By Anthony McGann
The good judgment of Democracy examines a number of the broadest questions in political science—what is democracy and the way does it work—and presents a unified conception to provide an explanation for them. McGann brings jointly the customarily opposed literature on normative political philosophy, social selection, and the empirical research of political associations to teach that it's attainable to supply solutions for lots of notable difficulties general in all three. “This ranks with Riker and Mackie as the most vital works in democratic idea of the final thirty years. McGann slices via stylish nonsense like a knife via scorching butter.”--Iain McLean, Oxford University “McGann brings a number of theoretical arguments jointly to supply a coherent good judgment of majoritarian democracy and a wholehearted and finished safeguard of majority rule. particularly, he reveals advantage in what's in most cases considered as majority rule's vice — particularly biking — and he additionally exhibits that proportional illustration, now not first-past-the-post, is needed for actual majoritarianism. The e-book could be learn not only via formal theorists yet via a vast diversity of political technological know-how students and students.”--Nicholas R. Miller, college of Maryland “In The good judgment of Democracy Anthony McGann practices political technological know-how how it might be performed. he is taking a tough and significant theoretical query, specifically how we should always interpret the opportunity of majority-rule biking, pursues it single-mindedly around the unhelpful limitations raised by way of confirmed subspecialties and methodologies, and arrives at a collection of non-obvious normative and empirical effects. Will you settle with each argument he advances? definitely now not. you'll, besides the fact that, profit immensely from analyzing this exemplary book.”--Jim Johnson, collage of Rochester Anthony McGann is Assistant Professor of Political technological know-how on the college of California, Irvine.
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Additional resources for The Logic of Democracy: Reconciling Equality, Deliberation, and Minority Protection (Michigan Studies in Political Analysis)
Sample text
However, we can make a normative case for considering only the Arst preference of voters in allocating seats in legislatures. Under a pure proportional system (an abstraction, of course, given that seats are not divisible in reality), everyone gets a representative of the list they choose, however small. In a sense there is no need to consider second-place preferences because everyone gets their Arst preference (see Dodgson 1884/1995 for an early statement of this position). Furthermore, it can be argued that the fact that my preferred representative is your very least preferred is irrelevant—their job is to represent me, not you.
However, the degree to which social decisions should be judged by the same criteria as individual decisions is open to question. Nicholas Miller (1983) was the Arst to suggest that cycling may actually be a desirable quality in a social decision rule. His argument grows out of confrontation between social choice theory and the empirical study of pluralist democracy. Social choice theory suggests that multidimensional political competition, as we observe in countries with multiple cross-cutting social cleavages (class, religion, ethnicity, language, region), leads to cycling and instability.
We no longer have to decide which groups deserve special consideration but merely have to make the system fair to individuals. Individuals can then decide which group identities are salient to them when they vote. As a result, it is possible to come to a determinate conclusion—political equality implies proportional representation. The previous chapter has justiAed why we should prefer the liberal conception of equality over group-based conceptions—it can be justiAed either in terms of doctrinal liberalism (the rights of individuals have precedence over the rights of groups those individuals make up) or in terms of individual equality providing the only democratic means to arbitrate between the claims of various cross-cutting groups.
