CB argues for a value theory of democracy as an alternative to procedural and epistemic theories. The three core values which underlie democracy are: equality of interests, political autonomy and reciprocity. These values are implicit in the practices and institutions of contemporary democracies. They are central to democracy because they facilitate and sustain the idea of democratic citizens as free, equal and reasonable rulers. These values are understood to be not merely important and central values for a just state but central to democratic governance. A careful articulation of these values reveals that these values require respect for both majoritarian procedures - procedures which guarantee meaningful participation in decision-making — and an effective protection of substantive rights. Much of CB’s book is devoted to an examination of the conclusions which follow from the value theory of democracy. CB identifies what substantive rights individuals have and establishes the ways in which the three core values identified by him support these rights.
The question addressed by chapter 7 is what institutional structures reflect best the core values and how these institutions ought to operate. Such an institutional structure ought to respect people’s autonomy by protecting participation, protecting equality of interests and instantiating reciprocity. Determining what the ideal institutional structure is requires examining hard cases, namely cases in which the decisions generated by majoritarian procedures (and, by virtue of this fact, decisions that are congenial to some of the democratic core values) are incompatible with the substantive rights (whose protection is also congenial to the core values). When majoritarian procedures yield decisions which violate substantive rights there is always an inevitable loss to democracy. If such decisions are allowed to stand, substantive rights are violated to the detriment of the core values; if, on the other hand, these decisions are overruled by the courts, majoritarian procedures are defied to the detriment of the core values. CB believes that given such conflicts the right decision is the decision which minimizes the aggregate or overall loss to the core values. Determining what the right decision is requires therefore comparing or balancing the loss to core values resulting from an anti-majoritarian rights-respecting decision and the loss to core values resulting from a majoritarian rights-violating decision.
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