Equality - A Normative Principle of Democracy

“Equality is an ideal that is never perfectly achieved, even in strictly political terms” (Diamond and Morlino, 2004, p. 27). That it is never fully realised is not a weakness of the concept but the starting point for thinking about democratic quality. The normative and the empirical are linked but distinct. We measure democracies, ultimately, because we assume there is a point at which they cease to be democratic, yet the standards we use to judge them rest on prior normative commitments. Equality is one of those commitments. My concern here is not the empirical problem of how to quantify it, but the normative features that mark it out as a requirement of democracy. These features are necessarily broad and fuzzy, precisely because they derive from equality’s status as a foundational democratic ideal rather than an observable variable.

Empirical approaches, by their very nature, work to operationalise equality. Sigman and Lindberg, for example, identify three aspects of 'egalitarian democracy' that can be measured across countries (Sigman and Lindberg 2019, pp. 597–599). Their framework is valuable precisely because it forces abstraction into observable form. In doing so, it can be used to build a more robust concept of equality. However, operationalisation requires choices. Those choices reveal priorities. The components they identify are those that lend themselves to quantification. This is not a criticism, but a reminder that monitoring democracy empirically and grounding it normatively are distinct activities. What their approach presupposes, but does not fully articulate, is the underlying normative claim that citizens must stand as equals if democratic authority is to be legitimate. It is that prior claim, equality as a condition of legitimacy rather than a variable to be measured, that is my concern here.

Democracy typologies are deceptive. They appear as objective statements but are built on layers of descriptive bias that lead them down particular paths, when equality is discussed. Each label embeds a prior normative decision about which features of democracy matter most. Equality is redefined by whichever system it is placed within. Electoral democracy sets a minimal threshold, voting rights and competitive elections, but need not engage with the structural inequalities that hollow out formal equality in practice. The United Kingdom's first-past-the-post system illustrates the point: equal voting rights do not produce equal representation. Systematic underrepresentation of communities continues regardless of universal suffrage. Liberal democracy leans toward equal rights and legal protections, but through prioritising individual freedoms it avoids questions about material inequalities that distort equal political standing. Formal equality before the law, for example, means something very different depending on who can afford it. Neutrality between competing interests appears even-handed, but when background conditions are already unequal, neutrality tends to embed rather than correct them. This is the trap Klein (2024, p. 785) illuminates. His observation that relational egalitarian theories risk presenting electoral institutions as incompatible with equality is a symptom of what happens when normative ideals are drawn into discussions of measurement rather than normative argument. The problem is not that different democracy types champion different ideas. The problem is that naming a democracy type becomes a way of settling, by definition, what equality requires, and in doing so, casts doubt on equality's establishment as a normative principle rather than acknowledging the limits of the typology. Equality's complexity is not a problem to be resolved by better classification. It is a signal that the concept is doing serious normative work.

Given that equality may appear illusory, there is a requirement to break out of that circularity and state what the normative commitment actually consists of. Democratic authority establishes itself through the consent and participation of citizens, however imperfect or minimal that may be in any particular instance. Consent and participation only carry normative weight if citizens stand in some relationship to equality. This is not just a procedural requirement. It is a relational one. Equality is not primarily about what citizens hold, for example rights, resources and protections, but about how they stand in relation to one another. A political system in which some citizens are structurally positioned as inferiors cannot generate legitimate authority, however formally correct its procedures. Bengtson and Lippert-Rasmussen (2025, pp. 298-299) explore the normative core of this claim: on the relational egalitarian account, democracy is not an instrument for producing equal outcomes but a necessary and constituent part of what it means for citizens to relate as equals at all. Equality and democracy are not simply compatible. They are mutually constitutive. This, however, carries its own tension. Bengtson and Lippert-Rasmussen argue that the way of understanding social relations that makes relational egalitarianism plausible, as an account of democracy's value, tends to make it less plausible as a theory of justice, and vice versa. The two ambitions pull the concept in different directions. What this reveals is not that the normative case for equality is in question, but that it operates at a depth no single democracy type can contain. The complexity is the point.

The most obvious objection to treating equality as a foundational, normative requirement is a practical one. An element that resists precise definition appears to offer no standard at all. If equality means different things in different democratic contexts, how do we know we have it? This objection mistakes complexity for relativism. Equality is better understood as what Gallie termed an “essentially contested concept” (Gallie, 1956, pp., 171-172), a concept whose internal complexity and positive normative appeal make persistent disagreement not a failure of definition but a constitutive feature of the concept itself. As Collier et al. (2006, p217) discuss, recognising contestability does not mean that any interpretation of a concept involved in democracy discussions is permissible. Not all interpretations are equally valid, even when the concept allows multiple readings. This broad approach can be applied to equality. Its contestation is not a reason to abandon, for want of a universal standard but a sign that the standard is doing real normative work. Dryzek (2016, pp. 358–359) makes a related point: the right response to essential contestability is not to resolve it by definitional imposition, the very situation that democracy typologies arrive at, but to preserve the space for ongoing discussion about what the concept requires. Equality, on this account, functions not as a fixed point or state of being, but as a permanent critical pressure on democratic arrangements, one that no institutional type fully satisfies and none can afford to ignore.

Treating equality as a foundational normative commitment rather than a measurable variable, has a direct implication on how we might judge the quality of democratic instances. It means that no instance can be final. Equality functions as a pressure on democracy. The relevant question then becomes not whether a given system scores well on an equality index, but whether its structures and processes remain genuinely open to challenge on equality grounds. Beramendi, Besley and Levi (2024, p. i263) offer a useful approach here: political equality is best understood as equal consideration, the condition in which voices are equally expressed and given equal hearing, and that this cannot be reduced to any distribution of influence over outcomes, however defined. What this requires is not a particular institutional form but a particular institutional disposition. One that takes seriously the claims of those whose equality is undermined or compromised by the existing structures and remains open to revising structures that fail that test. As Trantidis (2024, p. 459) argues, social inequalities strike at democracy's normative foundation precisely because they render the meaning of political equality contestable, and that contestation, rather than being resolved by better measurement or clearer typologies, calls for ongoing deliberation about what equality requires. Equality, on this account, is not a threshold to be crossed or an endpoint to be met, but a standard to be continuously argued over. That is not a weakness of democratic theory in general and equality in particular. It is, perhaps, its most important strength. That argument has consequences for empirical work too. If equality is one of the standards against which democratic quality is judged, measurement frameworks are not neutral tools, they are themselves normative choices and should be evaluated as such.