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How do considerations related to backlash affect the desirability of pursuing otherwise justified immigration policies? This paper argues that backlash-related considerations bear on immigration policy decisions in ways that are both more powerful and complicated than typically recognized. The standard possibility, the egalitarian backlash argument , endorses immigration restrictions in order to protect support for egalitarian distributive institutions. The paper shows that this account does not, by itself, provide a convincing rationale for restricting immigration because such diminished support is (a) likely outweighed by the benefits of more permissive immigration policies and (b) caused by the objectionable preferences of citizens. However, the paper develops an alternative account of the relevance of backlash-related considerations, the democratic backlash argument , which holds that increased levels of immigration threaten to contribute to undermining democratic institutions. This argument provides a more powerful rationale for restricting immigration, one that can—under identified conditions—justify immigration restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors of the journal "Politics, Philosophy & Economics" aim to process submitted manuscripts in a timely manner to benefit authors and scholarly debate. They have made decisions on 72% of submissions within 30 days, 87% within 60 days, and 97% within 90 days. The acceptance rate has remained around 5%, similar to previous years. The editors express gratitude for the support of Associate Editors, the Editorial Board, and reviewers, acknowledging that maintaining efficiency depends on continued support from scholars worldwide. While an increase in submissions could pose a challenge, the editors are currently pleased with their efforts. [Extracted from the article]

Voters entrust policy-making authority to representatives between elections, but it is the voters' role, at election time, to effect I accountability i by evaluating what their representatives have done and will do. This vulnerability stems from the fact that lottocratic systems would typically move representatives in and out of office more frequently than electoral systems (because incumbents would be returned for subsequent terms at far higher rates in electoral systems). In other words, our claim is I conditional i : a I well-designed i electoral system, not just I any i electoral system, will have benefits that result from the combination of high pivotality and accountability that lottery-based systems have no clear way to duplicate. First, it is worth highlighting that - unlike traditional Madisonian arguments for the instrumental superiority of electoral systems - our argument does not depend on the ability of electoral systems to select particularly well-qualified individuals for public office. Well-designed electoral systems may, in fact, have this benefit, but the claim that electoral systems have epistemic advantages relative to lottocratic alternatives does not require it. [Extracted from the article]

Democracy is instrumentally crucial to the protection of important and non-controversial human rights such that the most reliable way to protect I those i rights is to accept a human right to democracy. The standard instrumental argument for a human right to representative democracy holds that such a right is justified because such forms of government are uniquely effective at preventing states from (1) violating certain urgent rights of their citizens and (2) upsetting international peace and thereby threatening the protection of important human rights. For instance, if regime type X was marginally worse at protecting personal integrity rights, but far better at eliminating poverty, then - provided that one accepts either that there are subsistence rights or that rights can sometimes be outweighed by other important goals - it may become difficult to defend an instrumentally justified human right to democracy. Therefore, if the institutional explanation is correct, the upshot of the instrumental argument would be that I non-democracies are liable to interference because, in the absence of democratization, democracies are more likely to attack them and, in the process, generate human rights violations. i That, though, is surely a perverse explanation of why peaceful, rights respecting non-democracies should be liable to interference. This egalitarian component of democracy is central to the debate, because those who deny that there is a human right to democracy typically insist that any rights-respecting regime must include opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate in the governance of the regime. [Extracted from the article]

Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]