On the concept of political manipulation
| Author | Gregory Whitfield |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120932253 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
On the concept of
political manipulation
Gregory Whitfield
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract
Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively –
with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. But political actors do things – they engage
in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the
expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion,
yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely
because they serve to purposively alter citizens’ beliefs, intentions and behaviour.
With this article, I explicate a conception of political manipulation to capture this
sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation
of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond
being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove
useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of dem-
ocratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to
sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power.
Keywords
Coercion, deliberation, democratic theory, manipulation, persuasion
Introduction
Consider the following short cases. A candidate misleads a voter about the record
of an opponent. A lobbying organization prints marketing materials that closely
resemble utility bills to increase recipient attention. Minority voters are targeted
with calls falsely informing them of polling place closures. A campaign operative
Corresponding author:
Gregory Whitfield, Justitia Amplificata, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
Email: g.whitfield@em.uni-frankfurt.de
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885120932253
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2022, Vol. 21(4) 783–807
pursues an undercover operation to bait an opponent into recorded corruption.
A legislator undermines the alliance of a pair of colleagues, knowing each will need
to offer partnership with him instead. A voter submits an inaccurate ordering of
her preferences with an aim to better secure her true preferences in the social
ordering produced through a ranked ballot election. A committee draws a new
electoral map isolating the opposition party’s support in fewer districts than the
previous map.
My aim is to systematize the intuition that these cases are of a kind, that they
share relevant features, that our thinking on liberty and democracy is improved by
conceptualizing cases like them together as illustrating a distinct species of inter-
ference. Readers may not share normative intuitions about the rightness, legitima-
cy, etc. of these examples. Indeed, they should separate us across divisive principled
commitments, just as a range of examples on state coercion would. But I argue
that, like examples of coercion, they share characteristics uniting them conceptu-
ally within a single phenomenon I will call political manipulation.
I argue this against those like Cass Sunstein, who doubt that manipulation is a
coherent single concept for which necessary and sufficient conditions may be given
(Sunstein, 2016: 81),
1
and against those like Robert Goodin (1980) and Anne
Barnhill (2014), who give analytic definitions that I will show conflict with consid-
ered judgments about the relevant conceptual issues, or are not concerned with
political contexts, respectively. But we need such a conception in the first place
because much liberal-democratic political thought has concerned itself primarily –
even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. Following Locke and
Mill, liberals have developed principles of non-interference to capture the wrong-
fulness of undermining others’ agency by forcing them to act according to some
external-to-them idea of normative action. On this broad set of accounts, justifi-
cation is owed for coercive policies precisely because they are coercive (Hardin,
1990: 79; Nagel, 2003: 218; Nozick, 1974: ix; Rawls, 1993: 216–217).
2
None of the
cases above involved coercion, yet they are certainly exercises of (sometimes sig-
nificant) power for political ends. We need to think carefully about whether and
how such exercises might call for justification.
The stakes of clarifying manipulation are high. We need normative theories that
parse the ethics of a variety of forms of interference, coercive or otherwise.
Such theories also serve to assess the justice of political institutions that determine
the extent of manipulation within a system, and the degree of citizen and institu-
tional resilience against inevitable acts of manipulation. Without a thorough con-
ceptual understanding of the nature and varieties of manipulation, we cannot hope
to begin thinking normatively about its presence in our politics. It is towards that
wider normative project that this article’s conceptual work aims. In what follows, I
argue for a conception of political manipulation covering a wide range of cases not
well described as coercion, persuasion, interference or alternative takes on
manipulation.
The conceptual approach I take has three methodological features worth
noting. First, it is non-moralized. Following several other thinkers (e.g. Baron,
784 European Journal of Political Theory 21(4)
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