| Summary: | What is democracy and what makes it just or fair? The orthodox answer to both questions holds that democracy is reducible to the idea and ideal of procedural equality. On this view, democracy is a set of institutions that provides citizens with equal procedural opportunities to influence political decisions, and this fact about democracy is what makes it just or fair. === The position defended in this essay holds that the orthodox answer of proceduralism is mistaken. The conceptual ideal that animates proceduralism---the notion of an equal distribution of political power---is theoretically impossible, and the closest proxy---a decision-making process that terminates in simple majority rule---cannot be justified as fair in virtue of the way that it distributes power. === In order to be fair, democratic institutions must satisfy both process- and outcome-oriented criteria of fairness. Fairness overall requires both just outcomes and a fair political process that promotes everyone's interests in public recognition, agency, and moral membership in a community of equals. Procedural equality is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of fairness overall. === A proceduralist account of the fairness of democratic institutions is most appealing in the context of conscientious disagreement about questions of substantive justice. Its implicit promise in that context is to provide a neutral and impartial way to solve otherwise intractable moral disputes. In this context, too, the promise of proceduralism is illusory. Here, however, proceduralism is not alone in its failure; for no account of democratic institutions can render them fair in the presence of conscientious moral disagreement.
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