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Abstract: When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? We approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide an argument for ‘yes’, alongside one for ‘no.’ The arguments are presented via three desiderata on a ‘yes’ answer: 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 upon two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state’s office-holders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is ‘deliberative’ rather than ‘aggregative.’