What Do We Mean by Democracy? Reflections on an Essentially Contested Concept and Its Relationship to Politics and Public Administration

Democracy as an Essentially Contested Concept

In thinking about democracy as an essentially contested concept, it is helpful to begin here by thinking about the possible reasons for the various disagreements or disputes that arise regarding the meaning of a term such as democracy. One reason, of course, may be that one or more of the parties to the dispute, while perfectly well-meaning, are frankly confused or ill-informed as to the meaning of the term and simply cannot see their particular mistake or error. Another reason may be that one or more parties to the dispute are actually being deceptive and are cynically promoting what they themselves fully recognize as a false definition of the term so as to promote either their selfish interests or, perhaps more charitably, those of a group to whom they feel a particularly strong kinship or loyalty. However, notwithstanding the fact that many disagreements about the meaning of democracy arise for precisely these reasons, the argument advanced in this article is that many disagreements also can and do arise and, moreover, will likely continue to arise over time because democracy is what Gallie (1956) has termed an “essentially contested concept.”

An essentially contested concept may be said to exist where, historically, there has been an ongoing and genuine disagreement among different parties as to the exact meaning and applications of the concept. Moreover, each of the parties to this disagreement appears quite capable of advancing reasonable arguments in defense of its own interpretation of the concept in question. To use Gallie’s words, essentially contested concepts or terms are those, such as, for example, “art,” “democracy,” or “justice,” where “when we examine the different uses of these terms and the characteristic arguments in which they figure we soon see that there is no one clearly definable general use of any of them which can be set up as the correct or standard use” (1956, p. 168). Rather, such examination, in fact, gives rise to disputes that are “centred on the concepts” and that are “perfectly genuine” and “which, although not resolvable by argument of any kind, are nevertheless sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence” (p. 169). In such cases, as Gallie puts it, any discussion with respect to “the proper uses” of these concepts “inevitably involves endless disputes” (p. 169).

When a concept is essentially contested in this manner, according to Gallie, such a concept is typically, among other things, not simply descriptive. It is also, at the same time, “appraisive” or evaluative “in the sense that it signifies or accredits some kind of valued achievement” (1956, p. 171). In other words, what is described in using or talking about the concept is something that is normally thought of as being good or desirable. However, at the same time, such a concept is also “variously describable,” so that, depending upon which different aspects or parts of the concept happen to be emphasized, as Gallie notes, “there is nothing absurd or contradictory in any one of a number of possible rival descriptions of its total worth” (p. 172). Furthermore, as he sees it, an essentially contested concept is also “open” in that it “admits of considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances; and such modification cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance” (p. 172).

In light of the above, democracy would appear to be precisely such an essentially contested concept. Certainly, it must be conceded that democracy has always had more than its fair share of critics going back to Plato and even today, as Alasdair Roberts (2017) has recently pointed out, there are still continuing complaints leveled against it. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that, across the past century and half or so, democracy has come to be thought of, at least within the developed world, almost universally in affirmative terms, as something to be sought after and protected, so much so, in fact, that even the shabbiest dictatorships on the globe have attempted to appropriate the term for themselves to characterize their own regimes and to justify their repressive practices. To use the words of Austin Ranney and Willmoore Kendall,

“democracy” has become, the world over, what social psychologists call an “honorific” word. It is like “truth,” “justice,” and “decency” in that it evokes such pleasant associations in most of us that we wish to identify ourselves and our ideas with it. (1951, p. 431)

Crick puts the matter more colorfully when he observes that “democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs. She is everybody’s mistress and yet somehow retains her magic even when a lover sees that her favours are being, in his light, illicitly shared by many another” (1993, p. 51). In fact, it can be argued, as Gallie puts it, that democracy has become “the appraisive political concept par excellence” (1956, p. 184). It for this reason, as Connolly observes, that “if we say that a society is undemocratic or that a practice does not meet democratic standards, we are typically characterizing that society or practice critically” (1993, p. 29).

Moreover, the concept of democracy has certainly proven, over its long history, to be “variously describable” and it is clearly the case that more than a few “rival descriptions” of it have been offered and continue to be offered over time, provoking ongoing disagreements or contests as to its exact meaning. Ranney and Kendall, for example, note the disagreements that exist “between those who regard democracy as merely a form of government, and those for whom it is also a social system, an economic system, and/or a ‘way of life,’” as well as those disagreements that exist “between those who identify democracy with majority rule and those who refuse to do so” (1951, p. 434). Connolly, drawing on Gallie, observes similarly “how for some the central concept of democracy is the power of citizens to choose their government through competitive elections” whereas “for others this factor is less important than the equality of opportunity of all citizens in attaining positions of political leadership; for still others both of these criteria pale in significance if the continuous participation of citizens at various levels of public life in not attained” (1993, pp. 10-11).

More recently, in his conceptual history of democracy, Oliver Hidalgo has enumerated various conflicts that exist between “direct (or radical) vs. representative democracy . . . elitist vs. deliberative (or participatory) democracy . . . liberal vs. republican democracy . . . pluralistic (or market) vs. social democracy . . . ancient vs. modern democracy” and “Western vs. non-Western democracy” (2008, p. 192). Furthermore, making very evident both the “variously describable” and the “open” character of democracy, Hidalgo argues that, in fact, “the overwhelming success of the concept [of democracy] is most of all due to its ability to subsume very different historical ideas and realities under its semantic field” and that “the historical evolution of the concept reveals that no unequivocal definition is possible because of the significant paradoxes, aporias, and contradictions it contains” (p. 176).

The Political Roots of Essentially Contested Concepts

In summary, then, democracy seems to possess important characteristics, ascribed by Gallie and others, to an essentially contested concept. ³ However, when considering these various characteristics, it is misleading, in this author’s view, to lapse into a sort of linguistic determinism and to think, as Gallie himself often appears to indicate, that it is the characteristics of the concept of democracy themselves that somehow per se cause democracy to be a contested concept, that it is these characteristics that are somehow the original source or well of contestation. Rather, it seems more useful to say that the concept of democracy has, in fact, tended to take on certain characteristics over time because of its actual use in the contestation that is characteristic of practical politics. In other words, it is not that there is something inherent in the original meaning of the word “democracy” itself that automatically triggers contestation, but rather that the practices of contestation, which are inherent in practical politics, have, historically, shaped the meaning of the word “democracy” in ways that are often contradictory and contested.

Such a view is lent support by Eugene Garver who argues that one should not look for a “demarcation criterion” that can be used to “determine which concepts are essentially contested and which are not. Concepts are essentially contested only derivatively, because they are employed in essentially contested arguments” (1990, p. 258). To put this in another way, “two conceptions are instances of a single essentially contested concept if they compete for its title, not the other way around” (p. 257). It is for this reason, as Garver sees it, that it is “partisans, not theorists” who actually “determine whether a conflict involves an essentially contested concept” (p. 258). Robert Grafstein notes, in a similar vein, that essentially contested concepts arise “because politics is the terrain on which competing forces of society collide, where the consequences of conceptions are felt by all” (1988, p. 22). For Grafstein, “it is the political character of certain concepts that makes them essentially contestable in the fuller sense” because it is this character that “transforms a relatively inert divergence between distinct definitions of concepts into an active contest among them” (1988, p. 19).

It follows, therefore, that theoretical disputes over what exactly political concepts mean, as well as how these concepts should be applied, cannot be separated from political practices, but, rather, are inextricably tied to them. As Connolly puts it,

Contests over the correct use of partly shared political concepts are themselves an intrinsic part of politics. In convincing me to adopt your version of “democracy,” “politics,” or “legitimacy” you convince me to classify and appraise actions and practices in new ways; you encourage me to guide my own conduct by new considerations. And if I decide to repudiate your use, I am likely to range myself with others opposing the interpretations, strategies, and policies that express the judgment you would have us accept. (1993, pp. 39-40)

Furthermore, making clear the intimate connection that exists between essentially contested concepts and political practice, Connolly argues,

When groups range themselves around essentially contested concepts, politics is the mode in which the contest is normally expressed. Politics involves the clash that emerges when appraisive concepts are shared widely but imperfectly, when mutual understanding and interpretation is possible but in a partial and limited way, when reasoned argument and coercive pressure commingle precariously in the endless process of defining and resolving issues. (p. 40)

It is because of this, as Connolly observes, that “one can hardly study our politics without staking out a position on some of these contested concepts” and that “to enunciate a public position on these issues is to implicate oneself to some degree in our politics” (p. 205).

This notion that essentially contested concepts should play an important, if not central, role in politics should hardly be surprising. After all, politics is about trying to reconcile conflicts not just among interests but also among the competing moral outlooks or conceptions of the good that different groups in any reasonably complex society hold to be important to them. Political practices emerge in such societies, as Stuart Hampshire has pointed out, because “there will always be conflicts between conceptions of the good, moral conflicts” and because “there is everywhere a well-recognized need for procedures of conflict resolution, which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny” (2000, p. 5).

One should expect, therefore, that different groups contending within such societies would tend to adopt their own favored variant or interpretation of political concepts to help them to articulate and to advance their own particular interests or conceptions of the good. This is why, as Connolly argues, “conceptual debates” over the meaning of contested concepts such as democracy are inevitably connected to “debates over the form of the good life” (1993, p. 230). As he notes, these debates are “so often intense” precisely “because we tacitly understand the relation of these debates to our deepest commitments” (p. 40). John Gray likewise observes that contests over the meaning of concepts are “indicative of conflicts between divergent patterns of thought—which are often, if not typically, partly constitutive of rival ways of life” (1977, p. 344).

Understanding this interconnectedness between essentially contested political concepts and our real-world political practices is important because it helps to explain why human beings have exhibited so many different and contradictory uses of these concepts over time. It helps to explain why the concept of democracy has, on some occasions, been used to justify or to legitimate certain policies and practices of government, whereas, on other occasions, it has also been used to resist the very same policies and practices. For instance, in the case of property rights, the role of government in protecting such rights has often been seen historically by some advocates of democracy as crucial to protecting the institutions of a truly liberal democracy. However, it has also often been seen by other advocates as anathema to a truly socialist democracy. Also, seeing the connection between essentially contested concepts and political practice helps to shed light on why it is that the concept of democracy has frequently been employed in political struggles to promote very different and conflicting values or conceptions of the good. Democracy has often been used, for instance, to advance the idea and practice of freedom, but, on the contrary, it has also been employed just as often to advance and justify the idea and practice of equality, despite the fact, as many would argue, in the case of communist democracies, the single-minded pursuit of such equality in the name of democracy has, almost without exception, significantly lessened if not actually destroyed freedom.

Finally, in pointing to the rootedness of essentially contested political concepts in our political practices, it must be emphasized that this is in no way to deny the role that language itself plays in affecting human perceptions and actions. While essentially contested political concepts have their origins in political practices, as they are used, such concepts, in turn, shape how people view and how they engage in these practices. As Hanna Pitkin has argued, drawing on the ideas of Wittgenstein, “what we say or think discursively about [the world] must be said or thought in language” and “that means that in saying it, we must introduce the assumptions and implications built into our language” (1993, p. 113). In doing this, as she notes, “we invoke a conceptual system” that “governs what we can say about reality” and that “also affects what we perceive” (p. 114). This is why, as Connolly argues, “to understand the political life of a community one must understand the conceptual system within which that life moves” (1993, p. 29). In other words, as Wittgenstein himself once put the matter, “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (1958, para. 19) and, in politics, this language, as is argued here, is a language in which the concept of democracy, along with other political concepts, appears to be perpetually contested.

Nihilism, Reasoning, and Contestation in Politics

If one accepts that democracy is an essentially contested concept, in the sense that this term is given here in this article, then it is reasonable to ask what precisely are the implications of this type of contestedness? This question is not without importance because the idea that the meaning and uses of certain political concepts must be subject to “endless disputes,” coupled with the notion that such disputes are rooted, not in any objective characteristics of the concepts themselves, but rather in the contestations of practical real-world politics, may strike some readers, to put it bluntly, at best, as theoretically barren and, at worst, as radically relativistic and even downright nihilistic. Such a view seems to be advanced by Gray, when he expresses concern that that “any strong variant of an essential contestability thesis must precipitate its proponents into a radical (and probably self-defeating) skeptical nihilism” (1977, p. 343). Barry Clarke observes likewise that to accept “the notion of an essentially contestable concept” comes “at the cost of introducing a radical relativism into all discourse using such disputable concepts,” as a result of which “any one idiosyncratic usage of an essentially contestable concept would be [just] as valid as any alternative idiosyncratic use” (1979, p. 136).

However, to this author’s mind, such a charge of radical nihilism or relativism is unwarranted. This is because to accept the idea that essentially contested concepts such as democracy are likely to be the subject of seemingly perpetual contestation or debate is in no way to assert that reason plays no role at all in dealing with these concepts in the particular concrete situations, which happen to arise in practical politics. Rather, it is simply to suggest that, to use Connolly’s words, while “the universal criteria of rationality available to us may limit and inform such debates,” they are “insufficient to resolve them determinately” (1993, p. 230). Gallie argues, in a similar fashion, how, whereas, as already noted, disputes regarding the meaning and uses of an essentially contested concept can be “sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence” (p. 169), at the same time, there can be no “general principle,” as he puts it, “for deciding, in a manner that would or might conceivably win ultimate agreement, which of a number of contestant uses of a given concept is its ‘best use’” (1956, p. 189). Indeed, for Gallie, any “account of reason” as “essentially something which demands and deserves universal assent . . . fails completely as a description of those elements of reason that make possible discussions of religious, political and artistic problems” (p. 196).

In this regard, when thinking about what it means to be rational or reasonable, it is important to emphasize that, given the “appraisive” and “variously describable” character of democracy and other essentially contested political concepts, any reasoned disputes involving the use of these concepts must inevitably rely upon some form of practical moral reasoning, as opposed simply to abstract logical or demonstrative reasoning. This requires, in turn, that the participants to such disputes, if they are to think, speak, and act rationally, in the broad sense of the word, possess what Gallie terms “the habit and equipment for discussing the morally relevant pros and cons of any proposed line of actions” (1968, p. 207). As he puts it, “in morals, as much as in religion and politics, the notion of discussion is of far greater importance for the definition of rationality . . . than is the notion of demonstrative proof” (p. 207).

Furthermore, if the implications that one can derive from an essentially contested concept are limited, at the same time, they are by no means trivial. At the very least, it may be argued that a recognition of the essential contested character of political concepts, as well as the rootedness of this contestation in political practice, carries with it the implication that any permanent resolution of the differences among conflicting or rival descriptions of political concepts, that is to say, any permanent decontestation of these concepts, could only occur in a world without the contestation that is, in fact, characteristic of political practice. To put the matter more bluntly, eliminate essentially contested political concepts and one ends up eliminating much if not all of politics, at least as it has come to be understood historically within our habits and traditions of practice. Connolly, in critiquing the practices of his fellow political scientists, clearly sees and appreciates this when he argues,

The desire to expunge contestability from political enquiry expresses a wish to escape politics. It emerges either as a desire to rationalize public life, placing a set of ambiguities and contestable orientations under the control of a settled system of understandings and priorities, or a quest to moralize public life thoroughly, bringing all citizens under the control of a consensus which makes politics marginal and unimportant . . . By depreciating politics at the level of theory, a politics of depoliticization is . . . endorsed in public life. (1993, p. 213)

On the other hand, a recognition of the fact that political concepts, like democracy, are essentially contested arguably can serve to protect and to enhance politics because such a recognition can encourage a willingness among parties to a political dispute to hear the arguments of their opponents, and also to engage themselves in practices of argumentation in dealing with the dispute. Gallie sees this, specifically in the context of democracy, when he argues that recognizing “the essentially contested character of the concept of democracy . . . points to an area which calls for moral tolerance” (1968, pp. 210-211). Connolly argues more generally that acknowledging that “there are essentially contested concepts in politics” and that “opposing uses” of these concepts “might not be exclusively self-serving but have defensible reasons in their support” can have the effect of introducing “into these contests a measure of tolerance and a receptivity to reconsideration of received views” (1993, pp. 40-41). In other words, recognizing that political concepts are essentially contested can help to promote the practice of adversary argument or what Hampshire (2000, p. 8) terms “audi alteram partem (‘hear the other side’),” a practice that, as he argues, is central to politics.

Of course, when considering any linkage that might exist between essentially contested concepts and politics, one must always bear in mind there is no logical necessity at all that the parties to a particular dispute over the meaning of a given concept should always choose to deal with their differences by means of political argumentation. To the contrary, as Gallie rightly reminds us, such parties, once they realize that the subject of their dispute with their opponents is essentially contested and thus cannot be settled solely by means of demonstrative argument, may well choose instead, in the name of democracy or, for that matter, some other political concept, “to cut the cackle, to damn the heretics and to exterminate the unwanted” (1956, p. 263). It follows, therefore, that the choice of an individual, a political group, or a government to deal with differences over the meaning of essentially contested concepts by means of argumentation rather than by force or violence will be seen more often as simply a matter of political tactics rather than as a matter of any sort of ethical or political principle.

However, as Garver points out, while it is quite true that “arguing as though one is advocating one version of an essentially contested concept is a tactic, it is not just one among others” (1990, p. 194). In particular, the practice of engaging in argumentation over the disputed meanings of a concept can itself over time come to change the manner in which parties come to see their disputes with their opponents. To use Garver’s words, “to treat one’s opponent as possessing another version of a single essentially contested concept is . . . to include that opponent in a single community” rather than simply erecting “a boundary between one’s community of discourse and that of one’s opponent” (1990, p. 263). Thus, as he suggests, to engage “one’s opponent in essentially contested argument” can “have a civilizing function, elevating one’s understanding of the subject in dispute, and of oneself and one’s opponent” (p. 259).

It is true, of course, as Garver again emphasizes, that this “civilizing function” of practices of argumentation in no way logically implies any sort of “universal duty to treat disputes as involving essentially contested concepts whenever possible” (1990, p. 259). Scientists, for example, are not morally obliged to engage in arguments with creationists as to whether or not creationism is really a science. Nor, for that matter, are advocates of liberal democracy morally obliged to argue with Anti-Semites or other racists as to whether or not Nazi Germany was truly a democracy. As Garver bluntly puts the matter, “just because something can only be achieved through argument does not make its achievement always desirable” (p. 259).

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the absence of any sort of universal and unconditional duty to engage in practices of argumentation, it is true that, at least in those cases where parties to disputes cannot simply ignore their opponents and are obliged, therefore, to interact with them in some fashion or other, there is a much to be said in favor of handling these disputes by means of broadly accepted political practices of argumentation rather than simply by force or violence. This is because the use of such practices, when compared with the use of force or violence, is helpful in avoiding what Hampshire terms the “great evils,” the evils that are “truly perennial” (2000, p. xi). These evils are “the unchanged horrors of human life, the savage and obvious evils, which scarcely vary from culture to culture or from age to age” (Hampshire, 2000, p. 43). They include, for example, “the mutilations of war, tyrannies, massacres and starvation” as well as “the evils of great poverty, and of sickness and physical suffering, and of the misery of bereavement” (p. xii). It is precisely the avoidance of such perennial evils that, as Hampshire observes, is “the proper business of politics” (2000, p. xi). Making very clear the alternative and echoing Hobbes here, he warns that, when conflicts can “no longer be resolved in the political realm,” then, they “will be resolved by violence or the threat of violence, and life will become nasty, brutish, and short” (2000, p. 98).

Contestation as a Part of the Meaning of Democracy

Acknowledging the essentially contested character of democracy, as well as other political concepts, far from promoting a radical nihilism or moral relativism, therefore, can be valuable in facilitating and fostering the political manner of governance to which we have become accustomed and which helps protect us from the perennial evils of human life. However, there is a further reason why it might be a good idea to understand and appreciate the essentially contested character of democracy. This is that, at least within European and Anglo-American traditions of political thinking and practice, the idea of contestation has, in fact, come to constitute an important, if not central, part of the very meaning of democracy itself.

The importance of contestation as an element in how democracy has been conceived is certainly evident, for example, in Machiavelli’s praise of the tribune of the people or “plebs” in the Roman Republic, which had a veto power over actions of the Roman Senate and magistrates. Machiavelli observes here how the resulting “disunion of the Senate and the people” had rendered “the republic of Rome powerful and free” (1950, p. 118). According to him, “good laws . . . spring from those very agitations which have been so inconsiderately condemned by many” (1950, p. 120). These political agitations, to Machiavelli’s mind, had “neither caused exiles nor any violence prejudicial to the general good,” but instead had “given rise to laws that were to the advantage of public liberty” (p. 120). For this reason, as he saw it, “every free state ought to afford the people the opportunity of giving vent, so to say, to their ambition” because “the demands of a free people are rarely pernicious to their liberties,” but, instead, “are generally inspired by oppressions, experienced or apprehended” (p. 120).

Writing some two centuries later, Robert Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, two English republican Whigs, known collectively as Cato (and whose work was widely read by American colonists), drew explicitly upon Machiavelli’s ideas about democracy, to argue that British liberties were secured by “a constitution, in which the people have a large share” and “the sole power of giving money; which includes in it everything that they can ask for the publick good” (1995, p. 177). Trenchard and Gordon saw the role of the elected House of Commons in Parliament as providing that “balance of property and power” that is “necessary to a democracy” (p. 648). In making this argument, they fully understood that the presence of such an elected body, within a mixed form of government, had the effect of raising the level of political contestation but, far from lamenting this contestation, as did Hobbes, they, like Machiavelli, welcomed it. As these writers saw the matter,

Whilst men are men, ambition, avarice, and vanity, and the other passions, will govern their actions; in spite of all equity and reason, they will be ever usurping, or attempting to usurp, upon the liberties and fortunes of one another, and all men will be striving to increase their own. Dominion will always desire increase, and property always to preserve itself; and these opposite views and interests will be causing a struggle: But by this struggle liberty is preserved, as water is kept sweet by motion. (p. 504)

Consistent with this emphasis on the desirability of ongoing political contestation, Trenchard and Gordon mounted a vigorous defense of freedom of speech. They saw it as “the great bulwark of liberty” and “the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them” (p. 114). As they put it, “it is the part and the business of the people, for those whose sake alone all publick matters are, or ought to be, transacted, to see whether they be well or ill transacted” and “so it is the interest, and ought to be the ambition, of all magistrates, to have their deeds openly examined, and publickly scanned” (p. 111).

Later in the 18th century, James Madison, in defending his design for the American Constitution, went even further, giving voice to what was in later centuries to be termed a “pluralist” conception of democracy, one in which contestation plays an essential element. Madison made clear that what he sought was a republican form of “government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people” (Wills, 1982, p. 190). However, Madison also recognized that this “great body of the people” would inevitably group themselves into contesting factions because, as he noted, “as long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed” (p. 43). Fearing that a faction of the majority of the people could too easily become as tyrannical as any king, he sought to limit the power of such a faction by means of an extended republic. As he argued,

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other (Wills, 1982, p. 48).

In other words, Madison’s response to what he believed were the potentially harmful consequences of political contestation within a republic was not to try and limit such contestation, but instead to increase the political, religious, and economic scope of such contestation by creating an extended federal republic. In this manner, as Madison saw it, individual rights would be protected by a “multiplicity of interests” and a “multiplicity of sects” (p. 264). They would be defended, as one might say today, in a democratic fashion, not “by creating a will independent of the majority, that is, of the society itself,” but instead “by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens, as will render an unjust combination of the majority of the whole, very improbable, if not impractical” (p. 264). In this way, as Madison argued, a “Republican remedy” would be provided “for the diseases most incident to Republican government” (p. 49).

In addition to providing this Republican remedy, Madison, consistent with the ideas of Machiavelli and Trenchard and Gordon before him, deliberately sought to inject a strong dose of political contestation right into the very heart of the federal government itself by using a separation of overlapping powers in such a way as to make sure that “those who administer each department” had “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others” in order that ambition could “be made to counteract ambition” (Wills, 1982, p. 262). Madison’s aim here in separating power was “to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other” (p. 263) and to design a system of government such that “its constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper place” (p. 261). As Lawrence Hatab, drawing on Nietzsche, has written, what Madison sought to accomplish here was to provide a structure of government in which “tyranny” was to be “avoided not by a principle of harmony but by counterposing elements of strife” (1995, p. 163).

This idea that contestation is not just inevitable but, in fact, also desirable within a democratic, or as early writers preferred to call it, republican form of governance is obviously itself contestable. The idea was not and, for that matter, is still not accepted by all proponents of democracy. It was disputed, of course, most notably by Rousseau, who believed that citizens and their government should always be guided in their words and actions by what he termed the general will, which, as he saw matters, “is always right and tends to the public advantage” (1913, p. 25). When they all do this, according to Rousseau, there is no longer any need for contestation because “all the springs of the State are vigorous and simple and its rules clear and luminous; there are no embroilments or conflicts of interests; the common good is everywhere clearly apparent, and only good sense is needed to perceive it” (p. 90). To secure this happy consensus, it was necessary, in Rousseau’s view, of course, that children, through public education, “under magistrates established by the Sovereign,” be “imbued with the laws of the State and the precepts of the general will” and, in this way, learn “to cherish one another mutually as brothers” and “to will nothing contrary to the will of society” (p. 269). Failing this, as he also famously and chillingly observed, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body,” which “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free” (p. 18).

However, if one recognizes that democracy is an essentially contested concept, then there is a good argument to be made for a type of governance, as well as a political culture, that is guided by a concept of democracy that allows for and that, in fact, encourages political contestation, as opposed to one that is guided by a concept of democracy that seems to deny it. This is that the former type of governance and culture allows for the expression of a plurality of different descriptions of democracy and other contested political concepts, along with the different values and conceptions of the good that undergird them, whereas the latter does not. Gray sees this when he argues,

To identify a concept as essentially contested is to say a great deal about the kind of society in which its users live. If it is the case, for example, that most of the concepts of our social and political thought—power, freedom, justice, coercion, and responsibility, for example have an essentially contested character, then this can only be so in virtue of the fact that our social and political thought occurs in a social environment marked by profound diversity and moral individualism. (1977, p. 337)

It follows for Gray that “any characterization of the central concepts of social and political thought as essentially contested, then, reflects (so far as it is acceptable) the pluralist, morally and politically polyarchic character of contemporary Western liberal society” (p. 337). In other words, democracy and other political concepts can only be essentially contested in regimes and societies where contestation over political and social ideas is accepted as something that is normal or acceptable.

Implications for Public Administration

At the beginning of this article, it was observed that, while public administration writers have long expressed a need to reconcile the values of democracy with those of an energetic and efficient public administration, different writers have expressed different views in regard to what exactly democracy means and as to what it implies for public administration. As noted, there are, for example, those, on one hand, who see democracy in terms of the expression of some type of popular or democratic will, as expressed through elected political institutions, which administrators ought generally to attempt to discern and follow, and there are those, on the other hand, who see democracy more in terms of direct citizen participation, which administrators ought to promote and help direct. What this article suggests is that these differences, as well as other differences, among public administration writers regarding the meaning and applications of democracy, are illustrative of the essentially contested character of democracy, and therefore, that such differences in our field are likely to continue indefinitely into the future, without any foreseeable resolution. This is not only because different conceptions of democracy are appraisive and, as such, reflect different values and conceptions of the good, but also because these disputes have their roots, not in the halls of academia, but rather in the real-world contestations of practical politics.

Given the appraisive and essentially contested character of democracy and its rootedness in political practice, it follows that public administration scholars should recognize that, whenever they talk and write about democracy and its implications for public policy and administration, these scholars, whether they are conscious of it or not, are, in fact, expressing a moral and political point of view and, as such, are engaging in a form of political discourse and action. This being the case, if we are to understand properly the relationship between democracy and public administration, then we must first accept that there is no politically or morally neutral conception of democracy. We must recognize that distinctions so often drawn in the field between “politics” and “administration” and between “facts” and “values,” while by no means meaningless, can never be absolute and that political and moral ideas and values will inevitably affect our enquiries concerning human actions in public administration, no matter how hard we might try to remove them. When writing and talking about democracy, as well as, for that matter, other contested political concepts, we must come to terms with the fact that, as Isaiah Berlin once argued, it is “nearly impossible” to “achieve neutrality” in statements about “moral and social life” because “the words themselves are inescapably charged with ethical or aesthetic or political content” (1979, p. 157).

To put this in another way, when one uses concepts such as democracy, it is inevitable that, as Connolly states the matter, “the normative dimension of political life enters political enquiry, not after the describing and explaining is done but, as it were, at the ground floor” (1993, p. 39). It should be noted that saying this is in no way to criticize political engagement in scholarship. To the contrary, when we hear leading public administration scholars, as noted above, talk about “democracy” in terms of how “responsible public management” requires “accountability or answerability to the collectively expressed values and will of citizens” or, alternatively, in terms of how public administrators should “take an active role in creating areas in which citizens, through discourse, can articulate shared values and develop a collective sense of the public interest,” we should feel perfectly free to be inspired to engage in political action by such words, or even to use such words ourselves as a means to inspire others, as we engage with them in political practice.

However, at the same time, if we wish to understand better the relationship between democracy and public administration, there is also merit in trying, as David Farmer (1995) and others have urged, to be more self-conscious or self-aware about the language that we use in public administration and reflect more upon, and try to understand better, the political and moral ideas and theories, which are implicit in much of the language that we use to talk about the “facts” of public administration. In this way, we might better recognize the essentially contested nature of the concept of democracy, as well as other important political concepts that we use in advancing our arguments and, in doing so perhaps at least hope for what Gallie terms a “raising of the level of quality of arguments in the disputes of the contestant parties” (1956, p. 193).

Dwight Waldo certainly understood the importance, within public administration, of precisely this type of self-awareness, when he observed in the 1980s that our literature “contains elements that are political theory as this is conventionally understood” and that “it serves useful functions to identify such elements and to examine them carefully: to trace their ancestry, to identify their analogs, to examine critically their intended explicit uses and their possible implicit functions in the political system” (1984, p. x). As Waldo put the matter,

there are limited, technical areas where public administrationists can escape, practically speaking, from concern with political theory; but, nevertheless, in their central concerns they cannot avoid this encounter. It is, rather, a matter of the level of consciousness and the degree of intelligence that is brought to the encounter. (1984, p. lvii)

This type of self-awareness in regard to the essentially contested meaning of democracy would seem especially important nowadays, given the rise around the globe of supposedly “democratically elected,” but also often frankly authoritarian political leaders, as well as increasing populist pressures, both from the right and left, that threaten the practices of liberal democracies. Without such self-awareness, there is a danger, in this author’s view, that public administration writers may overly emphasize particular conceptions of democracy that downplay the political contestation, which, as argued above, has come to be understood as a central part of the meaning of democracy. For example, when public administration writers talk about democracy in terms of the expression of the “collectively expressed values and will of citizens” or of a “collective sense of the public interest,” whereas such talk may well be inspiring, it can be argued here that, in using these terms, whether they are conscious of it or not, these scholars are evoking a vision of democracy that is distinctly more Rousseauian in character than it is Madisonian. It is, if not actually totalitarian, a vision of democracy that emphasizes unity and consensus over conflict and dissent and one that is, in fact, explicitly antithetical to the sort of contestation that has historically been associated with democracy.

Crick recognizes this problem when he argues that “there is both totalitarian and political democracy” (1993, p. 64) and that such concepts as “an allegedly general will” or “public interest” are “misleading and pretentious explanations of how a community holds together” (Crick, 1993, p. 24). “Worse still,” he argues, they can become “justifications for the sudden destruction of some elements of the community in favor of others” because, after all, as Rousseau would have put it, “there is no right to obstruct the general will” (p. 24). At the very least, it may be reasonably argued that, when public administration scholars seek to reconcile democracy and administration by overemphasizing concepts of democracy that divert attention away from political contestation, they are, to use Roy Heidelberg’s words, not so much “making public administration more democratic” as “making democracy more public administrationist” (2017, p. 27).

Cultivating greater self-awareness and reflection in regard to the use of the word “democracy,” in turn, suggests that public administration scholars should pay more attention than they have to the history of their own ideas regarding democracy. Gallie himself attests to the importance of such a history when he argues that, while

we come to see more precisely what a given scientific concept means by contrasting its deductive powers with those of other closely related concepts; in the case of an appraisive concept [such as democracy], we can best see more precisely what it means by comparing and contrasting our uses of it now with other earlier uses of it or its progenitors, i.e., by considering how it came to be. (1956, p. 198)

In an American context, this means also obviously paying more attention, as John Rohr (1986) and others have argued, to the history of American constitutional ideas and practices and their implications for public administration. Attention to these ideas and practices is important in light of the essentially contested of character of democracy, because, as argued above, our constitutional form of government itself promotes political contestation including contestation among rival conceptions of democracy. Furthermore, given our constitutional ideas and practices, it should be emphasized that this contestation in regard to the meaning of democracy and other political concepts takes place not only among political and judicial officials but also within the practice of public administration itself.

This is because American constitutional practices and the decentralization of political power they entail make difficult, if not impossible, the practice of a public administration that is free from the contestations of politics. As Norton Long (1949) wrote over six decades ago, because of these historically inherited practices, the “American system of politics does not generate enough power at any focal point of leadership to provide the conditions for an even partially successful divorce of politics from administration” (p. 258). Rather, administrators, if they are to be effective, find that they must respond to multiple and conflicting masters (Long, 1949; Rohr, 1986; Wilson, 1989). To borrow a term coined by Mark Bovens (2007), public administrators are compelled by their constitutional history and practices to face multiple and conflicting “accountability forums” to which they must answer for their actions. Consequently, whether they like it or not, public administrators cannot escape political contestation. They find, to use James Madison’s words, that “the spirit of party and faction” is involved “in the necessary and ordinary functions of Government” (Wills, 1982, p. 44). In other words, in the American constitutional form of governance, public administration is inevitably involved in political contestation in the sense that administrators, to be effective, must hear and be responsive to a plurality of different and often contesting interests and moral viewpoints.

Moreover, in seeking a balance among these contesting interests and viewpoints, whether expressed by elected leaders, organized interest groups, government unions, citizen representatives, or colleagues and subordinates within their own departments and agencies, public administrators are actually often balancing different ideas or notions of democracy, along with the different values or conceptions of the good associated with them. In exercising their administrative discretion, whether they are conscious of it or not, public administrators weigh, for example, values of majoritarian or overhead democracy against those of procedural democracy, interest group democracy, direct democracy, and even workplace democracy. In short, as public administration is forced by our Constitution to be a locus for political contestation, it becomes also then a locus for contestation over the practical meaning of democracy. It follows from this that, because of the involvement of American public administration in political contestation, public administrators inevitably end up playing an important role in helping to shape the actual meaning of democratic government in practice. Emmette Redford seems to recognize this when he argues that “the forums of decision making that constitute the administrative state . . . are crucial to the realization of the democratic ideal” (1969, p. 29). He suggests that the attainment of this “ideal in the world of administration depends much less on majority votes than on the inclusiveness of the representation of interests in the interaction process among decision makers” (p. 44).

Of course, given the essentially contested character of democracy, public administration scholars should always keep in mind that American constitutional ideas and practices are historically situated, and as is true of all such ideas and practices, they should never be, to use Gallie’s words, “put forward as universal political truths expressing the necessary conditions of any genuinely democratic aspirations or achievements” (1956, p. 185, footnote 3). Rather, scholars should recognize that whatever understanding of democracy they might happen to glean from examining our constitutional ideas and practices, this understanding will inevitably be informed by their own historically situated values and conceptions of the good and that, as a result, it will remain, like all such understandings, essentially contestable.

However, as the earlier discussion of Madison’s constitutional ideas makes very clear, an understanding of democracy, gleaned from our particular constitutional practices and traditions, has one important advantage over at least some other understandings of democracy that are advanced by public administration writers. This is that an examination of our Madisonian constitutional ideas and practices makes it clear how political contestation itself has come to form an important part of our own particular understanding of democracy and, moreover, that such contestation has historically included ongoing disputes over what it is that we exactly mean by democracy. Douglas Morgan, Richard Green, Craig Shinn, and Kenneth Robinson clearly recognize this fact when they argue,

The American founders gave us a constitutional system that embraces contending principles of good republican governance. These contending principles reflect basic disagreement as to what is required to preserve a regime of ordered liberty. The Constitution divides and checks governing power in part to keep the arguments perpetually in play. (2013, pp. 85-86)

Finally, it should, of course, be conceded that, whatever its virtues, political contestation inevitably has and likely will continue to be constrained and skewed by the power exercised by various interests operating within all democracies. However, this does not mean in any way that language and ideas such as democracy are unimportant. As noted earlier, Wittgenstein observed that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (1958, para. 19). If one adds to this Connolly’s observation that “every assessment of real interests is mediated through the way of life of those making the assessment” (1993, p. 73), then it becomes quite clear that interests are not something that can exist autonomously or somehow outside of language.

Rather, it is the case that language comes to shape the way in which participants in the political process come to view their own particular interests. Indeed, as Connolly points out, “the rise of a democratic ideology” itself is “more readily explicable if one refuses to assume that human beings must always and everywhere be governed by egoistic impulses, assuming instead that under appropriate conditions of social life, people can and will be motivated as well by desires to support their interests as social beings” (1993, p. 57). In other words, when one considers the role that interests play in public policy, it is also very important that one should not fall prey to what Berlin once termed “a very vulgar historical materialism that denies the power of ideas” (1969, p. 119). Language and ideas matter greatly and, as argued here, among these ideas are the contesting notions we hold, in public administration and in society, in regard to the meaning and uses of the concept of democracy.