2026 APSA Theme Panel: Private Associations and Democracy

Private Associations and Democracy

Thursday, September 3, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Full Paper Panel

Participants:

• (Chair) Roni Hirsch, Haifa University

• (Discussant) Steven Klein, King’s College London

• (Discussant) Emma Saunders-Hastings, The Ohio State University

Session Description:
Contemporary democratic theory has tended to locate democratic legitimacy primarily in public institutions, public reason, and state-centered mechanisms of accountability. But democracy under threat cannot be stabilized through public law and electoral politics alone. Many of the most consequential sites of power shaping democratic life today are neither fully public nor straightforwardly private: universities organize knowledge production, privately owned digital infrastructures function as epistemic authorities, philanthropic institutions wield extensive influence over public policy, and a dense ecology of meso-level institutions organize social cooperation beyond the state. Against the backdrop of democratic backsliding and institutional fragility, this panel asks how democracy can be understood, protected, and rebuilt when so many processes of vital importance for a democratic society fall outside formal institutions of public power.

Bringing together scholars of political theory and law, this panel will interrogate the democratic significance of nonpublic institutions and forms of reasoning. Rather than treating nonpublic reason as a residual category or a democratic deficit, the four papers we have gathered on this panel will explore its systemic role in sustaining—or undermining—democratic agency, legitimacy, and accountability.

In her paper entitled “Bowling over? Civil society institutions and authoritarian encroachment,” Turkuler Isiksel (Columbia University) argues that authoritarian encroachment triggers democratic duties on the part of nominally private institutions, particularly those that command significant organizational and material resources. The paper contends that this general duty applies differently to organizations depending on their guiding purposes.

In “The Oracle, Powered by Oracle™,” Alexandra Oprea (SUNY Buffalo) and Daniel J. Stephens (SUNY Buffalo) will consider the democratic implications of the fact that privately owned LLMs increasingly function as modern day oracles–trusted epistemic institutions that ordinary citizens view as uniquely positioned to deliver accurate pronouncements on matters of moral and political importance. They argue that although the emergence of oracles can reestablish trust in common epistemic institutions in ways that can overcome the problems of polarization that threaten contemporary democracies, their private ownership constitutes a significant threat to democracy.

In “In Search of University Democracy,” David Pozen (Columbia Law School) and Daniel Hemel  (NYU Law School) ask why virtually all U.S. universities have the same top-down, external-board-dominated governance model rather than one that gives faculty, students, staff, alumni, or community residents the right to (1) select a majority of the board or (2) exercise majoritarian voting power over high-level strategic, budgetary, and operational decisions. Pozen and Hemel argue that there is nothing legally or functionally required about the university governance status quo; and that, if nothing else, experimentation with stakeholder structures would be good for the sector as a whole, for enabling institutional pluralism and learning from policy variation and possibly also for resisting authoritarianism.

Abraham Singer’s (Loyola University Chicago) paper, “The Idea of Nonpublic Reason, Revisited,” considers the privileges and social obligations that associations possess in a democratic society. What are the bases of these privileges and the content of these obligations? A common way of answering these questions is to presuppose a broadly Rawlsian conception of nonpublic reason, understood as the reasons and norms that attach to associations protected by liberal rights and meant to accommodate a society marked by value pluralism. Such a view, however, overly homogenizes the normative stakes of associational life. Based on the different ways associations are constituted and oriented, this paper offers a reconstruction of four categories of nonpublic reason –pluralist, contestatory, systemic, and statutory – and the normative privileges and duties each implies.

Emma Saunders-Hastings (Ohio State University, author of Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality) and Steven Klein (King’s College London, author of The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State) have agreed to serve as co-discussants. Roni Hirsch (Haifa University), an expert on the ethics of markets, will chair the panel.

Overall, the panel aims to address the ways in which private and semi-private institutions structure and organize participation, knowledge, authority, and collective problem-solving—and to grapple with the pressing question of what democratic reconstruction would require at these critical institutional sites.

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