1. I am grateful to Nancy Fraser for prompting this article, and to audiences in Canberra and Paris for discussions of it. Thanks most particularly to Gustaf Arrhenius, Lars Bergstrom, John Dryzek, Lina Eriksson, Marc Fleurbaey, Christoph Freghe, Karl Hinrichs, Magnus Jiborn, Andrew Knops, Douglas Maclean, Jane Mansbridge, Simon Niemeyer, Laurie Paul, Thomas Pogge, Michael Ridge, Torbjorn Tannsjo, Folke Tersman, and the Editors ofPhilosophy & Public Affairs. Work on this article was conducted under Australian Research Council Discovery Project P0663060.
2. I prefer that characterization to two others more common in the scant literature on this topic. Calling it "the Boundary Problem" makes the issue seem more a matter of geography than it necessarily is; cf. Frederick G. Whelan, "Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem," inNomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 13-47. Calling it "the Problem of Inclusion" inclines us to think in terms of inclusion in some already existing decision-making group, ignoring the question (which I see as logically the crucial one) of how to constitute that group in the first place; cf. Robert A. Dahl, "Procedural Democracy," inPhilosophy, Politics and Society, ed. P. Laslett and J. S. Fishkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 97-133, at pp. 108-29; Robert A. Dahl,Democracy and Its Critics(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 119-31; Judith N. Shklar,American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3. Dahl,After the Revolution?, pp. 60-61. He continues, "I think this is because they take for granted that a people has already constituted itself. How a people accomplishes this mysterious transformation is therefore treated as a purely hypothetical event that has already occurred in prehistory or in a state of nature. The polis is what it is; the nation-state is what history has made it. Athenians are Athenians. Corinthians are Corinthians, and Greeks are Greeks."
4. Dahl, "Procedural Democracy," pp. 108-29;Democracy and Its Critics, pp. 119-31.
5. The issue is absent altogether from J. R. Pennock's otherwise encyclopedicDemocratic Political Theory(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). It gets only a brief chapter in Carl Cohen'sDemocracy(New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 41-55, and Giovanni Sartori'sDemocratic Theory(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1962), pp. 17-30, reprinted asThe Theory of Democracy Revisited(Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1987), pp. 21-38. The fullest discussion remains Whelan'sNomoschapter on "Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem," from nearly a quarter century ago.