Jane Mansbridge

To ensure their continuing effectiveness, democratic systems must not only be responsive, fair, and decisive, Charles Beitz’s three criteria; they must also be perceived as legitimate. A legitimacy focus takes us beyond the electoral system to the contacts citizens have with the entire representative system, including legislatures, administrative agencies, the judiciary, and even civil society associations. That focus also takes us to the dyadic one-on-one interactions between citizens and their representatives. Finally, a legitimacy focus takes us to a contingency theory of competition, pointing out that in some contexts the structures and practices of intense political competition produce lower perceived legitimacy, even if they provide better public policy. Some structures long scorned in political science—such as nonpartisan or single-party cities and state legislatures, districts with long incumbencies, and ranked-choice voting—all produce less acute competition but arguably more perceived and also normative legitimacy.

A dramatic transformation has begun in the way scholars think about human nature. Political scientists, psychologists, economists, and evolutionary biologists are beginning to reject the view that human affairs are shaped almost exclusively by self-interest—a view that came to dominate social science in the last three decades. In _Beyond Self-Interest_, leading social scientists argue for a view of individuals behavior and social organization that takes into account the powerful motivations of duty, love, and malevolence. Economists who go beyond "economic man," psychologists who go beyond stimulus-response, evolutionary biologists who go beyond the "selfish gene," and political scientists who go beyond the quest for power come together in this provocative and important manifesto. The essays trace, from the ancient Greeks to the present, the use of self-interest to explain political life. They investigate the differences between self-interest and the motivations of duty and love, showing how these motivations affect behavior in "prisoners' dilemma" interactions. They generate evolutionary models that explain how altruistic motivations escape extinction. They suggest ways to model within one individual the separate motivations of public spirit and self-interest, investigate public spirit and self-interest, investigate public spirit in citizen and legislative behavior, and demonstrate that the view of democracy in existing Constitutional interpretations is not based on self-interest. They advance both human evil and mothering as alternatives to self-interest, this last in a penetrating feminist critique of the "contract" model of human interaction.

In this paper Jane Mansbridge reflects upon the role of resistance in democracy. Resistance “can cause inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion.”’ Instead we should increase the legitimacy of democratic action and in that manner further the possibility of sanction through coercion. An improvement of democratic institutions and of the procedures of deliberation, which makes room for citizen input, would also make for a more efficacious and organized resistance, when necessary.