Pure proceduralism holds that the legitimacy of democratic decisions derives from the fairness of the procedure used to make them

There are several ways in which pure proceduralism might be understood. On an account of aggregative democracy—which takes the aggregation of individual preferences, for example through voting, to be the key feature of democracy—pure proceduralism implies that democratic decisions are legitimate if the aggregative process is fair. Kenneth O. May’s defense of majority rule (May 1952) implies a view of this sort (see also Dahl 1956).