Bellamy, Richard;
Kröger, Sandra;
(2024)
Truthfulness, pluralism and the ethics of democratic representation.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations
10.1177/13691481241287185.
(In press).
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Abstract
It is sometimes suggested that even democratic politicians need to dirty their hands in ways that render hypocrisy, lying and deception unavoidable and even justified. By contrast, we draw on John Rawls’ Political Liberalism to argue that the ‘reasonable disagreements’ occasioned by the ‘fact of pluralism’ that make democratic politics necessary can only be resolved in ways congruent with democratic norms if politicians are truthful in Bernard Williams’ sense, and adhere to the related virtues of ‘sincerity’ and ‘accuracy’. Supplementing Eric Beerbohm’s ‘relational model’ of campaign ethics with Suzanne Dovi’s account of the ‘good representative’, we argue that these both entail the virtues of truthfulness. We contend the contemporary crisis of representation associated with the rise of technocracy and populism can be linked to the ways both undermine these virtues through their common rejection of pluralism and the related need for truthfulness. Consequently, both involve deformations of ‘good’ democratic representation.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Truthfulness, pluralism and the ethics of democratic representation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/13691481241287185 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13691481241287185 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | his article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
| Keywords: | democracy, ethics, leadership, populism, representation, technocracy, truthfulness |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198865 |
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