Academic & Crossref DOI Search

Abstract: This chapter identifies what it means to enjoy specifically political equality. To affirm equal political status is to recognize each citizen as equally entitled to render authoritative judgments as to how to organize and regulate all citizens' common life. Citizens have equal political status when common institutions and practices reflect and express the idea that they each have the capacity to judge matters of justice and political morality, and the entitlement to exercise that capacity by rendering judgments that have public authority on equal terms with others. Admitting citizens into the common project of political rule—to a share in the regime—respects them, by granting authority to their political judgment. A politically egalitarian society, then, regulates matters of common concern through decision-making processes that respect equally each citizen's authority, or jurisdiction.

Abstract: This chapter discusses how the ideal of equal status connects to democratic aspirations, and why people should take that ideal seriously. Equality of status constitutes, and is constituted by, relations of an egalitarian kind. When people mutually recognize one another's equal status, they put themselves in an egalitarian relation. However, there are further connections between status equality and egalitarian relations, in that the recognition of equal status in various respects helps promote relationships among citizens free of hierarchy, domination, servility, and the like. These further connections are contingent, depending upon truths of empirical sociology and psychology—about how, in fact, humans tend to respond to certain social conditions, like material or political inequality. A similar structure holds for the ideal of political equality. The shared status of “democratic citizen” is constituted by a range of expectations that regulate institutions and individual practices. That status is properly recognized when institutions and practices meet those expectations. When citizens mutually recognize one another's status, they thereby engage in, and promote, valuable egalitarian political relations.