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Government by the people. Until recently, democracies counted very few persons among 'the people'. Now they include all adult citizens, including, in many nations, recent immigrants, and democracy is virtually universally revered as the best or the right form of government. In the democratic upsurges in Eastern Europe in 1989, a rallying-cry from crowds in the street was 'We are the people'. Every chanter, every listener, knew what that meant, and most of them presumably thought it a claim of morality, of right. In its simplest form, democracy entails having all citizens participate in voting on policies. In large states this is not sensible or even possible and participation takes place in sequential forms. First, representatives are chosen and then they decide on policies. It is widely believed that different structures for representation could produce substantially different outcomes. Hence, there is no simple formula for democracy that relates popular preferences to political outcomes in large polities. Because the general character of democracy is widely understood, we may focus discussion most acutely by beginning with its difficulties. Contemporary public choice theory began in the analysis of two critical problems fo
Justifications of democracy that turn on equality are still in their infancy. One might look to equality of outcomes, such as economic results, or to equality of political power or opportunities for participation. Democracy may tend to produce welfare policies that elevate the condition of the very poor and thereby enhance equality of outcomes, but the data are quite ambiguous and the causal theory of why this should happen is very thin. Equality of political power is perhaps the more compelling justification, but it lacks conceptual clarity. How do we measure power to equate it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Deliberation is especially associated with Jurgen Habermas. Critics argue that the appeal of deliberation is the appeal of the intellectual salon with a dozen or so erudite and witty discussants. Deliberation was not even very good much of the time in Athens, with its extraordinarily supportive conditions. It has little chance in a nation of 50 or 200 million adult citizens. Perhaps therefore, much of the argument in favour of deliberation has the flavour of rationalist, rather than genuinely procedural, justification. Rationalist debate is, of course, carried out by theorists, not by peoples. Indeed, the salon model of deliberation is an oddly elitist vision of democracy. The first four-positive-justifications are, in their own terms, less compelling than they might be just because they founder on the two perverse logics of democracy. They founder both conceptually and empirically. The negative claim for democracy is a variant of Winston Churchill's quip that democracy is the worst form of government other than all the other forms we know. This sounds like a strictly empirical claim, but it requires some sense of the notion 'better', which may make no sense under th
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Mancur Olson, Dr Strangelove, Eastern Europe, Thomas Hobbes's, Deliberation Athens, Winston Churchill's, Stuart Mill, , Kant Mill, Kenneth Arrow, justifications democracy, form government, democratic theory, equality political power, collective preferences, democracy claim, twentieth century, individual preferences, autonomy depends, democracy mess, democracy mess society, perverse logics democracy, democratic participation,
Approximate Word count = 1234
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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