An Egalitarian Case for Class-Specific Political Institutions

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178288
• Author: Vincent Harting
• Date: 01 October 2023

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178288

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(5) 843 –868

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231178288

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Article

An Egalitarian Case for

Class-Specific Political

Institutions

Vincent Harting1

Abstract

Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic

tendencies of representative government have recently paid more

attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that

is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-

making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the

justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are

outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what

I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy

political equality fully, their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue

of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-

divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for

the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection

of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs

should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality.

Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation

toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up

wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided

to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing

egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs.

1Department of Government, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE),

London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Vincent Harting, Department of Government, The London School of Economics and Political

Science (LSE), Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: v.a.harting@lse.ac.uk

1178288PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231178288Political TheoryHarting

research-article2023

844Political Theory 51(5)

Keywords

class-specific political institutions, plebeian republicanism, representative

government, political equality, oligarchic capture

Introduction

Egalitarian democratic theorists usually maintain that a well-ordered society

must satisfy a principle of substantive political equality: votes on relevant

public matters should be equally distributed, deliberation among citizens

widespread, and money-determined politics absent (Christiano 2010, 199).

Yet even the most robust existing welfare state is typically far from satisfying

this requirement at a systemic level. A growing body of both empirical and

normative literature illustrates how economic elites increasingly exercise

undue influence over democratic processes and outcomes,1 revealing a wide-

spread vulnerability of contemporary liberal democracies to oligarchic cap-

ture (White 2020).2 By comparison, contributions to the normative justifiability

and design of alternative institutions explicitly aimed at fighting oligarchiza-

tion are rather scarce. Instead, most theorists tend to optimistically insist that

we should just improve standard liberal-democratic institutions and practices

(e.g., Pettit 2012), neglecting the relative systemic failure of these institutions

in delivering their egalitarian promises (Vergara 2020a). Contrary to such

optimism, other scholars react in an anti-institutionalist vein, arguing that for-

mal political institutions are inherently undemocratic and that the struggle

against elite domination should rather focus on forms of grassroots mobiliza-

tion and popular resistance (e.g., Negri 2009; Rancière 1999). But this

approach is limited too because, without the enforcement capacity and pros-

pects of stability for such measures, their likelihood of success in countervail-

ing trenchant oligarchization can be put into question (Hamilton 2018, 485;

Muldoon 2021, 2; Popp-Madsen 2020, 17). A demand for theorizing alterna-

tive anti-oligarchic institutions is well-founded and much-needed.

1. Important studies showing the intensity of this phenomenon in the United States

are Bartels (2017), Domhoff (2013), Hacker and Pierson (2010), Winters (2011),

and Gilens and Page (2014). See Hopkin and Lynch (2016) for a discussion on

Europe. See also Elkjær and Klitgaard (2021) for a systematic review of the

recent literature.

2. Perhaps the paradigmatic example in this context is Rawls’s (2001, 135ff) dis-

cussion of welfare-state capitalism as transgressing basic demands of egalitar-

ian justice in the sense that such a system is liable to produce monopolies and

concentrations of economic power that, in turn, would damage the fair value of

political liberties and substantive political equality.