Goodin, Robert. "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives". Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol.35, No.1 (2007): 40-68.

Goodin, Robert. "Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives". Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol.35, No.1 (2007): 40-68.

• One of the essential issues of democratic theory is deciding what portion of the total population should be involved in the democratic decision-making process. Having all bound by laws involved in the decision-making process seems simple, but this would actually include foreigners in another country, who are bound by laws they do not get to make (42).
• Determining the basis of the electorate, or demos, is a prerequisite for establishing any democracy or form of democratic theory. Moreover, the electorate cannot be decided democratically, because a democratic decision requires an electorate, meaning that the electorate must be constituted according to some logical precept (43).
• The lack of input from democratic theory on the constitution of the electorate means that it could potentially not matter to democracy, in that every form of electorate is equally valid, regardless of restrictions on race, sex, or religion. Most scholars, however, reject this notion of democracy for allowing Rhodesia or the USSR to be considered democracies (45-47).
• Most electorates are constituted by nationality, usually based on common territory or common history, which has a logic because people with common histories and people who live close by will be affected by each other's actions and have an interest in the community as a whole (48).
• This logic, however, is not fool-proof, and people who share common history and territory will not necessarily be affected or concerned with the actions of the rest of the community. Instead, the interlinked interests are the most important element; the basis of the electorate should therefore be all affected interests (49).
• The idea of all affected interests is much more robust than the more common idea of all those bound by the law having a say in the law, as those bound by law can clearly affect those not bound by that law. For example, a government quota on fish would only bind domestic fishermen, but it would affect all fishermen (49-50).
• The most common iteration of the principle is the all actually affected interests principle, which the author argues is logically incoherent, because which parties are actually affected by a decision depends on what decision is made. Therefore, the electorate cannot be decided without a decision dependent on an electorate (52).
• The other principle is the all possibly affected interests principle, which employs the status quo as a baseline and includes all those whose position would be affected by any possible outcomes of the decision (53-54).
• The acceptance of this principle leads to more questions, as it still leaves undecided the electorate which is responsible for setting the agenda of decisions to be made. Theoretically, everyone is affected by decisions which could be on the agenda, meaning the whole world should take party, but this is manifestly impossible (55).
• There is a manifest need for the democracy of a society to be limited by respect for privacy, as personal lives and internal operations of businesses cannot be decided by every person who may be affected by decisions made. To be theoretically consistent, the electorate should either have the power to decide on everything, or have its power be extremely limited to those affairs in which people have direct interests (62-63).
• " The democratic ideal ought ideally be to enfranchise 'all affected interests.' Understood in a suitably expansive 'possibilistic' way, that would mean giving virtually everyone everywhere a vote on virtually everything decided anywhere" (68).
• Since this is not a possibility, the author instead suggests that international law could form a best case scenario to a world government, by allowing affected interests to be compensated according to a globally agreed body of law (67-68).