Daniel J. Stephens

The ability to identify which citizens are democratically competent and which fall beneath the relevant standard of competence bears on numerous questions in democratic theory. These include questions about the distribution of the franchise, the type of civic education that democratic governments should provide to their citizens, and how we might prevent democratic backsliding. In this paper, we aim to identify and defend a criterion of minimal democratic competence. Specifically, we argue that a voter should be regarded as minimally democratically competent with respect to a given election if and only if that voter knows how to vote for the candidates or policies that, if chosen, would not predictably bring about the end of that electoral democracy, and intends to vote that way.