ABSTRACT
One aspect or treating citizens as equals in a properly ordered democracy is to give them equal votes in the process of collective decisionmaking. Citizens then have an equal influence on the outcome of the process. We discussed this adversarial equality extensively in the last chapter. Many have thought that this is sufficient to ensure political equality. But there is another element to the distribution of political influence that is perhaps even more important. In politics, citizens must not only be able to exert pressure on the process by which collectively binding decisions are made, they must be able to know what they are making decisions about. They must have some idea about how the decisions are related to their interests as well as the moral worth or the justice of the decisions. They must have some idea about what their interests are as well as what kinds of moral concerns are really important to them. Without any understanding of these issues a citizen would be voting without any clear aim. Thus, it is necessary to include a discussion of the cognitive conditions for meaningful participation in a theory of democracy.
