Non-domination not only provides republicanism's basic case for establishing a system of self-rule, but also dictates how this system should operate and be organised. The key quality republicans have looked for in this regard is that the political process obliges decision-makers to ‘hear the other side’ (‘audi alterem partem’). Historically, they have associated ‘hearing the other side’ with a particular conception of public reason, on the one hand, and political arrangements that embody a balance of power, on the other. The former characterises the civic attitudes and types of deliberation citizens and politicians should adopt when making decisions, the latter the way decision-making power needs to be divided to encourage these virtues and facilitate access to the political process. Republicans claim that only political systems embodying these two elements will treat all as equals and so avoid domination through arbitrary rule.

This chapter has three aims. First, it criticises those versions of these two features of republican politics that have come to be associated with constitutional judicial review and somewhat depoliticised or apolitical forms of deliberative democracy. On the one side, reasoning by the public is distinguished from a stipulative form of public reason. On the other side, the balance of power so as to encourage all citizens to give equal consideration to each other's views and interests is contrasted with the separation of power, which is revealed to have the perverse effect of removing such incentives.