Democracy is about collective self-rule under conditions that afford everyone political standing and consideration in matters of common concern. But in today’s globalized world, democratic states must respond to a growing number of demands for inclusion from beyond their borders, on issues ranging from migration, to trade, to human rights and the environment. Under these conditions, there is an urgent need for a principled means of determining who is entitled to inclusion, and on what basis. Defenders of the All-Affected Principle claim that inclusions should track the impacts that decisions can have on people’s lives. Defenders of the All-Subjected Principle adopt a similar strategy but use a narrower threshold for inclusion. My argument is that neither principle entirely satisfies. The problem is that both principles are too backwards looking. I offer an alternative formula for democratic inclusion that captures the underlying wrong to which complaints about undemocratic exclusion are seeking to draw our attention. One complaint is about domination: being exposed to the arbitrary and one-sided power of others. Another complaint is about usurpation: having your judgement displaced, without your consent. Using these two complaints as a guide does a much better job explaining when inclusion is justified and the appropriate institutional response.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) in democratic theory holds that everyone who is affected by a decision has a claim to participate in making that decision. Authors who invoke the principle usually restrict its scope and argue only for enfranchising affected interests within formal political decision-making procedures. In other words, the AAP would expand the demos (e.g. by including people affected by decisions taken in other countries), but need not expand the sites of formal politics to which democratic norms apply. Against these scope restrictions, we argue that the AAP applies to some extra-governmental actors and, in particular, to big philanthropists. We make this argument without endorsing an expansive reading of the AAP as applying to all kinds of decisions, public and private. Rather, we argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the AAP—for thinking that it is wrong for people to be denied influence over exercises of power that affect them—do not pick out formal political decision-making as a uniquely important site of inclusion. We also challenge, on anti-paternalist grounds, the assumption that it is primarily the risk of negative impacts that grounds claims to inclusion.

This chapter investigates (1) whether there is a convincing justification for the All-Affected Principle, (2) whether it is best understood as substantive or procedural principle, and (3) whether it provides a useful way to approach boundary questions. Though the All-Affected Principle is often justified as realizing self-determination in political decision-making, I argue that the AAP does not do so. Instead, the ideal of self-determination, properly understood, supports individual and collective autonomy rights, and institutional arrangements that are at odds with a global democracy of the all-affected.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) is a simple idea that captures a core democratic intuition: enfranchising the people who are governed. Yet democratic theorists have often shied away from the various conceptual challenges that explicating its meaning arises. This chapter therefore articulates a reformulation of the AAP that is (a) pluralistic, which means it is more flexible in terms of both the kind of effect it examines as triggering right for participation as well as the kind of influence and forms of participation that may be required and (b) refocuses the principle around social power rather than mere affectedness. The implications of this reformulation are briefly considered in the context of referenda as a tool for determining the boundaries of political communities and it is concluded that such referenda need to be institutionalized and built into democratic system, in the same way procedures for constitutional amendments allow for infrequent but crucial examination of the political communitys foundations.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) expresses a basic intuition about what democracy is good for: I should want to have a say in decisions that significantly affect my life. Here I sketch an approach to the AAP that responds to this normative ideal, as well as to the issues of organizing these ideals into institutions and practices beyond state-based constituencies. First, I interpret the AAP a normative specification of social justice as it relates to democratic inclusion. Second, I comment on the most three common objections to the AAP principle. Third, I contrast the AAP to a common alternative, the All-Subjected Principle. Fourth, I argue that the normative force of the AAP should be derived from social justice. Fifth, specifying the AAP in this way produces a distinction between democratic equalities and democratic equities. Sixth, this approach to the AAP helps to identify constituencies—actual or latent—defined by essential interests, challenging use to find new ways and means of democratic inclusion for essential interests. Finally, I look at the question as to whether the AAP is workable in practice, noting that we already use the AAP extensively but implicitly and unevenly.

Corporations and other powerful contemporary institutions take decisions that increasingly impact the possibilities for well-being not only of those who work or live within them and are governed by them but also of distant people who are deeply affected by their functioning. This democratic deficit raises the question of whether the workers and others who are so affected should have a say in the policies that set the basic conditions for their own livelihoods and flourishing. This chapter sketches an understanding of the scope of the All-Affected Principle, taking it as an important addition to the “common activities” principle that requires democratic rights for the members of an institution or community. It proposes that both principles require democratic management (or “workplace democracy”) within firms, and suggests that the All-Affected Principle is especially apt for addressing the exogenous effects of decisions on people beyond the firm, or on distant people impacted by the institutions of global governance. The chapter goes on to consider applications of the All-Affected Principle for other labor rights under capitalism, including the right to form unions, support for care work, and for the unemployed.

This introductory chapter examines arguments for and against adopting the All-Affected Principle (AAP) as a criterion for democratic inclusion, and the alternatives. For many, the attraction of the AAP lies in its straightforward simplicity: If you are affected by a collective decision, you should be able to influence it. Yet there remains sharp disagreement among scholars of democracy about how to best formulate the AAP and the circumstances in which it applies. Surveying the literature, we argue that appeals to the AAP will vary according to: (1) organizational scope; (2) decision-making context; (3) kinds of influence; (4) how influence is allocated; (5) the definition of “affectedness”; and (6) the stringency of any participatory requirements. Whether the AAP is consistent with existing arrangements, or requires a more radical redrawing of democratic boundaries, is a question on which opinions may differ significantly. We conclude by discussing the trade-offs between more versus less ambitious versions of the AAP, the implications for addressing pressing governance challenges, and the future of the democratic project more generally.

This chapter discusses an oft-cited source of the All-Affected Principle in a procedural maxim of Roman private law known by the tag quod omnes tangit (‘what touches all’), a maxim that became a more expansive principle of medieval canon and civil law. By exploring some of the maxim’s original contexts and formulations, the chapter draws out several important lessons for the All-Affected Principle itself: the interplay between procedural and substantive claims; the empowerment of some to advance such claims on behalf of others; and the need for procedural closure. It then explores the possible application of this approach in the context of how climate change touches all and how claims might be made on the basis of the All-Affected Principle accordingly. Identification of moral rights to a fair per capita share of a global carbon budget, and rights against the unjust imposition of harm or the risk of harm, are both considered as potential sources of such claims. A range of possible institutional arrangements to advance and realize such claims, such as trusteeship, are briefly considered in conclusion.

This chapter offers a ‘realist’ interpretation of the All-Affected Principle, as a democratic principle for distributing political inclusion. This interpretation aims to capture the AAP’s democratic appeal as a basis for political legitimacy in the pluralist institutional landscape of global governance practice. First, it is argued that the distinctive democratic value of the AAP derives from its concern with institutionally empowering those valuable dimensions of individuals’ political agency that are expressed through participation in the practical performance of global governance functions, alongside those expressed through deliberative or aggregative social ‘choice’ procedures. Second, it is argued that this interpretation of the normative point of the AAP supports a pluralist, rather than a cosmopolitan, institutional approach to democratic inclusion: the sites, types, and constituencies of inclusion should vary across institutional contexts, depending on their real-world consequences for the empowerment of individuals’ capacities to advance their interests through institutional collaboration with others. Third, the chapter elaborates the broader ‘realist’ conceptions of global democracy and political legitimacy that are implied by this interpretation of the AAP, and highlights some advantages and limitations of the realist account.

This chapter considers whether and how the All-Affected Principle (AAP) ought to be extended to large-scale, Western-based INGOs such as Oxfam and Care. These INGOs are frequently criticized for being undemocratic. Would more compliance with the AAP make them more democratic? I consider two possible ways of extending the APP to INGOs. The AAP’s “inclusive face” analogizes INGOs to governments and suggests that they should be more inclusive. It thus offers only a limited basis for critique. The AAP’s “exclusive face” points out that INGOs are unaffected, and tells us that they should therefore be excluded. The AAP’s exclusive face therefore offers a more radical basis for critiquing INGOs than its inclusive face. However, even the AAP’s exclusive face has serious limitations in the context of INGOs. This is because INGOs face the involvement/influence dilemma: they can be involved in addressing social problems or they can avoid undue influence, but it is difficult for them to do both simultaneously. I therefore turn to three organizations that directly and intentionally address this dilemma: SURJ, Thousand Currents, and the Solidaire Network. I show that these organizations reinterpret the AAP in ways that are relevant to, and generative for, other similarly-situated entities, such as INGOs.

The “All Affected Interests Principle” (AAIP) and the related “All Subjected Principle” (ASP) articulate principles of political legitimacy that can serve as potent instruments for evaluating the legitimacy of non-state institutional orders. However, while both are useful for evaluating the legitimacy of already-existing institutional orders, many of most important democratic legitimacy failures of our age arise not only from the undemocratic character of already-constituted orders but also from the fact that in many key domains we lack any institutionalized capacity to address the urgent collective action problems we face. How can such institutions be established in a democratically legitimate way, as an exercise of democratic collective agency? The chapter takes a historicizing turn, arguing that AAIP and ASP creatively retrieve and reconstruct old ideas in the history of democratic thought, liberating them from the presupposition that they can only be actualized within the territorial boundaries of the state. It then argues that we can reconstruct the concept of constituent power as a form of democratic agency to show how democratically legitimate sites of binding collective decision beyond the state can come into being.

This chapter critiques the All-Affected Principle (AAP) for its inattention to structural power relations. Illustrating with the case of school desegregation in the American metropolis, it argues that people are significantly affected not only by decisions, but also by nondecisions, doxic norms, and positioning in systemic relations of domination. It makes the case for reformulating the AAP in a way that broadens it to focus on people’s social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit their fields of possible action.