Applications of Corporate Moral Agency Local Diversity and Polycentric Democracy

APPLICATIONS OF CORPORATE

MORAL AGENCY

Local Diversity and Polycentric Democracy

RYAN MULDOON*

ABSTRACT

Polycentric democracy holds great promise as a means to deal with the core

democratic challenge of intractable disagreements that stem from our diversity.

Instead of simply having majorities win, polycentric orders aim to find a way of

letting everyone get what they want. Polycentric solutions are often presented

as cost-free, as only those who choose to join a club or move to a new locale

are affected. This paper examines the ways in which quite serious costs to third

parties can arise in polycentric orders, and then offers some possible ways to

recover the benefits of polycentricity while mitigating some of these costs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THE CHALLENGE OF DIVERSITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 790

II. THE PROMISE OF POLYCENTRICITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791

III. THE PERILS OF POLYCENTRICITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 794

IV. A WAY FORWARD? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 802

Especially at the local level, democratic orders have a number of ways of han-

dling the diverse interests and needs of citizens. There is, of course, deliberation

and majority-rules voting, which allows people to determine some rule for all citi-

zens. But more interestingly, especially when we consider provisioning local

public goods or services, we gain extra options that have serious prima facie

appeal: we can either spatially split the electorate (via foot voting between exist-

ing jurisdictions or creating a new jurisdiction), or we can use private governance

to allow for club goods provision that does not require support of the general elec-

torate. These latter two options are in several ways superior to deliberation and

majority vote for accommodating a more diverse citizenry. After all, we can do a

* Ryan Muldoon is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy, Politics

and Economics Program at the University at Buffalo. His work focuses on the challenges and

opportunities of diverse societies. © 2021, Ryan Muldoon.

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far better job of ensuring that citizens are getting closer to the sort of social com-

pact they are interested in, because they can more easily get more of the costly

social goods that they want, and fewer of the ones that they do not. However, I

argue that these mechanisms come with serious costs, especially when we con-

sider the longer run dynamics of these approaches. These approaches have helped

fuel stark racial and socio-economic segregation and large differences in quality

of governance. Most worrisome, these costs are frequently shouldered by those

outside of private governance contracts and those who are being moved away

from. In particular, I am interested not only in material harms, but in the demo-

cratic harms that those outside of the extra polycentric arrangements bear, in the

form of reduced democratic voice, and a weaker real option of foot voting. The

aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which we can recover the benefits of

polycentric democracy while taking these externalities into account.

I. THE CHALLENGE OF DIVERSITY

At the core of any democratic system is a need to harness the benefits of a

diverse populace while managing the disagreements that arise from that same di-

versity. Different citizens have different interests, different wants, and different

needs. While much of this diversity can be handled by having a robust private

sphere, in which individual preferences or choices do not need to be turned into a

matter of public policy, there will remain a fairly broad public sphere in which

we will need to find ways of managing our differences. The basic challenge, of

course, is that we must make a single choice, despite our differences, about the

rules that we are all to follow. Whatever rules we select might leave much to indi-

vidual choice, but regardless of how extensive the set of rules we choose for our-

selves, it remains the case that we must select some rules for ourselves. Although

it would be nice if our differences were always worked out via a robust debate

that led to consensus, much more typically we find ourselves at odds with each

other, and for any particular political choice that we make as citizens, some por-

tion of the population will wish we made another one. This is a core function of

any liberal democratic order—offering an account of why people are bound by

rules they would have not chosen (and may have indeed not selected when given

the option).

To make this worse, insofar as we have political coalitions around clusters of

issues, it is perfectly possible that some minority group will not merely lose on a

vote, but on a whole series of votes. Not getting your way every now and again is

of course part of the democratic bargain, but citizens may well feel that systemati-

cally losing is something else entirely. If part of democratic participation is hav-

ing some sense of authorship over the rules to which one is bound, that notion of

authorship becomes increasingly tenuous the more one sits on the losing end of

votes. Especially in first-past-the-post, winner-take-all democratic orders, if some

minority group holds 30% of the votes, it might well mean that rather than getting

their way 30% of the time, they simply never get their way. This may mean that

for minority groups of various sorts—especially those that aren’t able to make

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