Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.

/pdf/democracy-and-its-critics-2zxg086s7q.pdf

Democracy and Its Critics

政治自由主义 = Political liberalism

more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith’s illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view

Democracy in America: An Appreciation On the Occasion of the Centennial of Tocqueville's Death

Recent accounts of epistemic democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. Epistemic democrats aim to offer such accoun...

https://scholar.harvard.edu/ingham/files/latest_draft_1_16_12.pdf

Disagreement and epistemic arguments for democracy

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others’ having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others’ choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory. ∗University of California San Diego. Email: singham@ucsd.edu †Washington University in St. Louis. Email: flovett@wustl.edu. Republicans hold that people are dominated, and therefore unfree, merely in virtue of others’ having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices, even if the latter are benevolent and therefore unlikely to exercise those abilities. Republicans further argue that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Some recent critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the mere possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to collections of individuals, then, as one critic puts it, “republican freedom is impossible,” for “there are always collections of agents who could, by coordinating, invade any individual,” and who thus would count as sources of domination (Simpson, 2017, p. 41). We argue that the dilemma raised by these critics is apparent only. We present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination, paying special attention to cases involving collections of agents, and show how it allows for the possibility of popular control, without making domination ubiquitous and therefore unavoidable. For collections of individuals to have abilities in the relevant sense, the mere possibility of coordination is insufficient: in a sense we will make precise, it must be the case that they would actually coordinate if each placed sufficient value on achieving their shared aim. Not all collections of individuals meet this condition; most are unable to surmount the barriers to 1Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Workshop in Politics, Ethics, and Society at Washington University in St. Louis; at the Philosophy Colloquium at Davidson College; and at the 2019 meeting of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society. The authors would like to thank the participants at each of these events for their very helpful feedback. The authors are also especially grateful for comments and suggestions received from Matthew Babb, Randy Calvert, John Lawless, Daniel Layman, Brian Tamanaha, David Wiens, and the anonymous reviewers at AJPS. 2Significant contributions to the contemporary republican literature maintaining these claims include Pettit (1997, 2012, 2014); Skinner (1998, 2002); Viroli (2002); Lovett (2010). See also the papers collected in Laborde and Maynor (2009). 3See most importantly Simpson (2017), but similar arguments can be found in Dowding (2011), Sharon (2016), List and Valentini (2016), Kolodny (2019).

/pdf/republican-freedom-popular-control-and-collective-action-fo6o4swpfn.pdf

Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action

What does it mean to say that citizens have control over their leaders? In a democracy, citizens should have some control over how they are governed. If they do not participate directly in making policy, they ought to maintain control over the public officials who design policy on their behalf. Rule by Multiple Majorities develops a novel theory of popular control: an account of what it is, why democracy's promise of popular control is compatible with what we know about actual democracies, and why it matters. While social choice theory suggests there is no such thing as a 'popular will' in societies with at least minimal diversity of opinion, Ingham argues that multiple, overlapping majorities can nonetheless have control, at the same time. After resolving this conceptual puzzle, the author explains why popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.

Rule by Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control

Deliberative minipublics are small groups of citizens who deliberate together about a policy issue and convey their conclusions to decision makers. Theorists have argued that deliberative minipubli...

Can Deliberative Minipublics Influence Public Opinion? Theory and Experimental Evidence:

Effects of Deliberative Minipublics on Public Opinion: Experimental Evidence from a Survey on Social Security Reform

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