Abstract
This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decisionmaking
procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional
account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one
hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged
as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on
the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund’s
account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic
conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize
citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the
circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an
account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper
expression of citizens’ reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority
does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through
the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic
value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather
than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we
demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet
abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that
this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as
a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants
her opportunity to influence public choices.