Electoral democracy and structural injustice.

Detailed historical research on the substantive content of party platforms in the nineteenth-century United States shows that the primary concern of all major parties, decade after decade, was the enabling of economic growth under a capitalist property regime (Bensel, [12], pp. 202-203). If, therefore, "justice is the end of government" (p. 259), as Madison writes in I Federalist i No. 51, then I Federalist i No. 10 tells us that justice, and therefore the end of government, means the protection of humans' natural propensity for property acquisition. Pettit ([62], pp. 173-174) claims that party competition helps counter "false negatives" and promotes a broad "culture of freedom", since the ability to stand for office, form parties, and criticize governing parties implies the prior liberties of "speech, association, and travel" (Pettit, [64], p. 201). Rather than competitive elections, I focus on the competitive party system, since parties are the primary agents of competition in electoral democracies (Bellamy, [9], p. 231; Katz & Mair, [43], p. 1). My aim, then, is not to critique minimalist, aggregative democracy from the standpoint of deliberative democracy, but to critique I maximalist i views of electoral democracy from the standpoint of structural injustice. [Extracted from the article]