Search

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]

The article discusses the 3 distinct concerns namely epistemic, behavioral and relational that help explain what is wrong with situations where the wealthy have more opportunity for influence than their fellow citizens. It raises initial skepticism regarding the egalitarian position by introducing examples suggesting that there are circumstances where ensuring that citizens have equal opportunity for political influence fails to resolve the epistemic, behavioral and relational concern.

The essay considers philosophical arguments for states' rights to limit immigration, focusing on an analysis of philosopher Michael Blake's arguments in his article "Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion." The authors address the relationship between an immigrant's human rights and the freedom of the state to which he/she seeks to immigrate, and several hypothetical examples are analyzed.

The article offers information on the history of the U.S. nonprofit sector and the tax-deductible status of donations to U.S. charitable, non-profit organizations. The author finds merit in determining how public policy affects the non-profit sector given its increasing stake in the U.S. economy. It also discusses topics including which groups properly qualify for public support, criticism on issues of distributive justice and its inconsistency with current commitments to political equality.

The article discusses the justification of government policy intended to limit immigration using the argument that unlimited immigration violates social trust. The popular belief that maintenance of a welfare state is impossible unless social trust is maintained through the limitation of immigration and migration is described, along with the author's argument against such a belief, presented in three sections. The first section examines and challenges the empirical evidence popularly presented for the social trust belief; the second section argues that the claim is based on empirical evidence as well as a dubious normative component; and the third section argues that the social trust belief appeals to a false choice.

The article presents a study about the principle of fair play and its contribution in generating political obligations in the U.S. The principle of fair play needs to account for the ways in which successful provision of public goods affects the ability of foreigners to develop similar schemes of provision. The structure of incentives facing state leaders is constructed in a way that hinders the independent development of schemes for the provision of presumptively beneficial public goods.