Unique Virtues of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem

May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited as a general argument for majority rule, it has never been extended beyond pairwise decisions. Here we generalize May's theorem to decisions between many options where voters each cast one vote. We show that, surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. Our result suggests a conditional defense of plurality rule: If a society's balloting procedure collects only a single vote from each voter, then plurality rule is the uniquely compelling procedure for electoral decisions. First version: 15 September 2004; this version version 22 December 2005.May's theorem, plurality rule, simple majority rule

Democratic Accountability: The Third Sector and All

The state, the market and the voluntary non-profit sectors can be seen as each being characterized by a distinctive accountability regime. Those regimes focus on different subjects of accountability (actions, results and intentions, respectively) and on different mechanisms of accountability (hierarchy, competition and cooperative networking, respectively). Different regimes can complement one another, enhancing the democratic accountability of the system overall. They can also undercut one another, if their differences are not respected. Bringing the Third Sector under a market-style accountability regime, through 'public-private partnerships' based on competitive tendering, undermines the distinctive contribution that the Third Sector might make. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 19.The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Democratically Binding

The aspiration of the 'Democracy Unbound' project was to extend democracy in two dimensions: range and scope. The former would give a wider range of people the vote. The latter would give people a wider scope of things to vote on. In practice, no doubt there is room to do much more of both. But whereas it would be democratically justifiable in an ideal world for democracy to be completely unbounded as regards range, even in an ideal world democracy ought be subject to some limits internal to the logic of democracy itself as regards its scope

Global Democracy: In the Beginning

Talk about global democracy seems to be fixated on a Reform-Act model of democracy, with 'one person one vote for all affected by the decisions' as for example in a second popularly-apportioned chamber of UN. Politically, that seems wildly unrealistic. But remember that the Reform Acts came very late in process of democratization domestically. The first steps in the beginning that eventually led to full democratization of that sort were: a) limiting the arbitrary rule on the part of the sovereign; and (b) making the sovereign accountable to others (initially a limited set of others, which then expanded). Globally, there are moves afoot globally in both those directions. And once those pieces are in place, there are good reasons for expecting the circle of accountability basically only to expand and virtually never to contract.global democracy, accountability, rule of law

"The Temporal Welfare State: A Cross-national Comparison"

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of "temporal autonomy": the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalizing the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labor, unpaid household labor, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas-which we call "discretionary time"-represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.

Between Full Endorsement and Blind Deference

In Democracy Without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont advocates for the ‘full endorsement’ of laws and policies by all subject to them instead of ‘blind deference’ to the judgement of others. But if ‘full endorsement’ means anything like ‘complete consensus’ it is an unattainable ideal, and there are many perfectly reasonable ways short of ‘blind deference’ by which we take into account inputs from others when arriving at our own decisions. This article is devoted to exploring that middle ground—on which Lafont herself seems to agree we must always be operating, based on a closer reading of her book. The key to avoiding ‘blind deference’, I argue, is exercising your own independent judgement in deciding when and how far to defer to which others