Q&A: Senior Fellow Josiah Ober on The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (Princeton University Press, 2023)

In this Q&A, Josiah Ober, Hoover senior fellow and professor of classics and political science at Stanford University, discusses his new book coauthored with Brook Manville, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives.

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By Jonathan Movroydis

In this Q&A, Josiah Ober, Hoover senior fellow and professor of classics and political science at Stanford University, discusses his new book coauthored with Brook Manville, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives.

As Ober explains in the interview, democracies are experiencing very high levels of polarization and lack of trust in governing institutions. Consequently, there is a danger that democracies can no longer function effectively in a competitive world.

But Ober demonstrates that a study of history shows that democracy—with all its imperfections—can thrive and outperform authoritarian forms of government. The formula is the civic bargain, whereby citizens working from a baseline of unique conditions can advance their interests, negotiate with each other, and offer their talents and skills to achieve and sustain a stable and robust system of self-rule.

What inspired you to write the book, The Civic Bargain?

My coauthor, Brook Manville, and I had been talking about democracy for many years. We wrote an earlier book called A Company of Citizens. It’s about how we might think about relating some lessons from ancient democracy to contemporary practice of governance in America. I have spent much of my career studying ancient Greek democracy and then also contemporary democratic theory. So, this is a fairly deep interest of mine. Brook and I began thinking about what is now titled The Civic Bargain because we were concerned about the nature of the contemporary American political system and political culture. Like many other people, we were worried about very high levels of polarization, lack of trust in governing institutions, and especially about the danger that democracies can no longer function effectively in a competitive world. There are obviously challenges to freedom and equality that are of great concern. For this book, we decided to focus on the challenge of democratic effectiveness.

We realized too that there has been a lot of great literature that focused on the factors that make democracy fail. But, if we care about making a democracy effective and be hopeful about the future, we should emphasize the features that have enabled democracy to thrive in the past. So, we decided to use our skills and expertise in historical research to dive deep and try to answer that question through a series of case studies.

How do you define democracy?

Well, we decided to be crisp about it. Obviously, there are many different possible definitions of democracy—some of them richer and fuller, some of them leaner. We decided to go with a very basic definition, that is, democracy is self-government, meaning that we, some defined citizenry, are not dominated by, not told what to do by, some external boss, be it a tyrant or a dictator or a king. If we are going to govern ourselves without a boss, we must have the skills to make that work in practice. It requires establishing certain baseline conditions.

What are those conditions?

Through our research, we attempted to really strip down to the core of what makes a democracy work. We basically asked, "How could a society govern itself without an external boss?” Answering this question requires first understanding the purpose of government.

As individuals, we can’t secure and sustain ourselves without depending on a collective group of people with common interests. People are more likely to prefer the rule of a boss than to live in insecurity or in poverty.

The next question is, if you are going to have a government by the people, who are the people? Ultimately, citizenship needs to be defined. You can't simply say, "Well, who knows who we are? We'll decide on a case-by-case basis." That’s a nonstarter.

If we're going to govern ourselves, there have to be rules. And those rules must be ones that we can collectively agree on, we the citizens. The rules will govern our security and welfare. But how are we going to design and execute them?

In designing rules, we assume that, in any democratic citizenry, there will be a certain level of diversity. My interests aren't identical to your interests or to his interests or her interests. There will be interest groups within any extensive democratic body. Each of those interest groups will be advancing specific policy preferences. So, how are we all going to get what we want? We are going to have to negotiate with each other. And in negotiating with one another, or bargaining, that means that none of us is going to get everything that we want. Just by the definition of bargaining, you don't get everything whereas your bargaining partner gets nothing. If it’s a zero-sum game, it’s not a bargain. It's simply taking.

The bargain is the really big takeaway of the book. If you want a democracy, you must be ready to bargain. You must accept that you are not going to get everything you want. You will never get to the perfect form of justice or ideal social order to what you are aiming because others will have different ideas. But the bargain has to deliver to each of us more than we would have received outside of the bargain. It must be better than the state of anarchy.

This leads to the next question: How are we actually going to be able to bargain in good faith with one another? Well, I have to assume, or I have to convince myself, that the people with whom I'm bargaining are in some sense my friends rather than my enemies. I can't treat them as people who my goal is to defeat. This idea goes back to Aristotle, who really understood, and said in his works on ethics and politics, that to have any kind of decent government we must have a civic friendship. He is very careful to say this isn't an idealized form of friendship. It's not your best friend, but it's not your enemy either.

So how can we go about reaching this civic understanding and putting it into practice? We must have a robust civic education, both at the K‒12 and university level. Civic education should also be an ongoing process, whereby citizens remind one another that we are in a common project to maintain welfare and security without an external boss. It’s not always easy, but it’s certainly worthwhile.

But what if people have different conceptions about freedom and self-rule?

In the book, what Brook and I suggest is that, indeed, we can have on the margin different conceptions of freedom, but we have to agree about some kinds of freedom. We absolutely must agree about free speech, at least free speech that is relevant to our civic lives together. We must have free assembly. We must be able to get together to engage in bargaining, whether that is face-to-face, through representatives, or in a virtual space.

There are also various kinds of other freedoms: freedom of conscience, freedom in relationship to property rights. and so on. Without these, what I regard as, very desirable forms of freedom, it’s impossible to sustain self-rule.

You spoke earlier about high levels of polarization hampering the ability for democracies to operate effectively. But isn’t polarization a unique feature of democracy?

The danger of polarization is that it can lead to a civil war that collapses security. If we're in a civil war, we're not secure. This is pretty basic. The other danger is that polarization can bring a kind of absolutism—my way or the highway. There are voices on both the left and right of this country that reject the idea of compromise and view political leaders who are willing to engage in any negotiation or bargain as sellouts.

Up to that point, polarization, I think, can be an advantageous feature of democracy. It allows us to put more ideas on the table and to consider other perspectives. It’s good for a society to have deep differences of opinion, different commitments to certain forms of the public good, different religious beliefs, different conceptions of what the best possible way is to live our lives. And these differences are certainly a feature of democracy.

Are democracies like those in Scandinavia, with a high degree of cultural homogeneity, more functional than heterogenous ones such as the United States?

One of the basic ideas in our book is that every democracy has to confront the challenge of scale. It’s easy to scale up autocratic forms of government. The guy at the top of the pyramid gives orders to ten, who give orders to a hundred, and on you go down. You can scale up indefinitely, so long as you have the proper kind of enforcement mechanisms at every level. With democracy, as we bring in more people with varying interests and commitments to the bargaining table, it simply becomes more complicated to govern.

To solve the problem of scale, democracies need to develop genuinely innovative institutions that will enable diversity to be their strength. Diversity can be a plus when, as we spoke about a minute ago, people can offer competing perspectives. Moreover, with diversity, we have more specialized knowledge and skills. If faced with a challenge, we have more inputs that, when organized effectively, can produce better results. In this sense, diverse democracies can operate more effectively than large-scale autocracies, in which one person rules and his or her subjects are too fearful to speak up even when the state is pursuing a policy course that could be damaging for the country.

In a system of self-rule, we all have a stake and incentive to help solve problems. But again, we also must figure out how to manage the costs of citizens being unwilling to give up something that they feel very strongly about.

Would it be correct to say that diversity could potentially make democratic institutions even more resilient?

Federalism is one of those kinds of solutions that allows you to have local democracy that potentially brings inputs from different regions and attracts people with different perspectives. I wrote a book years ago called Democracy and Knowledge, which argued that convening a whole lot of people democratically comes at a high cost, but that cost is dramatically outweighed by the value of the infusion of information from those active citizens. There is a tension. But ultimately, citizens working through their democratic institutions must maximize the value of diversity in their society and minimize the cost.

At some point, we must do that culturally. That is why we emphasize civic friendship in The Civic Bargain. We must believe that we're in this together. And, yes, institutions can help us gain that kind of trust. But interpersonal trust must be developed, in a sense, by how we relate to one another and how we educate one another to be citizens.

When have these conditions for an effective democracy been successfully implemented?

In the book, we explore four cases: Athens, Rome, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To start, let’s take one of the less familiar ones: Rome. The Romans kicked out the last of their kings in 509 BC. But having kicked out their kings, the people who were running the Roman state were basically oligarchs, a group of people who had a special claim to power since they were born into distinguished old families. They called themselves the patricians. Indeed, in Latin they called themselves the “paters” (fathers), so they treated all the other Romans as their sort of infantile children.

The Romans of lower classes, the plebeians, rejected this social and political structure. So they told the patricians: when the enemy invades, we won’t fight to defend Rome.

Since the patricians had a vested interest in saving Rome, they were forced to the bargaining table with the plebeians. This scenario unfolded several times. Whenever the plebeians demanded something, they were given some kind of concession from the patricians. Such concessions came in the form of the right to intermarry with patricians and an equal vote in assemblies.

With each concession, Rome moved toward what ultimately became a democratic republic, a system in which the Romans together were governing themselves without a boss. This was really the secret to the strength of the Roman state. That is how they, according to the historian Polybius, took over the world, or at least took over the world he knew, the Mediterranean.

The civic bargain is summed up in the famous abbreviated phrase “SPQR,” the Senate and the people of Rome. In truth, this meant the Senate elected by the people of Rome, the citizens of Rome themselves, and the Roman state in total.

The Romans had various forms of civic education that helped them understand one another as friends of some sort (civic friends) rather than just enemies who were each trying to acquire an advantage. Their stories were often stories of self-sacrifice, of willingness to do something for the community. You cared about the well-being and security of the community.

Let’s take, for example, the story of Cincinnatus. He was a simple farmer but a brilliant general, who was at his farm happily plowing his field. The senators came to him and said, "Cincinnatus, you have to lead Rome.” He responded, "But I need to take care of my crop."

"Cincinnatus, we need you to be the leader of the Romans," the senators demanded. So, Cincinnatus drops his plow, goes off, and leads the army. He puts himself in danger and succeeds in beating the enemy, but then immediately stands down from his position of leadership and returns to his plowing. Cincinnatus is an icon who symbolizes the willingness to put the good of the country ahead of your private good, at least temporarily.

Cincinnatus was a really powerful icon in the period of the American Revolution. The group of people who were friends of George Washington created the Society of the Cincinnati, modeling themselves after that great Roman leader. That is how we got the name of the southern Ohio city as well.

Those were the kinds of stories in which Romans were educated. This didn’t happen formally in schools. These stories were passed down generationally according to an oral tradition.

Another bargaining story is the American constitutional moment. The American founders at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were confronting a crisis. The Articles of Confederation, the existing form of government for the United States, had clearly failed. The country was bankrupt and parts of it were on the brink of civil war. But they were able to come up with a bargain. Is it a perfect bargain? As we all know, of course it wasn't. It incorporated slavery. Did they think it was a perfect bargain at the time? Absolutely not. There is a famous speech that Benjamin Franklin gave at the very end of the convention in which he explicitly says, "Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it’s not the best. The Opinions I have had of its Errors; I sacrifice to the Public Good.”

It’s true that the Constitution doesn't instantiate a form of perfect justice. But if we think about it as the best bargain that could be achieved, at that time, given the interests that were on the table, given the potential for especially the Southern delegates to simply walk out if they didn't get part of what they wanted, then it was as good as it was going to get. But as time went on it became evidently clear that the bargaining hadn’t finished. Citizens were brought back to the bargaining table through the amendments process.

In its first half-century, America was not able to come up with a satisfactory adjustment to the original bargain, and therefore we fell into civil war. The American Civil War, sadly, was just the sort of event the civic bargain was intended to avoid: citizens killing each other because we couldn’t figure out how to negotiate any longer.