 Second, expressive associations “are credited with enhancing the quality of democracy by cultivating citizenship and promoting open fora for public deliberation and self-government”, opening up a “parallel polis” through a “plurality of non-state social groups”, by which the state can be kept in check and its powers limited (Craiutu 2008: 263–4; Levy 2014: 27). Put differently, one core function of many expressive associations or “intermediate” associations is to check the power of the state. Intermediate groups give people an alternative to acting through the state. They enable people to act in concert and thereby more easily resist the wrongful threats to personal freedom that governments can pose (Levy 2014: 1). An important part of preserving this function of such associations is for a citizenry to become accustomed to the art of association, and to join with like-minded people in the pursuit of what they perceive, in competition with others, as the common good. This can only occur when groups are allowed to exclude people who have different understandings of that good. In other words, to create genuine space for democratic dissent, groups must be allowed to exclude people based on a principle of expressive discrimination: such “expressive exclusion” sits at the intersection of speech, association, and democracy (Bedi 2010).