Why it is a question
CLAIM-030 says an organized whole’s operative intention is not the expectation of its members’ intentions. The owner asked what that implies for a politics that steers by polls, and then put the point in terms of reasons rather than goods: the whole’s reasons need not be its members’ reasons. CLAIM-271 carries that answer as a thesis. The question stays open because three answers are live and the record cannot yet choose:
- Its members’ reasons. A poll majority is a sum of members’ reasons, and a decision that follows it carries them. Against this: a majority for one conclusion can be made of opposite reasons, so following it may carry no reason that any majority holds.
- Its own reasons. The polity’s reasons are the ones its procedures (constitution, platform, deliberation, avowal) make, as THEORY-131 and THEORY-139 would have it, and polls are one input to them.
- None. A polity that only follows conclusions is aggregating by conclusion, and on THEORY-127 its verdicts can then be ones that no set of reasons it holds would support. On THEORY-139 it is then not conversable: it cannot be held to reasons it does not have.
A related point, not yet a claim: a poll’s answers are partly produced by asking. THEORY-166 finds that question order changes answers across 66 Pew surveys. If that holds, part of what a poll reports is a property of the instrument rather than of the members.
What would count as an answer: evidence on whether policy in poll-responsive democracies tracks aggregated member conclusions, a stated collective rationale, or neither, and whether outcomes that follow conclusions are less consistent across linked issues than outcomes reached by deliberation. The record holds none of that literature yet. Gilens and Page (2014) and Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists are candidates, once the anthology has been checked for them.