What Can Voting Do for Democracy?

Abstract Empirical political scientists and normative political theorists alike have challenged the grip elections hold on our democratic imagination, albeit for very different reasons. Against both sets of critics, Emilee Booth Chapman’s remarkable and timely new book Election Day: How We Vote and What it Means for Democracy makes a compelling case for the ballot box’s unique place in democratic theory as a site of collective agency among political equals. Chapman offers an invaluable framework for navigating the shifting character of the American voting system and the innumerable proposals for improving it. But at the same time, this essay argues that in face of American democracy’s moral failures, Election Day reveals as much about the limits of well-ordered elections as it does their democratic promise.