1,721,192 research outputs found
Are democratic and just institutions the same?
No full textDemocratic procedures and just social outcomes are clearly not the same thing. A majority of the electorate can easily vote for a politician or a party that promotes social injustice (Barry 1991b). Given the competitive nature of democracy and the fact that most, if not all, political issues concern the distribution of scarce resources, unjust (re)distributions (under some theory of justice) are likely to be the norm rather than the exception. Unless, that is, the competitive aggregative procedures (voting and pressure politics) can be rigged to ensure that just distribution follows; or people can be persuaded somehow not simply to vote in their own self-interest but to look more broadly at social welfare in their society (Goodin 2003b). In fact, we know that sociotropic voting occurs and people do not uniformly vote for their own self-interest. And whilst the voting systems are not normally ‘rigged’ to achieve just distribution, most liberal democracies do have some constitutional provisions to control rent-seeking. Nevertheless, democratic procedures and just social outcomes are far from being the same thing. Despite this obvious fact, I am not convinced that extant theories of justice and arguments for democracy are as analytically distinct as most theorists maintain. I will argue that the fundamental justifications for having democratic procedures lie essentially in the same realm as arguments for social justice. Of course, there are many competing theories of justice. And they do not all envisage the same ‘good life’
Rational choice and community power structures
No full textThis chapter applies Dowding’s analysis of power to the community power debate. It demonstrates the importance of the collective action problem to our understanding of power in society, showing that both pluralists and their radical critics misinterpret power in society by ignoring collective action problems. It demonstrates the nature of luck and systematic luck in the power structure
Introduction: between justice and democracy
No full text‘Justice’ and ‘democracy’ have alternated as dominant themes in political philosophy over the last fifty years or so. Since its revival in the middle of the twentieth century, political philosophy has focused on first one and then the other of these two themes. Rarely, however, has it succeeded in holding them in joint focus. This volume attempts to remedy that defect. Inevitably, some chapters focus more heavily on one topic than the other. But all were written explicitly with a view to the conjunction, intersection or interaction of these two central values in contemporary political theory
The Development of Capability Indicators
No full textThis paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities constitutive of a good life, argued to be comprehensive at a high level of abstraction, and uses it to operationalize the capabilities approach by developing a survey instrument to elicit information about capabilities at the individual level. The paper explores the extent to which these capabilities are covariates of a life satisfaction measure of utility and investigates aspects of robustness and subgroup differences using standard socio-demographic variables as well as a relatively novel control for personality. In substantial terms, we find there is some evidence of quantitative, but no qualitative, gender and age differences in the capabilities-life satisfaction relationship. Furthermore, we find that indicators from a wide range of life domains are linked to life satisfaction, a finding that supports multi-dimensional approaches to poverty and the non-materialist view that people do not just value financial income per se. Our most important contribution, however, is primarily methodological and derives from the demonstration that, within the conventions of household and social surveys, human capabilities can be measured with the aid of suitably designed statistical indicators
- …
