Suchergebnisse

'Mutual obligation' is a deft political slogan. Morally, it evokes deep-seated intuitions about 'fair reciprocity' and the 'duty of fair play'. It seems an easy slide from those intuitions to 'mutual obligation' policies demanding work-for-the-dole. That

In its recent 'deliberative' turn, democratic theory has forgotten a conventional wisdom, once widely appreciated, that there is much in politics that is better not discussed. In this article, the author catalogues what topics might be deemed 'politically undiscussable', and why, as a first step toward showing how and to what extent talking about such matters might help or hinder their resolution. One important way discussion helps is by information-pooling to establish the truth of the matter. Even where that is not a viable aspiration, discussion might nonetheless serve a 'premise-revealing' function, showing one another that we are reasonable agents and thus helping to desensitize contentious issues.

If free markets consist in nothing more than "capitalist acts between consenting adults" and if in the old legal maxim "volenti non fit injuria" then it seems to follow that free markets do no wrongs. But that defense of free markets wrenches the "volenti" maxim out of context. In common law adjudication of disputes between two parties it is perfectly appropriate to cast standards of "volenti" narrowly and largely ignore "duress via third parties" (wrongs done to or by others who are not themselves party to the action). In economic markets of course those third-party effects are rife. But we want them to be rectified systematically not piecemeal through particular cases between particular parties that happen to come to court. That is the proper province of political philosophers and system-designers in critiquing and constraining the operation of the market.

By analogy to Macpherson's "protective" and "self-developmental" models of liberal democracy, there might be two distinct models of liberal multiculturalism. On the protective-style model, the aim is to protect minority cultures against assimilationist and homogenizing intrusions of the majority. On the other model, here dubbed "polyglot multiculturalism," the majority might expand its own "context for choice" by having more minority cultures from whom to borrow. The latter is a more welcoming and inclusive strategy, still recognizably liberal in form, than the self-defensive liberalism of the more purely protectionist sort.

Many who discuss global democracy think in terms of a Reform-Act model of democracy, with the ideal being �one person one vote for all affected by the decisions� as in, for example, a second popularly apportioned chamber of United Nations. Politically, that is dismissed as wildly unrealistic. Remember, however, the Reform Acts came very late in process of democratization domestically. Among early steps that eventually led to full democratization of that sort domestically 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 in both those directions. Crucially, once those pieces are in place, the circle of accountability basically only ever expands and virtually never contracts.

Each of the main sectors of society-the state, the market and the voluntary non-profit sector-is characterized by a distinctive accountability regime, focusing on a different subject of accountability (actions, reults and intentions, respectively) and a different mechanism of accountability (hierarchy, competition and cooperative networking, respectively). Those 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.

Republican political theory has undergone a recent revival, first and most strongly among historians, subsequently in a more limited way among lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists. Surveying the many contexts in which republican principles are

Lawyers talk of the common law offence of 'perverting the course of justice' by bribing or intimidating judges or jurors, lying to the police or court, concealing or destroying or fabricating evidence. This article argues that the same things are wrong, and wrong for the same reasons, politically as judicially: they prevent people from knowing and applying for themselves the rules by which they are ruled. The sort of excuses typically offered for those perverse practices in politics - that 'it made no difference', that 'they could and should have resisted' or that it is merely a matter of 'fair adversarial competition' - would be laughed out of a court of law, and they should be shunned politically for the same reasons as judicially.

It is clearly undemocratic for wealth to be concentrated in the same few hands, year in and year out, as was traditional in the sorts of aristocracies which Tocqueville contrasted with early American democracy and as arguably remains standard in virtually all modern industrial societies. The crucial question is whether democrats ought to be content with wealth being concentrated in different hands from one year to the next, or whether democratic egalitarians ought to insist instead that wealth ought not to be concentrated in anyone's hands at all. Certainly we do see a fair bit of income volatility in advanced industrial economies. I shall offer evidence of that shortly. But I shall go on to argue -pace Tocqueville and his many followers3-that that is not enough. A more general model of 'democratic welfare' ought to take account of the circulation of public benefits, and of the need for them, alongside earnings flows. Evidence from across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggests that altogether too many of those who fall into poverty would get stuck there, were it not for government benefits; and those public benefits are more democratic in their incidence and their impact in some places than in others. That is one respect in which income volatility alone is insufficient to underwrite the democratic character of the economic order.

One of the most exciting innovations within 'practical democratic theory' in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well-honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small-scale deliberative exercises to the 'main game', politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.

Deliberative democrats enjoin participants in ideal speech situations never to lie. But game theorists show that people can have purely truth-based motives for strategically misrepresenting information they hold privately when they are deliberating with others. If deliberative democrats want to ensure that every participant in the deliberation fully and truthfully reveals to one another all private information that they hold, that sets some stringent requirements for the nature of the group that deliberates together.

'Mirror representation' — what is today dubbed 'the politics of presence' — presupposes relatively modest levels of diversity among those being represented. If the groups to be represented are too numerous, internally too heterogeneous or too crosscutting, too many representatives will be required for the assembly to remain a deliberative one where 'presence' can have the effects its advocates desire. In those circumstances, what is being represented ought be conceptualized as the 'sheer fact of diversity' rather than 'all the particularities of the diversity among us', the appropriate response to that is legislative reticence.

Because they are motivationally and organizationally distinct, Third-Sector organizations are capable of doing many things that neither the state nor the market sectors can do reliably or well. Markets notoriously fail in the face of positive externalities, for example. Profit-seekers prefer to free-ride rather than to contribute. But for community-oriented altruists of the Third Sector, the presence of positive externalities is merely an added inducement to contribute to such causes. Within the state sector, non-market failures notoriously arise from rentseeking, as profiteers attempt to co-opt the coercive power of the state to serve their private ends. But being voluntary organizations lacking any coercive powers, non-profits are immune to that threat as well. In short: the Third Sector works where the states and markets fail, for reasons that are by now fairly well understood. Note well, however, that what enables the Third Sector to play that role in supplementing the other two sectors is that that sector is motivationally and organizationally distinct from the other two. Recalling that fact ought make us wary of arrangements, whether of 'partnership' or 'competition', that straddle the various sectors. The worry must be that, in bringing different sectors under the same yoke, the very thing that made the Third Sector a useful adjunct to the other two sectors — its organizational and motivational distinctiveness — risks being lost. These concerns, too, are familiar. Faith-based organizations rightly worry that their sacred missions might be compromised by the conditions that the secular state imposes (and inevitably and rightly so) when subcontracting public functions to outside bodies.3 Non-profits rightly worry that, in competing against for-profit organizations for public contracts, they will become not just interchangeable with but perhaps even indistinguishable from for-profit organizations, doing the same things in the same ways as forprofits would have done. And perhaps that, too, is inevitably and rightly so, given the 'level playing field' standards of fair competition that properly govern public tenders quite generally. My focus here is on a particularly compelling case of that general conundrum: the implications for democratic accountability. Different sectors being accountable, each in its own complimentary way, can yield greater accountability across social institutions overall. But arrangements that straddle sectors (whether through partnership or competition) inherently blur the distinctions between the sectors. In so doing, those arrangements undermine the accountability of each sector in its own terms and, hence, the interlocking system of social accountability overall. The plan of the paper is as follows: After some preliminary remarks on the concept of accountability and its various conceptions (section I), I develop a basic typology of accountability regimes (section II), with each of the three sectors of society being predominantly associated with its own distinct type of accountability regime (section III). I then sketch complimentarities among these three accountability regimes, leading to greater accountability overall than if accountability was pursued in only one mode (section IV). Finally, I show (in section V) how certain ways of yoking the three sectors together in 'public-private partnerships' might undermine key features of the peculiarly non-profit accountability regime, thus diminishing its distinctive contribution to the overall grid of social accountability.

In the post-Cold War world, the last remaining superpower is almost hegemonic. Almost: but not quite. The US cannot act all on its own. It needs — or thinks it needs, or pretends to need — the support of at least a few other countries in anything it does. But it only needs a few, and there are many that could serve equally well. That may not be yes of all policy areas. But some such thinking certainly underlies the US's "floating coalition" for its "war against terror". "Some countries may want to participate in one way, but not in another." Some countries will join the fight against one foe, others against other foes. But "make no mistake about it: if they do not act, America will." No particular ally is an indispensable element of any coalition. No other country enjoys a veto against American action. "Our mission will not change to fit any coalition's." Such is the rhetoric. So too is the action. As the Washington Post reports, 'Washington has established a floating coalition of allies, friends, useful strangers and the occasional opportunist to chase Osama bin Laden's network. But in waging war on Afghanistan, the Pentagon prefers an alliance of one, or at most one and a half. The United States has gratefully accepted the help of police, intelligence and financial authorities around the globe to track al Qaeda's operatives, money and plots. Washington has also used the airspace, ports and bases of a few nations to get in position to attack. But the strike force assaulting Afghanistan is essentially an all-American affair, with the important involvement of British commandos'. Paradoxically, after hectoring its European allies for years to get more interested in NATO operating outside Europe, Washington today is setting aside for the time being offers of direct military help from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and others. The painful memories of command and control coordination problems in the Kosovo air war of 1999 and the Persian Gulf War of 1991 are still fresh. And the remote and fractured nature of the theater of operations in and around Afghanistan makes simpler a lot better. Evidence from experimental games should make us very wary of an Almost Hegemon of this sort. In the psychological laboratory, anyway, the dominant player in an "any of many" coalition game proves to be less solicitous of the interests of the junior partners in its coalition than is even an absolute dictator who needs none of them. If transferable to the real world, those findings seem to suggest that an Almost Hegemon is worst of all: even an Absolute Hegemon would treat others more fairly; and a Semi-Hegemon, with few junior partners to choose among, would be fairer yet again.

In the post-Cold War world, the last remaining superpower is almost hegemonic. Almost: but not quite. The US cannot act all on its own. It needs — or thinks it needs, or pretends to need — the support of at least a few other countries in anything it does. But it only needs a few, and there are many that could serve equally well. That may not be yes of all policy areas. But some such thinking certainly underlies the US's "floating coalition" for its "war against terror". "Some countries may want to participate in one way, but not in another." Some countries will join the fight against one foe, others against other foes. But "make no mistake about it: if they do not act, America will." No particular ally is an indispensable element of any coalition. No other country enjoys a veto against American action. "Our mission will not change to fit any coalition's." Such is the rhetoric. So too is the action. As the Washington Post reports, 'Washington has established a floating coalition of allies, friends, useful strangers and the occasional opportunist to chase Osama bin Laden's network. But in waging war on Afghanistan, the Pentagon prefers an alliance of one, or at most one and a half. The United States has gratefully accepted the help of police, intelligence and financial authorities around the globe to track al Qaeda's operatives, money and plots. Washington has also used the airspace, ports and bases of a few nations to get in position to attack. But the strike force assaulting Afghanistan is essentially an all-American affair, with the important involvement of British commandos'. Paradoxically, after hectoring its European allies for years to get more interested in NATO operating outside Europe, Washington today is setting aside for the time being offers of direct military help from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and others. The painful memories of command and control coordination problems in the Kosovo air war of 1999 and the Persian Gulf War of 1991 are still fresh. And the remote and fractured nature of the theater of operations in and around Afghanistan makes simpler a lot better. Evidence from experimental games should make us very wary of an Almost Hegemon of this sort. In the psychological laboratory, anyway, the dominant player in an "any of many" coalition game proves to be less solicitous of the interests of the junior partners in its coalition than is even an absolute dictator who needs none of them. If transferable to the real world, those findings seem to suggest that an Almost Hegemon is worst of all: even an Absolute Hegemon would treat others more fairly; and a Semi-Hegemon, with few junior partners to choose among, would be fairer yet again.