Kelsen and Schumpeter on Democracy

Abstract

I summarize the innovations introduced by Kelsen and Schumpeter into our understanding of democracy and the value they attribute to it. Then I emphasize that their's is not a "liberal" democracy but a majoritarian one: neither reverts to some super- or contra-majoritarian institutions to explain why democratic government would be a limited one. Finally, I try to tease out their views about the mechanisms that prevent tyranny of the majority. They understand, I think, that limited government must be self-enforcing, that it must be an equilibrium in which the current majority stops short of monopolizing power and the current minority accepts to act within the democratic framework given that the majority is not monopolizing. But formal analyses of this problem, summarized in the last section, are very recent.

Keywords: democracy, self-limited government