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The deepest foundation of our democratic crisis is our increasing human interdependence. That interdependence creates increasing needs for 'free-use goods': goods that, once produced, anyone can use without paying (other names: "public goods," "non-excludable goods"). Such goods produce the classic "free-rider" problems to which the most efficient solution in societies of strangers is usually government provision through taxes or regulation, both of which depend on a combination of voluntarism (based on duty and solidarity) and legitimate coercion. More interdependence creates more free-rider problems, which require more government intervention/coercion. Our eighteenth-century democratic mechanisms were not designed to legitimate the amount of state coercion we now need. To bolster legitimacy, we need to embrace the logic of free-use goods and replace one-way with recursive representation, the principle of distinction with more descriptive representation, corruption with clean institutions, and legislative-centric democracy with a full representative system approach, all drawing on our collective intelligence.

Reading these essays gave me a thrill of excitement like the one I felt on hearing that the #MeToo movement had extended even into China. The ideas in this Critical Perspectives collection go much deeper into the nature of and reasons for descriptive representation than I could two decades ago. Anne Phillips (1995) and Melissa Williams (1998), the two pioneers in this field who produced analyses far more thorough than mine, would, I think, agree with me on this. So would Iris Marion Young, whose early challenge in a talk over lunch inspired me to puzzle out my own take on the problem.

Because our collective needs for state coercion will steadily increase with greater human interdependence, we must take far more seriously the need to justify that coercion to the coerced. Cristina Lafont moves to the forefront of democratic theory the goal that citizens should 'own and identify with the institutions, laws and policies' that coerce them – an important move, particularly today, when many feel, often correctly, that they have not been 'heard' in producing the laws that coerce them. Lafont's approach might be furthered, I argue, by a theory of legitimacy that a) explicitly endorses plural sources of democratic legitimacy, b) acknowledges the aspirational quality of the many democratic ideals that make up this legitimacy, and c) recognizes consequently that democratic legitimacy is always partial.

Abstract
Democracy When the People Are Thinking reveals how Deliberative Polls are today becoming embedded to various degrees in the policy processes of some democratic states. Some are legally required and even given close to decisional power at points in the democratic process. Here I warn that the more powerful Deliberative Polls and other minipublics based on "civic lotteries" become—the more they make important decisions instead of merely giving advice—the more they will come under attack from individuals and groups who benefit comparatively from traditional democratic processes. The more they come under attack, the more they will require both normative and perceived legitimacy. Robust legitimacy derives not only from appropriate delegation but from the design and the public presentation of the mini-publics themselves. A contingent analysis argues that the more embedded these institutions become in the state, the more important it will be first to ensure and then to publicize effectively the representativeness of the randomized assembly, the balanced and comprehensive nature of the materials and experts that the citizen deliberators consult, and the quality of the deliberation. Some practical suggestions follow.

In 1951, when Jean Elshtain was ten, she contracted polio. In the small Colorado town where she grew up (then as now, the population was under 200), the medical system did not understand well how to deal with polio. Her doctors sent her to a hospital, separated her from her parents, withdrew fluid from her spinal cord without anesthetic, and, for fear of contagion, sequestered her in a single room where even the nurse feared contact. Elshtain said later, "The only person I saw during that time was a nurse who [would] … put a meal down and leave a bedpan." After the nurse hurriedly left the room, this ten-year old girl faced the walls and her condition by herself.

En este texto Jane Mansbrige reflexiona sobre el rol de la resistencia en democracia. La resistencia puede generar inacción cuando se centra en detener y no en utilizar la coerción. A cambio, se trataría de mejorar la legitimidad de la acción democrática lo que incluiría la existencia de mecanismos de sanción. Una mejora de las instituciones democráticas y de los mecanismos de deliberación que den cabida al input ciudadano permitiría, a su vez, una resistencia más eficaz y organizada cuando ésta fuera necesaria. ; In this paper Jane Mansbridge reflects upon the role of resistance in democracy. Resistance "can cause inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion."' Instead we should increase the legitimacy of democratic action and in that manner further the possibility of sanction through coercion. An improvement of democratic institutions and of the procedures of deliberation, which makes room for citizen input, would also make for a more efficacious and organized resistance, when necessary.

This address advances three ideas. First, political science as a discipline has a mandate to help human beings govern themselves. Second, within this mandate we should be focusing, more than we do now, on creating legitimate coercion. In a world of increasing interdependence we now face an almost infinite number of collective action problems created when something we need or want involves a "free-access good." We need coercion to solve these collective action problems. The best coercion is normatively legitimate coercion. Democratic theory, however, has focused more on preventing tyranny than on how to legitimate coercion. Finally, our discipline has neglected an important source of legitimate coercion: negotiation to agreement. Recognizing the central role of negotiation in politics would shed a different light on our relatively unexamined democratic commitments to transparency in process and contested elections. This analysis is overall both descriptive and aspirational, arguing that helping human beings to govern themselves has been in the DNA of our profession since its inception.