When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative.

中文翻译：

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我们人民：政体是国家吗？

当一个自由民主国家签署条约或发动战争时，它的整个政体是否都在做这些事情？在本文中，我们通过最近关于集体代理的社会本体论文献来解决这个问题。我们提供了它的论点和它没有的论点。这些论点是通过三个考虑提出的：政体对国家行为的控制；政体的统一；以及个别政体成员的影响。我们认为，对于不同的自由民主国家，我们的问题的答案是不同的，并且取决于两个基本考虑：（1）该州公职人员拥有的自由裁量权；(2) 民主程序在多大程度上是协商性的而不是聚合性的。