An Adversarial Ethics of Campaigns and Elections

Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition. As we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism

Searching for a New Paradigm: Collective Settings

"Searching for a New Paradigm: Collective Settings," by More in Common and SNF Agora, is a report that seeks to re-articulate a long-standing paradigm for making democracy work. This is a paradigm that the authors believe has gotten lost in the attention economy that drives much of American politics. Investing in the design and distribution of civic infrastructure may not be the approach that garners the viral attention that often drives action, the authors say, but it is necessary for preparing our people and our communities for the inevitable uncertainties that we will face in the future. The authors write, "By investing in collective settings, we hope to develop the muscles for democracy that people and communities will need to seek, identify, and implement shared solutions that do not accept the world as it is but instead create the world they need."The report emerges from a collaboration between SNF Agora Institute and More in Common to organize convenings and joint research focused on synthesizing the evidence base for how we create collective settings that develop the behaviors and orientations that underlie a culture of democracy, and proposing a research agenda for moving forward

Beyond Moderation: The Politics of Nonviolence in a Violent World

This dissertation challenges the long-standing albeit usually implicit association between political moderation and nonviolent political action. For the three figures I examine here—Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Václav Havel—nonviolence is not a middle way between resignation and the kind of violent resistance many democratic theorists now endorse. Gandhi, King, and Havel each reject violent forms of resistance on the grounds that it marks a continuation instead of a break from a world built on and sustained by state or state-sanctioned violence. Put bluntly, violent forms of resistance are not too radical for Gandhi, King, and Havel; they are not radical enough. I ultimately argue that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s uncompromising commitment to nonviolent political action means that they are better described as zealots than political moderates. They exceed the bounds of normal politics as they ardently pursue their cause. What motivates and sustains their zealous politics? I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s zealotry is underpinned by what feminist and womanist theorists have called relationality—to be human, Gandhi, King, and Havel, believe, is to be constituted by the needs of the concrete and particular other. As a result, Gandhi, King, and Havel are compelled to respond when they witness someone harmed by state or state-sanctioned violence, even when doing so carried enormous costs and even if the likelihood of mitigating the harm is minimal, at best. Crucially, Gandhi, King, and Havel not only understand themselves as inextricably related to those who are harmed, but to the perpetrators of harm as well. Hence their embrace of nonviolent political action; they are unwilling to harm those who harm others. I do not think democratic theorists should be in the business of arguing that those subject to state or state-sponsored violence should refuse to respond in kind. As such, I am not proposing that Gandhi, King, and Havel offer a new normative model of resistance. That said, I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel give democratic theorists reason to re-examine the role of zealotry in pluralistic political communities. In brief, Gandhi, King, and Havel show that not all zealots introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice. Pluralistic political communities, then, should make room for zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel. And doing so requires considering the ontology—I am principally concerned with conceptions of human being or social ontology, here—of the various zealots who exceed the bounds of normal politics when ardently pursuing their cause. I introduce a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism to help democratic theorists distinguish between zealots that introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustices and those who, like Gandhi, King, and Havel, seem to have the opposite effect.</p

“We Will Not Bow”: The Late King’s Black Faith

This essay turns to the late thought of Martin Luther King Jr. to bring matters of faith back into debates about dissent in liberal democracies. Drawing on unpublished speeches as well as scholarship in Black theology, religious studies, and political theory, I contend that the post-1965 King is not as interested in moral or pragmatic principles as many democratic theorists think. The late King’s movement, I argue, is animated by what Black liberation theologian James Cone calls “black faith.” Manifesting Jesus’s liberating love—a love that the late King believes already transformed and was still transforming the world—this movement with the poor and dispossessed is caring yet forceful, quotidian yet spectacular, and nonviolent yet revolutionary. Foregrounding the late King’s black faith and the movement it animates, I conclude, opens up new horizons for theorizing dissent. </jats:p

An adversarial ethics for campaigns and elections

Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition. As we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism

An Adversarial Ethics for Campaigns and Elections

Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition. As we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism.</jats:p

The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization

Can cultural differences affect economic change? Max Weber famously argued that ascetic Protestants’ religious commitments—specifically their work ethic—inspired them to develop capitalist economic systems conducive to rapid economic change. Yet today, scholars continue to debate the empirical validity of Weber’s claims, which address a vibrant literature in political economy on the relationship between culture and economic change. We revisit the link between religion and economic change in Reformed Europe. To do so, we leverage a quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where certain regions had Reformed Protestant beliefs imposed on them by local authorities during the Swiss Reformation, while other regions remained Catholic. Using 19th-century Swiss census data, we perform a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design to test Weber’s hypothesis and find that the Swiss Protestants in the Canton of Vaud industrialized faster than their Catholic neighbors in Fribourg. </jats:p

replication_Princeton_10-3-18 – Supplemental material for The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization

Supplemental material, replication_Princeton_10-3-18 for The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization by Jeremy Spater and Isak Tranvik in Comparative Political Studies</p

replication_Census_FuzzyRDD_10-3-18 – Supplemental material for The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization

Supplemental material, replication_Census_FuzzyRDD_10-3-18 for The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization by Jeremy Spater and Isak Tranvik in Comparative Political Studies</p