We the People: Is the Polity the State?

Abstract

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative.

Making the state responsible: A proxy account of legal organizations and private agents acting for the state

“…By focusing on deliberative democracy and the conditions for making officials accountable to voters, Collins and Lawford‐Smith (2021) get close to this suggestion. However, although more promising, their view faces some problems.…”

Solidarity and Public Health

“…The polity presented byCollins and Lawford-Smith (2021) is a social group that represents the formalization of societal interactions for the purpose of government. That is to say, the political is the formalization of the societal.…”