Suchergebnisse

Contents -- About the Authors -- Preface -- Introduction - Margaret Levi, James Johnson, Jack Knight, and Susan Stokes -- Part I: Organization of Interests -- Chapter 1. Mobilizing Institutions and Class Bias in U.S. Electoral Politics, 1964 to 2004 - Jan E. Leighley and Jonathan Nagler -- Chapter 2. Barriers to Participation for Whom? Regulations on Voting and Uncompetitive Elections - Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan -- Chapter 3. Mobilizing Political Engagement and Participation in Diverse Societies: The Impact of Institutional Arrangements - Susan A. Banducci and Jeffrey A. Karp

Democratic governments are able to elicit, legally and legitimately, both money and men from their populations. Certainly there is tax evasion, draft evasion, and even outright resistance; yet to a remarkable extent citizens acquiesce and even actively consent to the demands of governments, well beyond the point explicable by coercion. This is a puzzle for social scientists, particularly those who believe that individuals are self-interested, rational actors who calculate only the private egoistic costs and benefits of possible choices. The provisions of collective good should never justify a quasi-voluntary tax payment and the benefits of a war could not possibly exceed the cost of dying. This book explains the institutionalization of policy in response to anticipated and actual citizen behaviour and the conditions under which citizens give, refuse and withdraw their consent. Professor Levi claims that citizens' consent is contingent upon the perceived fairness of both the government and of other citizens. Most citizens of democracies, most of the time, are more likely to give their consent if they believe that government actors and other citizens are behaving fairly toward them

My commitment to combining normative concerns with empirical social science led, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, to early adoption of rational choice political economy. However, it was a modified form of rational choice that takes into account ethical and societal concerns. This was the approach I applied to considerations of compliance and consent with government, what makes a trustworthy government, the formation of legitimating beliefs, and finally the construction of an expanded and inclusive community of fate as a building block for a new moral political economy.

AbstractThe neo-liberal variant of capitalist political economy is a problematic model of the economy no longer in sync with advances in technology, industry, or social science. The solution is institutional and governmental redesign that pays attention to issues of equity, flourishing, democracy, and the power of the relevant participants.