Suchergebnisse

The core populist claim is that 'the people' have been unjustly neglected by government. This core claim, while unexceptionable on its face, tends to be associated with claims that would corrode liberal democratic institutions. It is important that political and legal theorists identify the claims made by citizens who may be attracted by populist political forms, lest they manifest themselves in political forms toxic to (broadly understood) liberal democratic norms and institutions. They must address these claims, even as they also consider ways in which to confront these political forms. An example of how this work might proceed can be gleaned from some recent democratic theory and practice, which has 'democratized' membership in political parties as well as the process of selection of the party leader. This apparent democratization both disserves the cause of democratic deliberation, and opens the door to the risk of populist takeover of traditional parties.

Abstract:In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution's design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution's more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan's interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

Many political theorists believe that the extension of democratic institutions beyond the nation-state would inevitably be deleterious to the possibility of meaningful citizenship and to the functioning of democratic institutions. It is argued here that many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

John Gray (1996) interprets Isaiah Berlin as having made value pluralism the basis of an antirationalist, agonistic liberalism. Gray argues that Berlin's value pluralism actually stands in tension with his liberalism, & a wholehearted affirmation of value pluralism should have led him to reject the claim that liberal institutions are morally superior. Here, it is argued that Berlin's pluralism is more moderate than that ascribed to him by Gray, in that it does not allow for diminishing the value of liberty beyond a certain point. This version of pluralism is more compatible with the objectivity Gray claims for pluralism than is his own version. 15 References. Adapted from the source document.