%0 Journal Article
%T Plural voting and political equality: A thought experiment in democratic theory
%A Trevor Latimer
%J European Journal of Political Theory
%@ 1741-2730
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1474885115591344
%X I demonstrate that a set of well-known objections defeat John Stuart Mill¡¯s plural voting proposal, but do not defeat plural voting as such. I adopt the following as a working definition of political equality: a voting system is egalitarian if and only if departures from a baseline of equally weighted votes are normatively permissible. I develop an alternative proposal, called procedural plural voting, which allocates plural votes procedurally, via the free choices of the electorate, rather than according to a substantive standard of competence. The alternative avoids standards objections to Mill¡¯s proposal. Moreover, reflection on the alternative plural voting scheme disrupts our intuitions about what counts as an egalitarian voting system. Undue emphasis on Mill¡¯s version of plural voting obscures three important reasons to reject plural voting in favor of strictly egalitarian voting systems: (1) that certain choices that generate inequalities of political power are morally impermissible; (2) that even chosen inequalities may undermine the potential epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making; and (3) that such choices may undermine citizens¡¯ commitments to democracy understood as a joint project
%K Political equality
%K plural voting
%K John Stuart Mill
%K weighted voting
%K democracy
%K procedures
%K egalitarianism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474885115591344