The Authorship Principle: What Makes Democracy (Un)Democratic

Democracy is commonly equated with elections, representation, and procedures for authorizing rulers. This article challenges that assumption by defining democracy as collective authorship: the shared capacity of those who live under laws to participate in making them in complex modern polities. Representation, even when electorally authorized, separates citizens from lawmaking power and institutionalizes heteronomy rather than self-rule. I develop an authorship principle grounding legitimacy in shared exposure to the consequences of law and a complementary exclusion rule—the reversed ideal speech situation—according to which those not affected by a law must not exercise binding authority over it. Drawing on historical cases and contemporary policy domains, the article shows that modern systems concentrate authority in actors insulated from the effects of their decisions. Democracy, it argues, is representation constrained or displaced whenever authority migrates away from consequence-bearing agents.