The purpose of this paper is to assess the emergence of the pirate movements in the European Union. Our goal is to sketch the steps towards a research agenda for this grassroots political movement which gained momentum since 2009. To attain our goal we showed the re-signification of the concept of piracy in the debate around intellectual property and its institutional settlement. Afterwards we analysed the big political themes of several European Pirate Parties and their struggle to follow the preferences (...) of the median voter. We concluded with a set of hypotheses of which the most important is that the pirates will inscribe neither to the left nor to the right part of the political spectrum. (shrink)

Voters have many motivations. Some vote on the issues. They vote for a candidate because they share that candidate's policy positions. Some vote on performance. They vote for a candidate because they think that candidate will produce the best outcomes in office. Some vote on group identities. They vote for a candidate because that candidate is connected to their social group. This paper is about these motivations. I address three questions. First, which of these motivations, were it widespread, would be (...) best for intrinsic democratic values? Second, how do the motivations of actual American voters affect the value of American democracy? Third, what motivations should individual American voters have? I argue that widespread issue voting would be best, followed by performance voting, followed by group voting. I argue that American voters do not much contribute to the value of American democracy. Their behavior makes it hard to achieve many democratic values. Finally, I argue that, were America an ideal democracy, American voters would have reason to vote on the issues. But, in their non-ideal democracy, American voters merely have reason to avoid voting on privileged group identities. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...) the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who states or affirms that something is the case, they state or affirm that a certain course of political action is (...) the one that should be followed or enacted. Consequently, the performance of acts of political advocacy such as voting should be understood as bounded by epistemic norms mirroring those binding the act of assertion and yield epistemic responsibilities mirroring the ones required to satisfy these norms. (shrink)

The present investigation was undertaken to investigate the acute toxicity of cadmium, a heavy metal widely detected in the aquatic environment due to natural effects and anthropogenic activities, in freshwater teleost, Channa punctata (Bloch). The experiments for the bioassay were performed in semi-static test condition according to the standard guidelines. The behavioural changes in the fish were observed for all tested concentrations of the metal. The data obtained for bioassay were analyzed for median lethal concentrations (LC ) of the (...) metal by SPSS computer software. The LC 50 50 values, estimated by SPSS, with 95% confidence level were found to be:20.589 (18.326-23.221), 17.133 (14.840- 19.734), 11.815 (9.696 – 13.850) mg/L and 9.908 (7.635-12381) mg/L for cadmium chloride at 24, 48, 72 and 96 h exposure, respectively. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the widespread practice in the United States of busing voters to the polling station on Election Day is an instance of paying people to vote. We defend a definition of what it means to pay people to vote, and on this definition, busing voters to the polling station is an instance of paying people to vote. Paying people to vote is illegal according to United States federal election law. However, the United States courts have (...) historically considered the practice of busing voters to the polling station legally permissible. The United States legal system, therefore, faces a dilemma: either the courts must change their interpretation of current federal election law such that busing voters to the polling station is a violation of federal election law, or federal election law must be changed so that at least some instances of paying people to vote are legally permissible. We argue that choosing either horn of the dilemma has a controversial implication for the United States legal system. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the widespread practice in the United States of busing voters to the polling station on Election Day is an instance of paying people to vote. We defend a definition of what it means to pay people to vote, and on this definition, busing voters to the polling station is an instance of paying people to vote. Paying people to vote is illegal according to United States federal election law. However, the United States courts have (...) historically considered the practice of busing voters to the polling station legally permissible. The United States legal system, therefore, faces a dilemma: either the courts must change their interpretation of current federal election law such that busing voters to the polling station is a violation of federal election law, or federal election law must be changed so that at least some instances of paying people to vote are legally permissible. We argue that choosing either horn of the dilemma has a controversial implication for the United States legal system. (shrink)

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)

Review of Jonathan Israel, "A Revolution of the Mind" (Princeton University Press, 2010).

The success of any election depends on whether it was free and fair both to the candidates and the voters. Due to media coverage of national elections locally, regionally and globally, subtle psychological cues have become popular and are being used in student Representative Council (SRC) elections to harness voter preferences. This study focused on investigating the relationship between subtle psychological cues and voter preferences among university of Zimbabwe students. More so, the study was focused on four operationally (...) defined subtle psychological cues namely Ballot order effects, Hallo effects, Negativity bias and Push polls on whether they would influence the participant’s voter preference. The study takes the form of an experimental research design and is based on a sample of 80 purposefully selected participants. In addition, primary data was gathered using 4 ballot papers with a Likert scale and was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Studies (SPSS) version 23. Descriptive statistics, T-tests for independent samples, Chi-square tests and Pearson correlation were computed to establish the degree of the relationship between the variables in question. Results show that of the four subtle psychological cues under investigation, negativity bias and hallo effects were predominantly popular due to the American presidential debates such as that of Richard Nixon against Kennedy and Barack Obama against Hilary Clinton. In addition the results show no statistically significant group differences on how gender, ethnicity and year of study affected voter preferences. Ultimately, there were three positive correlations for the experiments Ballot order effects, Hallo effects and Negativity bias. However, contrary to the reviewed literature there was a negative correlation between Push polls and voter preferences. The conclusion was that there is statistically significant relationship between subtle psychological cues and voter preferences and hence have the potential to increase or decrease the votes a candidate obtains. Therefore, the University can closely monitor SRC elections and make sure the students do not abuse psychological cues such as negativity bias and push polls as they have the potential of ruining the student’s reputations. Also the organisation can add to its current SRC election policies the strategies that were implemented in this study to hold other factors at a constant such as using butterfly ballot paper ordering to help make the free and fair. (shrink)

The success of any election depends on whether it was free and fair both to the candidates and the voters. Due to media coverage of national elections locally, regionally and globally, subtle psychological cues have become popular and are being used in student Representative Council (SRC) elections to harness voter preferences. This study focused on investigating the relationship between subtle psychological cues and voter preferences among university of Zimbabwe students. More so, the study was focused on four operationally (...) defined subtle psychological cues namely Ballot order effects, Hallo effects, Negativity bias and Push polls on whether they would influence the participant’s voter preference. The study takes the form of an experimental research design and is based on a sample of 80 purposefully selected participants. In addition, primary data was gathered using 4 ballot papers with a Likert scale and was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Studies (SPSS) version 23. Descriptive statistics, T-tests for independent samples, Chi-square tests and Pearson correlation were computed to establish the degree of the relationship between the variables in question. Results show that of the four subtle psychological cues under investigation, negativity bias and hallo effects were predominantly popular due to the American presidential debates such as that of Richard Nixon against Kennedy and Barack Obama against Hilary Clinton. In addition the results show no statistically significant group differences on how gender, ethnicity and year of study affected voter preferences. Ultimately, there were three positive correlations for the experiments Ballot order effects, Hallo effects and Negativity bias. However, contrary to the reviewed literature there was a negative correlation between Push polls and voter preferences. The conclusion was that there is statistically significant relationship between subtle psychological cues and voter preferences and hence have the potential to increase or decrease the votes a candidate obtains. Therefore, the University can closely monitor SRC elections and make sure the students do not abuse psychological cues such as negativity bias and push polls as they have the potential of ruining the student’s reputations. Also the organisation can add to its current SRC election policies the strategies that were implemented in this study to hold other factors at a constant such as using butterfly ballot paper ordering to help make the free and fair. (shrink)

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises – voter independence – is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, ‘large crowds are fallible but better than small groups’. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of (...) deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (‘indistinguishable’) voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We also prove a more general and simpler such jury theorem. (shrink)

Condorcet's famous jury theorem reaches an optimistic conclusion on the correctness of majority decisions, based on two controversial premises about voters: they are competent and vote independently, in a technical sense. I carefully analyse these premises and show that: whether a premise is justi…ed depends on the notion of probability considered; none of the notions renders both premises simultaneously justi…ed. Under the perhaps most interesting notions, the independence assumption should be weakened.

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

Several scholars have recently entertained proposals for "epistocracy," a political regime in which decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a society's most informed and competent citizens. These proposals rest on the claim that we can expect better political outcomes if we exclude incompetent citizens from participating in political decisions because competent voters are more likely to vote "correctly" than incompetent voters. We develop what we call the objection from selection bias to epistocracy: a procedure that selects voters on (...) the basis of their observed competence---as epistocracy does---will often be "biased" in the sense that competent voters will be, on average, more likely than incompetent voters to possess certain attributes that reduce the probability of voting correctly. Our objection generalizes the "demographic objection" discussed in previous literature, showing that the range of realistic scenarios in which epistocracy is vulnerable to selection bias is substantially broader than previous discussions appreciate. Our discussion also shows that previous discussions have obscured the force of the threat of selection bias. Since we lack reasons to believe that epistocratic proposals can avoid selection bias, we have no reason to seriously entertain epistocracy as a practical proposal. (shrink)

What obligations are there on voters? This paper argues that voters should make their electoral decision competently, and does so by developing on a recent proposal for democratic legitimacy. It then explores three problems arising from this ‘competency obligation’. First, how should voters be competent? I propose three conditions required for voter competence. Second, how competent should voters be? I argue that the competency required tracks the significance of the consequences of the vote. Third, if the electorate are unlikely (...) to deliver a competent decision, should suffrage be restricted to the competent alone? I defend unrestricted suffrage on the grounds that restricting suffrage cannot guarantee a competently made electoral decision. Instead, obligations on voters should be minimised by political parties satisfying their obligations to be politically sound; if they are sound, then the obligation to be competent can be easily satisfied by voters. (shrink)

There is, in some quarters, concern about high–level machine intelligence and superintelligent AI coming up in a few decades, bringing with it significant risks for humanity. In other quarters, these issues are ignored or considered science fiction. We wanted to clarify what the distribution of opinions actually is, what probability the best experts currently assign to high–level machine intelligence coming up within a particular time–frame, which risks they see with that development, and how fast they see these developing. We thus (...) designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity. (shrink)

In response to the growing social discontent at what is perceived as generational injustice, due to younger generations of voters facing long-term negative consequences from issues disproportionately decided by the votes of older generations of voters, there have been suggestions to introduce an upper age voting threshold. These have been all but universally dismissed as offensive and contrary to basic democratic values. In the present article, I show that the idea is in fact entirely consonant with present-day democratic practices and (...) far from without a precedent. Hence, I describe how the aforementioned generational injustice can be rectified using a simple vote weighting scheme which is easy to implement and interpret. Lastly, I discuss the societal effects that this alteration of the voting system would have on the distribution of the origins of political power. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments over interrelated propositions is a newly arising field of social choice theory. I introduce several independence conditions on judgment aggregation rules, each of which protects against a specific type of manipulation by agenda setters or voters. I derive impossibility theorems whereby these independence conditions are incompatible with certain minimal requirements. Unlike earlier impossibility results, the main result here holds for any (non-trivial) agenda. However, independence conditions arguably undermine the logical structure of judgment aggregation. I therefore (...) suggest restricting independence to premises, which leads to a generalised premise-based procedure. This procedure is proven to be possible if the premises are logically independent. (shrink)

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes—or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as (...) wide as possible and weight citizens’ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters’ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters. (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don’t care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit (Section 1), I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters (Section 2). I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives (Section 3). I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable (Section 4). (shrink)

The purpose of the study was to determine the demographic profiles in terms of age, sex, years in teaching, type of school and ethnicity, SOGIE, perception about the workplace climate in terms of the different gender prejudices faced by secondary science teachers at City of Dasmariñas, Cavite; the study aims to identify if there is a significant difference between perceptions of the participants about the gender prejudices when grouped according to demographic profile; determine if there is a substantial relationship between (...) SOGIE and perceptions about the gender prejudices. This study developed an action plan to promote awareness and make schools SOGIE-sensitive; the research design was quantitative, and an online questionnaire was the data-gathering tool. Descriptive statistics used were mean, median, and standard error; the second level was for relational statistics using Chi-square statistics, Mann-Whitney statistics, and Kruskal-Walli’s statistics. The study revealed that most science teachers in Dasmariñas City, Cavite, were female and young professionals. Science teachers at the secondary level have a diverse SOGIE; in addition, there is zero visibility for transgender people and intersex people. Generally, the secondary schools in the City of Dasmariñas, Cavite, are unsafe for people with diverse SOGIE, especially for transgender and intersex people. The study suggests that the action plan proposed in this study should be adopted by schools to address the issues of gender prejudices and to promote awareness of SOGIE. (shrink)

The paper presents a critical evaluation of the existing anthologies of Romanian oratory and analyzes the pertinence of a new research line: how to trace back the foundations of Romanian versatile political memory, both from a lexical and from an ideological point of view. As I argue in the first part of the paper, collecting and editing the great speeches of Romanian orators seems crucial for today’s understanding of politics (politicians’ speaking/ actions as well as voters’ behavior/ electoral habits). In (...) the second part, I focus on the particularities generated by a dramatic change of media support (in the context of Romania’s high rates of illiteracy at the end of the 19th century): from “writing” information on the slippery surface of memory (declaimed political texts such as “proclamations,” “petitions,” and “appeals”) to “writing” as such (transcribed political speeches). The last part of the paper problematizes the making of a new canon of Romanian eloquence as well as the opportunity of a new assemblage of oratorical texts, illustrative for the 19th century politics, and endeavors to settle a series of virtual editing principles. (shrink)

Despite their purported demographic and institutional decline, White evangelical voters were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and even more so in his 2020 loss. The story of Trump’s electoral successes among Christian voters in the last two elections is in large part the story of religious nationalism—and White Christian nationalism in particular—because Trump personifies the convergence of nationalism-infused forms of messianism and apocalypticism intrinsic to White evangelicalism, which culminate in QAnon cultic ideology. However, these same ethnoreligious/nationalist (...) patterns and logics extend much further back than Trump’s insurgent candidacy. This chapter traces the recurring, resurgent patterns of “zombie nationalism” among White evangelical Christians in the United States over the last half century that emerged in response to periods of significant societal change and certain recurring sociopolitical issues. In particular, alongside established elective affinities around ethnicity (whiteness) and religion (Christianity), this chapter makes the case for incorporating gender and sexual politics as key factors in the articulation and legitimation of religious nationalism in the United States. White Christian nationalism tends to reemerge as a salient political force during periods of rapid social change and diversification, driven by racialized religious grievances symptomatic of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, or the paradoxical internalization and reprojection of a person’s or group’s perceived endangerment, victimhood, and/or suffering, in order to gain power. Drawing on examples of marriage equality and reproductive rights, this chapter demonstrates how an understanding of sexual politics is key to both apprehending and breaking the cyclical reanimation of White Christian nationalism. Escaping the nihilistic impulses driving these cycles will require White evangelicals to develop new hermeneutical tools capable of transforming the exclusionary patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that fuel the engine of ressentiment animating zombie nationalism. (shrink)

Proponents of epistocracy worry that high levels of voter ignorance can harm democracies. To combat such ignorance, they recommend allocating comparatively more political power to more politically knowledgeable citizens. In response, some recent critics of epistocracy contend that epistocratic institutions risk causing even more harm, since much evidence from political psychology indicates that more politically knowledgeable citizens are typically more biased, less open-minded, and more prone to motivated reasoning about political matters than their less knowledgeable counterparts. If so, perhaps (...) epistocratic institutions will perform worse epistemically than corresponding democratic institutions. Call this 'the problem of epistocratic irrationality'. This paper argues that the problem of epistocratic irrationality can be overcome. First, I argue that critics of epistocracy have overlooked several complications regarding the psychological data they claim shows that more knowledgeable citizens are less politically rational. Second, I argue that appropriately designed epistocratic institutions could overcome the problem of epistocratic irrationality even if such critics have interpreted the data correctly. I first explore whether refined selection mechanisms could allow epistocrats to avoid empowering less rational citizens, before assessing the prospects of implementing only those epistocratic institutions with a solid track record of reliable performance. (shrink)

This study examined correlations between moral value judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), and participant scores on the Short-D3 “Dark Triad” Personality Inventory—a measure of three related “dark and socially destructive” personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. Five hundred sixty-seven participants (302 male, 257 female, 2 transgendered; median age 28) were recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk and Yale Experiment Month web advertisements. Different responses to MIS items were initially hypothesized to be “conservative” or “liberal” in line (...) with traditional public divides. Our demographic data confirmed all of these hypothesized categorizations. We then tested two broad, exploratory hypotheses: (H1) the hypothesis that there would be “many” significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad, and (H2) the hypothesis that there would be no significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Machiavellianism or Psychopathy, but “some” significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Narcissism. Because our hypotheses were exploratory and we ran a large number of statistical tests (62 total), we utilized a Bonferroni Correction to set a very high threshold for significance (p = .0008). Our results broadly supported our two hypotheses. We found eleven significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad—all at significance level of p < .00001—but no significant correlations between the Dark Triad and liberal MIS judgments. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Objectives There is little research on moral uncertainties and distress of palliative and hospice care providers (PHCPs) working in jurisdictions anticipating legalising voluntary assisted dying (VAD). This study examines the perception and anticipated concerns of PHCPs in providing VAD in the State of Queensland, Australia prior to legalisation of the practice in 2021. The findings help inform strategies to facilitate training and support the health and well-being of healthcare workers involved in VAD. Design The study used a qualitative approach (...) to examine and analyse the perception and anticipated concerns of PHCPs regarding challenges of providing assisted dying in Queensland. Fourteen PHCPs were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy to obtain a broad representation of perspectives including work roles, geographical locations and workplace characteristics. Data were collected via one in-depth interview per participant. The transcripts were coded for patterns and themes using an inductive analysis approach following the tradition of Grounded Theory. Setting The study was conducted in hospital, hospice, community and residential aged care settings in Queensland, Australia. These included public and private facilities, secular and faith-based facilities, and regional/rural and urban facilities. Participants Interviews were conducted with fourteen PHCPs: 10 nurses and 4 physicians; 11 female and 3 male. The median number of years of palliative care practice was 17, ranging from 2 to 36 years. For inclusion, participants had to be practising palliative and hospice care providers. Results PHCPs are divided on whether VAD should be considered part of palliative care. Expectations of moral distress and uncertainty about practising VAD were identified in five areas: handling requests, assessing patient capacity, arranging patient transfers and logistical issues, managing unsuccessful attempts, and dealing with team conflicts and stigma. Conclusions The possibility of having to practise VAD causes moral distress and uncertainty for some PHCPs. Procedural clarity can address some uncertainties; moral and psychological distress, however, remains a source of tension that needs support to ensure ongoing care of both patients and PHCPs. The introduction of VAD post-legalisation may present an occasion for further moral education and development of PHCPs. (shrink)

As part of recent epistemic challenges to democracy, some have endorsed the implementation of epistemic constraints on voting, institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent voters from participating in public decision-making procedures. This proposal is often considered incompatible with a commitment to political equality. In this paper, I aim to dispute the strength of this latter claim by offering a theoretical justification for epistemic constraints on voting that does not rest on antiegalitarian commitments. Call this the civic accountability justification for epistemic constraints (...) on voting. On this view, voters stand to one another in a normative relation of reciprocal accountability that requires them to uphold an epistemically responsible conduct. Modest epistemic constraints on voting are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting is conforming to this normative requirement. Thanks to its distinctive features, the civic accountability justification can overcome two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with the idea of epistemic constraints on voting: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem. (shrink)

The papers published in this special issue can fairly be unified under the heading “Epistemic Democracy,” but there is more variety among them than this might indicate. They exhibit the broad range of ways in which epistemological considerations are figuring in contemporary philosophical discussions of democracy. The authors range from young and promising to established and distinguished. I'd like to introduce a few of the issues that run through the papers, sprinkling references to the actual papers along the way. From (...) the beginning, democratic forms of government have included discussion and debate. In real life the value of democracy can hardly be separated from the value of free public discussion, prior to voting, about the issues and candidates. This is not to say that either the discussion or the vote have always been inspiring, but whatever value democracy is thought to have, it seems inseparable from public political discussion. One way of accounting for the value of the discussion is to suppose that voters exchange reasons (not always cooperatively) about what to do. Even a quick look at the content of political debate seems to confirm that it is mostly about which decision would be best for the country or city whose laws or leaders are in question. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...) can happen even if various conditions are held constant, such as: the evidence jurors have access to, the voting system, the number of jurors, some independence conditions between voters, and so forth. This observation matters in many active debates on, e.g., epistemic dilemmas, the wisdom of crowds, independence theses, epistemic democracy, and the division of epistemic labour. (shrink)

"For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few. Each citizen will have a thousand sons who will not be (...) his sons individually but anybody will be equally the son of anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike.". (shrink)

Kirjasymposioartikkeli esittelee Hanna Meretojan teoksen The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) keskeisimmät ajatukset ja kytkee ne laajempaan hermeneuttiseen ja jälkistrukturalistiseen ajatteluperinteeseen, etenkin Jean-François Lyotardin luonnehdintaan jälkimodernista aikakaudesta suurten modernien historiallisten metakertomusten horjumisen ja pienten paikallisten kertomusten moneuden aikakautena. Tässä valossa Meretojan hermeneuttista kertomusetiikkaa voidaan lukea ennen muuta pienten, ei-totalisoivien kertomusten etiikkana. Artikkeli esittää, että tällaiselle etiikalle löytyy hedelmällinen vertailukohta Hannah Arendtin totalitarismiteoriasta, joka sijoittaa ideologiset metakertomukset totalitaarisen hallinnan ja sen tuottaman ”banaalin pahuuden” (...) ytimeen; niin Arendtin kuin Meretojankin kertomusetiikan keskeisenä viitekohtana on holokausti moderniteetin eettisenä nollapisteenä. Nämä yhteydet tuovat esiin Meretojan hahmotteleman hermeneuttisen etiikan laajan teoreettisen kaikupohjan myöhäismodernissa ajatteluperinteessä. Lopuksi pohditaan kysymystä hermeneuttisen pienten kertomusten etiikan jatkuvasta ajankohtaisuudesta sosiaalisen median ja sen ”kuplien” aikakaudella. (shrink)

Objective: To examine the current ethical review process of ethics committees in a non-pharmacological trial from the perspective of a clinical investigator.Design: Prospective collection of data at the Study Centre of the German Surgical Society on the duration, costs and administrative effort of the ERP of a randomised controlled multicentre surgical INSECT Trial between November 2003 and May 2005.Setting: Germany.Participants: 18 ethics committees, including the ethics committee handling the primary approval, responsible overall for 32 clinical sites throughout Germany. 8 ethics (...) committees were located at university medical schools and 10 at medical chambers. Duration was measured as days between submission and receipt of final approval, costs in euros and administrative effort by calculation of the product of the total number of different types of documents and the mean number of copies required .Results: The duration of the ERP ranged from 1 to 176 days. The median duration was 26 days at MSUs compared with 34 days at medical chambers. The total cost was €2947. 1 of 8 ethics committees at universities and 8 of 10 at medical chambers charged a median fee of €162 . The administrative effort for primary approval was 30. Four ethics committees required a higher administrative effort for secondary approval .Conclusion: The ERP for non-pharmacological multicentre trials in Germany needs improvement. The administrative process has to be standardised: the application forms and the number and content of the documents required should be identical or at least similar. The fees charged vary considerably and are obviously too high for committees located at medical chambers. However, the duration of the ERP was, with some exceptions, excellent. A centralised ethics committee in Germany for multicentre trials such as the INSECT Trial can simplify the ERP for clinical investigators in and outside the country. (shrink)

Political polarization is on the rise, undermining the shared space of public reason necessary for a thriving democracy and making voters more willing than ever to dismiss the perspectives of their political opponents. This destructive tendency is especially problematic when it comes to issues of race and gender, as informed views on these topics necessarily require engaging with those whose experiences may differ from our own. In order to help our students combat further polarization, we created a course on "The (...) Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender" that incorporated intergroup dialogues - small, diverse, semester-long discussion groups-that focused on building the civic virtues of toleration, egalitarianism, and solidarity. In this article, we describe our approach, including the evidence that intergroup dialogue can act as a catalyst for democratic dialogue. We hope that the practice of intergroup dialogue can help other instructors cultivate the civic virtues in their philosophy classrooms as well. (shrink)

Majority rule is often regarded as an important democratic principle. But modern democracies divide voters into districts. So if the majority should rule, which majority should rule? Should it be the popular majority, or an electoral majority (i.e., either the majority of voters in the majority of districts, or the majority of voters in districts that contain the majority of the population)? I argue that majority rule requires rule by the popular majority. This view is not novel and may seem (...) obvious. But it is rarely defended, and often rejected. I defend it by arguing that this view about which majority should rule is best supported by the arguments for why the majority should rule, and best avoids the arbitrary and perverse verdicts of rule by electoral majorities. I close by considering the significant practical implications of the view. The Electoral College is often criticized on the basis that the winner of the popular vote doesn’t always win the election. But all district-based democracies have this feature, so all district-based democracies must be reformed if they are to satisfy the principle of majority rule. (shrink)

Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent (...) the other, then average voter competence must either be 0.60 or 0.40. We still have to decide which, but limiting the choice to those two values is a considerable aid in that. Key Words: Condorcet Jury Theorem • epistemic democracy • voter competence. (shrink)

In Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill concedes that secrecy in voting is often justified but, nonetheless, maintains that it should be the exception rather than the rule. This paper critically examines Mill’s arguments. It shows that Mill’s idea of voting depends on a sharp public/private distinction which is difficult to square with democratic ideas about the different powers and responsibilities of voters and their representatives, or with legitimate differences of belief and interest amongst voters themselves. Hence, it concludes, (...) we should reject the assumption, which many of us share with Mill, that the secret ballot is justified only on prudential grounds and recognise how central privacy is to any democratic conception of citizenship and politics. (shrink)

Proponents of the duty to vote (DTV) argue that in normal circumstances, citizens have the moral duty to vote in political elections. Discussions about DTV analyze _what_ the duty is, _who_ has this duty, _when_ they have it, and _why_ they have it. Missing are answers to the Specification Question: to _which_ elections does DTV apply? A dilemma arises for some supporters of DTV—in this paper, I focus on Julia Maskivker’s work—because either answer is problematic. First, I argue that it (...) is implausible that DTV applies to _all_ elections because this makes the duty too costly for the voter. Second, I argue that there are no good reasons why under normal circumstances DTV applies only to _some_ elections. I consider objections but conclude that the dilemma is successful and therefore the case for DTV is incomplete. (shrink)

A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. I will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. I will explore the implications of (...) this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, public reason liberalism, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues. (shrink)

In a recent study appearing in Neuroethics, I reported observing 11 significant correlations between the “Dark Triad” personality traits – Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy – and “conservative” judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey. Surprisingly, I observed no significant correlations between the Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments. In order to determine whether these results were an artifact of the particular issues I selected, I ran a follow-up study testing the Dark Triad against conservative and liberal judgments on 15 additional moral (...) issues. The new issues examined include illegal immigration, abortion, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the war on terrorism, laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and environmentalism. 1154 participants (680 male, 472 female; median age 29), recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk, completed three surveys: a 15-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), the 28-item Short Dark Triad personality inventory, and a five-item demographic survey. The results strongly reinforce my earlier findings. Twenty-two significant correlations were observed between “conservative” judgments and the Dark Triad (all of which were significant past a Bonferonni-corrected significance threshold of p = .0008), compared to seven significant correlations between Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments (only one of which was significant past p = .0008). This article concludes by developing a novel research proposal for determining whether the results of my two studies are “bad news” for conservatives or liberals. (shrink)

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that are morally objectionable, (...) and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and (...) being part of those groups depends on having certain beliefs (e.g. about welfare spending). Even if a decrease in welfare spending would be bad for me, I might still benefit by believing in and, consequently, voting for a decrease since my vote is unlikely to make a difference but getting to see myself as a rugged individualist will make a noticeable difference to my wellbeing. It is sometimes argued that this hypothesis fails for empirical reasons. I will argue that things are worse: it is conceptually incoherent. I will do so by first showing that it is a rationalizing explanation and then argue that rationalizing explanations must be reflectively stable from the agent's perspective. The rational irrationality hypothesis is not. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I (...) observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large. (shrink)

Should voting be compulsory? This question has recently gained the attention of political scientists, politicians and philosophers, many of whom believe that countries, like Britain, which have never had compulsion, ought to adopt it. The arguments are a mixture of principle and political calculation, reflecting the idea that compulsory voting is morally right and that it is will prove beneficial. This article casts a sceptical eye on the claims, by emphasizing how complex political morality and strategy can be. Hence, I (...) show, while there are good reasons to worry about voter turnout in established democracies, and to worry about inequalities of turnout as well, the case for compulsory voting is unpersuasive. (shrink)

Epistocratic systems of government have received renewed attention, and considerable opposition, in recent political philosophy. Although they vary significantly in form, epistocracies generally reject universal suffrage. But can they maintain the advantages of universal suffrage despite rejecting it? This paper develops an argument for a significant instrumental advantage of universal suffrage: that governments must take into account the interests of all of those enfranchised in their policy decisions or else risk losing power. This is called ‘the Interests Argument’. One problem (...) for the Interests Argument is that governments are not entirely responsive to voter interests, partly because voters do not always know what is in their interests. I will show how this epistemic claim can be used to support certain forms of epistocracy, but deny that it undermines the Interests Argument. I then consider whether we can identify forms of epistocracy that preserve the benefits of the Interests Argument whilst overcoming the epistemic limitations of democracy. I propose six forms of epistocracy, and argue that two are able to maintain these benefits, hence providing an evaluation of the relative strengths of these epistocracies with respect to one of the most valuable instrumental benefits of universal suffrage. Whilst epistocracy lacks many of the advantages of democracy, this paper shows that some forms fare better than others. (shrink)

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, (...) intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy. (shrink)

This thesis explores the party system and political parties in the post-communist Albania. The overarching question of the thesis is what kind of party system has developed and what is the structure and organization of the Albanian political parties. The study analyses the period 1991-2013, that is the period between the first and the last general elections. I argue and test that the Albanian party system is stable and that the Albanian political parties are mass clientelist parties with deep territorial (...) penetration. The members of the parties have ceased to paly their traditional roles of the era of mass party and their attachment tot he party is not ideological but aims to ensure material benefits in return for the support provided to the party in elections times. As parties don't have many tools at hand they use their organizational structure to stabilize electorate, which explains the low level of electoral volatility in Albania and as consequence the stability of the party system. The thesis ahs an institutional embedded and a historically structured framework according to which party strategies are shaped by both the institutional context and the historical setting in which parties are created and operate. Following this line of reasoning, the weak societal roots of parties do not allow for party identification or voter alignment; the early access to public funding reduces the incentives of parties to create strong links with the members and society to collect financial resources and; in line with the features of the patrimonial communism which is characterized by clientelism and nepotism, the Albanian political parties develop the same relationships between the higher echelons of the party and the lower strata of the party structure. On the other hand the lack of media access in the early phase of organization and the need to stabilize the electorate, encourage the Albanian political parties to seek a deep territorial penetration which results in the creation of mass clientelist parties. In order to test the hypothesis I have undertaken three steps: a) the analyses of the Effective Number of Parties and Electoral Volatility; b) the internal distribution of power, the role of the membership and the relationship of the organization with society and; c) the identification of financial resources of the political parties. (shrink)

In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about the preferences of less informed citizens. Specifically, they would lack access to such citizens’ preferences regarding the form that policies ought to take—that is, how these policies ought to be implemented. Arguing that this so-called Information Gap Problem militates against epistocracy, (...) Méndez instead recommends that we respond to problems created by widespread voter ignorance by improving the flow of information between political actors by adopting some participatory democratic institutions. In this paper I argue that the severity of the Information Gap Problem for epistocracy is overstated. After first sketching some background (Section 1), I argue that it is hard to see why information about citizens’ preferences for the form that policies ought to take is important enough that the expected costs of epistocracy outweigh its expected benefits if it selectively empowers people who lack access to such information (Section 2). Moreover, different forms of epistocracy are less threatened by the Information Gap Problem, assuming it is indeed a problem. For some forms of epistocracy, it may be no problem whatsoever. However, I conclude by suggesting that Méndez touches upon some more serious problems for epistocracy (Section 3). First, even setting aside the Information Gap Problem, there are open questions about the possible epistemic inferiority of epistocracy relative to democracy. Second, more comprehensive accounts of political competence that move beyond the possession of sufficient levels of political information are much harder to reliably test for, thus complicating the task of devising effective epistocratic selection mechanisms. Lastly, epistocracy arguably creates a serious risk of abuse that may outweigh any other benefits it brings. More research is needed to determine how (and whether) epistocrats can respond to such challenges. (shrink)

Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy—and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed, because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one’s model of political reality is compatible with—and indeed can positively enhance—one’s understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does (...) not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one’s model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance; and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy. (shrink)