Attila Mráz

This paper offers a novel, productive approach to political ethics in the European Parliament (EP), assuming some of its members (MEPs) are elected undemocratically in member states severely affected by democratic backsliding. It explores the normative foundations of how other MEPs should deal with undemocratically elected MEPs here and now, complementing long-term institutional reform proposals to counter backsliding. Criticising a cordon sanitaire approach to undemocratically elected MEPs, whilst rejecting that all MEPs have equal standing, the paper grounds a principled third way. First, it offers an account of individual representatives' (rather than EU political institutions') legitimacy and authority and shows how this account justifies asymmetrical duties vis-à-vis democratically versus undemocratically elected MEPs. Second, the paper draws action-guiding implications of this asymmetry for how democratically elected MEPs should relate to fellow MEPs. They should presumptively defer to and cooperate with other democratically elected MEPs, whereas they can and should deal with undemocratically elected ones strategically, as instrumentally necessary to discharge their own duties as representatives but also to protect the legitimacy and authority of the EP. Third, the paper argues that democratically elected MEPs should provide surrogate representation to voters of undemocratically elected MEPs but not to voters of other democratically elected MEPs.

This special issue examines the implications of a commitment to democracy for the ethics of voting and for the capacity of elections to legitimise the exercise of political power. Although there is a substantial literature on the morality of abstention and the justification for compulsory voting/turnout, there is almost no systematic discussion of the interplay between electoral institutions and the behaviour of voters as moral and political agents. Our collection seeks to address this lack and to bring philosophical attention to the variety of conceptual, normative, and strategic questions involved in the practice of democratic voting.

(OPEN ACCESS) In some contexts, voters on one side of the political spectrum may need to compromise their moral convictions more than voters on the other side, by voting for a lesser evil to defend democracy from an imminent populist threat. Such threats typically come from the far-right at present. This paper offers an account of political equality – defending the Egalitarian Moral Burdens Principle (EMBP) and the No Double Burdens Principle (NDBP) – to theorize such differential moral burdens as a pro tanto egalitarian wrong. My account distinguishes such morally objectionable comparative burdens from other, non-comparative, unobjectionable burdens of moral compromise that are part of normal democratic politics. EMBP prohibits burdens of moral compromise that fall disproportionately on voters with a particular reasonable political conviction in the long term. NDBP prohibits that these moral burdens fall disproportionately on those voters who have taken the bulk of the burdens of (fighting) injustice. The paper argues that both far-right populism and a democratic counter-populist strategy against it – which I call restorative populism – infringe both EMBP and NDBP. Nonetheless, the paper shows that voters should vote for the lesser evil if that is necessary to defend democracy even if the moral burdens of lesser-evil voting fall disproportionately on them – thus infringing their political equality. It argues, though, that there are times when such infringements of political equality pro tanto entitle voters to abstain or engage in protest voting instead of voting for the lesser evil.

(OPEN ACCESS) In this paper, I criticize two views on how political equality is related to equally distributed political power, and I offer a novel, pluralist account of political equality to address their shortcomings—in particular, concerning their implications for affirmative action in the political domain, political representation, and the situation of permanent minorities. The Equal Power View holds that political equality requires equally distributed political power. It considers affirmative action—e.g., racial or gender electoral quotas—, representation, and more-than-equal power to permanent minorities pro tanto objectionable. The Equal Status View, in contrast, holds that political equality concerns equal relations and status, and it is only contingently related to equally distributed power. I argue that while the Equal Status View is right that equal power can be insufficient for—or even objectionable from the viewpoint of—political equality, it is wrong to conclude that equal power has no independent significance in an account of political equality. My pluralist account shows that political equality entails not only status-based requirements but also independent egalitarian requirements to distribute political power equally. This account provides a finer-grained understanding of affirmative action in the political domain. It justifies affirmative action but holds that it should only be used to realize equal political status until thorough-going social reform allows us to maintain both equal political status and equally distributed political power at the same time. Similarly, representation should be amended with power-balancing institutions, and permanent minorities should enjoy equal status with minimal compromise to power equality.

(OPEN ACCESS) This paper establishes moral duties for intermediaries of political advertising in election campaigns. First, I argue for a collective duty to maintain the democratic quality of elections which entails a duty to contain some forms of political polarization. Second, I show that the focus of campaign ethics on candidates, parties and voters—ignoring the mediators of campaigns—yields mistaken conclusions about how the burdens of the latter collective duty should be distributed. Third, I show why it is fair to require intermediaries to contribute to fulfilling this duty: they have an ultimate filtering position in the campaign communication process and typically benefit from political advertising and polarization. Finally, I argue that a transparency-based ethics of campaign advertising cannot properly accommodate a concern with objectionable polarization. By contrast, I outline the polarization-containing implications of my account, including a prohibition on online targeted advertising, and intermediaries’ duties to block hateful political advertising.

(OPEN ACCESS) In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not justify such support – although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care – but not necessarily surrogate voting.

While some descriptive and normative theories of legislation account for an extensive role of legal interpretation in legislation, others see its legislative role as marginal. Yet in contemporary constitutional democracies, where legislation is limited and guided by constitutional norms, as well as international and supranational law, legal interpretation must play some role in legislation—even if all or most of legislative activity may not be adequately described and evaluated as legal interpretation. In this chapter, I aim to explore some implications of recognizing the role of legal interpretation in legislation—notably, for the conceptualization and significance of legal expertise in the legislative process, as well as for determining the moral duties of legislative representatives. First, I argue that the role of legal interpretation in legislation calls for institutional reforms in legislatures in order to ensure that legal expertise is adequately channeled into the legislative process, including agenda-setting. Second, I argue that interpreting legal norms through legislation implies specific moral duties for legislative representatives, both in their relations to one another and in their relations vis-à-vis their constituents. I show that giving legal interpretation its due in a descriptive and normative account of legislative activity does not imply an elitist understanding of legislation, and it does not compromise our conception of legislatures as loci of political and moral disagreement and democratic representation.

(OPEN ACCESS) This paper offers a novel substantive justification for mandatory electoral quotas—e.g., gender or racial quotas—and a new methodological approach to their justification. Substantively, I argue for a political egalitarian account of electoral quotas. Methodologically, based on this account and a political egalitarian grounding of political participatory rights, I offer an alternative to the External Restriction Approach to the justification of electoral quotas. The External Restriction Approach sees electoral quotas as at best justified restrictions on political participatory rights. I argue for the Internal Restriction Approach instead, which can justify electoral quotas by specifying the pro tanto scope of political participatory rights rather than by justifying restrictions on the pro tanto scope of these rights. On this approach, adequately set electoral quotas do not even conflict with and are not balanced against political participatory rights, while electoral quotas—when justified—are pro tanto required rather than merely permitted.

In this paper, I offer a solution to the Capacity/Equality Puzzle. The puzzle holds that an account of the franchise may adequately capture at most two of the following: (1) a political equality-based account of the franchise, (2) a capacity-based account of disenfranchising children, and (3) universal adult enfranchisement. To resolve the puzzle, I provide a complex liberal egalitarian justification of a moral requirement to disenfranchise children. I show that disenfranchising children is permitted by both the proper political liberal and the proper political egalitarian understandings of the relationship between cognitive capacity and the franchise. Further, I argue, disenfranchising children is required by a minimalistic, procedural principle of collective competence in political decision-making. At the same time, I show that political equality requires the enfranchisement of all adults, regardless of cognitive capacities, and that the collective competence principle does not ground adult disenfranchisement. This justifies the progressive legal trend that holds the capacity-based disenfranchisement of adults to be incompatible with liberal democratic principles.