisely for this reason that it can provide reasons for action. To act fully as a member therefore means not only performing an action that is useful to the group, but performing it by adopting a reason that derives from the group as a group.

I believe this point can help us to better understand a surprising feature of democracy. Let us suppose that a law is passed with 51 per cent of the votes in parliament. The remaining 49 per cent voted against it. Yet we still say that ‘Parliament has passed the law’. Even a citizen who opposed that law can say, ‘that is what we have decided’, without this negating the fact that, personally, they would have preferred the opposite. Tuomela explicitly considers situations of this kind. ‘In some groups,’ he writes, ‘there may be an institutionalised procedure (such as voting according to the majority principle) for reaching a group outcome that entails group authority, in the sense that all members should abide by that outcome (as members of the group, though not necessarily in a personal sense) even if the group’s opinion differs from the individual opinions of all participants’” (pp. 318). One of the small normative miracles of democracy is that of transforming disagreement into a common decision without, however, turning it into consensus. Tuomela can afford to stop here. Her problem is ontological: given certain conditions, how can the decision of a few count as the group’s decision? Political justice, on the other hand, begins precisely a moment earlier. It cannot take the alternatives as already given. It must ask how they came to be on the table, which ones were left out, and who had the power to draw that line

Let’s return to the hundred citizens. Each has one vote to choose between the car park and the redevelopment of the high street. Forty would have preferred to allocate the resources to schools, but this option never made it to the ballot. If we look only at the final stage, we have perfect political equality consisting of one hundred citizens and one hundred votes of equal weight. If we look at the entire process through which the alternatives were formulated, the conclusion changes radically. Someone had the power to determine the scope of decision-making – the range of options available. Viewed from this perspective, democratic power is distributed across at least three levels. First, there is the power to participate: who can speak and vote. Then there is the power in decision-making: how much each vote counts and according to which rule preferences are aggregated. But there is a power that logically precedes both of these: power over the agenda – that is, the ability to determine which issues and which alternatives will reach the decision-making stage. Before the power to choose is distributed, someone has already helped to define the scope of what is possible.