Published book:
Rule by Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Short description: The book answers a basic question in political theory: in what sense can one view democratic governments as under popular control if there is no such thing as `the will of the people'? Social choice theory appears to show that talk of a popular will is logically incoherent, raising a deep problem for traditional interpretations of popular control. The book explains how multiple, overlapping majorities can nonetheless have control, at the same time, even if there is no such thing as `the will of the majority' or `the will of the people'. After resolving these conceptual puzzles, I explain why popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.
Published and forthcoming articles:
"Domination and Democratic Legislation" (with Frank Lovett), Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract: Republicans hold that people are unfree if they are dominated, that is, if others have an insufficiently constrained ability to frustrate their choices. Since legislation can frustrate individuals' choices, republicans believe that the design of legislative institutions has consequences for individual freedom. Some have argued that if legislative institutions are democratic, then they need not be sources of domination at all. We argue this view is incorrect: the introduction of legislative authority, even if democratically organized, always creates a new site of domination. However, republicans can defend democratic procedures as the best means of minimizing the degree to which citizens are dominated, subject to the constraint of equalizing everyone's freedom. We formulate and prove this claim within a simple model of legislative authority and domination.
"Representative Democracy and Social Equality," American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Abstract: When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials, rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens.
"Demographic objections to epistocracy: a generalization" (with David Wiens), Philosophy & Public Affairs, forthcoming.
Abstract: 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.
"Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action'' (with Frank Lovett), American Journal of Political Science 63(4) (2019): 774-787.
Abstract: Republicans maintain that people are dominated merely in virtue of others having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make the argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory.
"Why Arrow's Theorem Matters for Political Theory Even If Preference Cycles Never Occur," Public Choice 179(1) (2019): 97--111.
Abstract: William Riker (1982) famously argued that Arrow's impossibility theorem undermined the logical foundations of ``populism,'' the view that in a democracy, laws and policies ought to express ``the will of the people''. In response, his critics have questioned the use of Arrow's theorem on the grounds that not all configurations of preferences are likely to occur in practice; the critics allege, in particular, that majority preference cycles, whose possibility the theorem exploits, rarely happen. In this essay, I argue that the critics' rejoinder to Riker misses the mark even if its factual claim about preferences is correct: Arrow's theorem and related results threaten the populist's principle of democratic legitimacy even if majority preference cycles never occur. In this particular context, the assumption of an unrestricted domain is justified irrespective of the preferences citizens are likely to have.
"Can Deliberative Minipublics Influence Public Opinion? Theory and Evidence" (with Ines Levin) Political Research Quarterly 71(3) (2018): 654--667.
Abstract: Deliberative minipublics are small groups of citizens who deliberate together about a policy issue and convey their conclusions to decision-makers. Theorists have argued that deliberative minipublics can give observers evidence about counterfactual, "enlightened" public opinion---what the people would think about an issue, if they had the opportunity to deliberate with their fellow citizens. If the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic are received in this spirit and members of the public revise their opinions upon learning them, then deliberative minipublics could be a means of bringing actual public opinion into closer conformity with counterfactual, enlightened public opinion. We formalize a model of this theory and report the results of a survey experiment designed to test its predictions. The experiment produced evidence that learning the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic influenced respondents’ policy opinions, bringing them into closer conformity with the opinions of the participants in the deliberative minipublic.
"Effects of Deliberative Minipublics on Public Opinion: Experimental Evidence from a Survey on Social Security Reform" (with Ines Levin) International Journal of Public Opinion Research 30(1) (2018): 51--78.
Abstract: This paper examines the potential influence of deliberative minipublics on public opinion. Using data from a large-scale survey experiment with national coverage, we investigate whether learning the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic affects observers’ support for changes to the Social Security program. Survey respondents in the primary treatment conditions were exposed to the findings of deliberative citizens’ panels regarding proposed changes to Social Security. Respondents in control groups did not receive any information about the deliberative minipublic. Overall, our results suggest that deliberative minipublics have some ability to affect public opinion even if members of the public acquire only minimal information about them. In particular, they are able to influence the opinions of relatively uninformed citizens. The results also suggest, however, that the effects may be limited in their extent and magnitude—at least in the scenario, modeled by our experiment, in which citizens acquire only minimal information about deliberative minipublics.
"Popular Rule in Schumpeter's Democracy," Political Studies 64(4) (2016): 1071--1087.
Abstract: in this paper I argue that existing democracies might establish popular rule even if Schumpeter’s notoriously unflattering picture of ordinary citizens is accurate. Some degree of popular rule is in principle compatible with apathetic, ignorant, and suggestible citizens, contrary to what Schumpeter and others have maintained. The people may have control over policy, and their control may constitute popular rule, even if citizens lack definite policy opinions and even if their opinions result in part from elites' efforts to manipulate these opinions. Thus, even a purely descriptive, ‘realist’ account of democracy of the kind that Schumpeter professed to offer may need to concede that there is no democracy without some degree of popular rule.
"Social Choice and Popular Control", Journal of Theoretical Politics 28(2) (2016): 331--349.
Abstract: In democracies citizens are supposed to have some control over the general direction of policy. According to a pre-theoretical interpretation of this democratic norm, the people have control if elections and other democratic institutions compel officials to do what the people want, or what the majority wants. This interpretation of popular control is hard to reconcile with insights from social choice theory. Some commentators---Riker (1982), most famously---have argued that these insights should cause us to abandon the idea of popular rule as traditionally understood. This paper presents a formal theory of popular control that responds to the challenge from social choice theory. It makes precise a sense in which majorities may be said to have control over the direction of policy even if the majority preference relation has an empty core, i.e., even if it's true that, no matter which policy agenda elected officials pursue, a majority would prefer they pursue a different agenda.
"Theorems and Models in Political Theory: An Application to Pettit on Popular Control", The Good Society 24(1) (2015): 98--117.
Abstract: in his recent book, Phillip Pettit presents a model of popular control over government, according to which it consists in the government being subject to those policy-making norms that everyone accepts. In this paper, I provide a formal statement of this interpretation of popular control, which illuminates its relationship to other interpretations of the idea with which it is easily conflated, and which gives rise to a theorem, similar to the famous Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem states that if government policy is subject to popular control, as Pettit interprets it, and policy responds positively to changes in citizens' normative attitudes, then there is a single individual whose normative attitudes unilaterally determine policy. I use the model and theorem as an illustrative example to discuss the role of mathematics in normative political theory.
"Disagreement and Epistemic Arguments for Democracy", Politics, Philosophy & Economics 12(2) (May, 2013): 135--154.
Abstract: Recent epistemic arguments for democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. They aim to do so without presupposing any narrow, controversial view of what the outcomes of democratic procedures should be, much as a good justification of a particular scientific research design does not presuppose the hypothesis that the research aims to test. This paper considers whether this aim is achievable. It asks, in particular, whether epistemic arguments can be reconciled with the commonly held view that disagreement about which laws and policies should be enacted is a fundamental, permanent feature of democratic politics and imposes constraints on how we understand the value of democratic procedures.
Rule by Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Short description: The book answers a basic question in political theory: in what sense can one view democratic governments as under popular control if there is no such thing as `the will of the people'? Social choice theory appears to show that talk of a popular will is logically incoherent, raising a deep problem for traditional interpretations of popular control. The book explains how multiple, overlapping majorities can nonetheless have control, at the same time, even if there is no such thing as `the will of the majority' or `the will of the people'. After resolving these conceptual puzzles, I explain why popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.
Published and forthcoming articles:
"Domination and Democratic Legislation" (with Frank Lovett), Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract: Republicans hold that people are unfree if they are dominated, that is, if others have an insufficiently constrained ability to frustrate their choices. Since legislation can frustrate individuals' choices, republicans believe that the design of legislative institutions has consequences for individual freedom. Some have argued that if legislative institutions are democratic, then they need not be sources of domination at all. We argue this view is incorrect: the introduction of legislative authority, even if democratically organized, always creates a new site of domination. However, republicans can defend democratic procedures as the best means of minimizing the degree to which citizens are dominated, subject to the constraint of equalizing everyone's freedom. We formulate and prove this claim within a simple model of legislative authority and domination.
"Representative Democracy and Social Equality," American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Abstract: When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials, rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens.
"Demographic objections to epistocracy: a generalization" (with David Wiens), Philosophy & Public Affairs, forthcoming.
Abstract: 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.
"Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action'' (with Frank Lovett), American Journal of Political Science 63(4) (2019): 774-787.
Abstract: Republicans maintain that people are dominated merely in virtue of others having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make the argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory.
"Why Arrow's Theorem Matters for Political Theory Even If Preference Cycles Never Occur," Public Choice 179(1) (2019): 97--111.
Abstract: William Riker (1982) famously argued that Arrow's impossibility theorem undermined the logical foundations of ``populism,'' the view that in a democracy, laws and policies ought to express ``the will of the people''. In response, his critics have questioned the use of Arrow's theorem on the grounds that not all configurations of preferences are likely to occur in practice; the critics allege, in particular, that majority preference cycles, whose possibility the theorem exploits, rarely happen. In this essay, I argue that the critics' rejoinder to Riker misses the mark even if its factual claim about preferences is correct: Arrow's theorem and related results threaten the populist's principle of democratic legitimacy even if majority preference cycles never occur. In this particular context, the assumption of an unrestricted domain is justified irrespective of the preferences citizens are likely to have.
"Can Deliberative Minipublics Influence Public Opinion? Theory and Evidence" (with Ines Levin) Political Research Quarterly 71(3) (2018): 654--667.
Abstract: Deliberative minipublics are small groups of citizens who deliberate together about a policy issue and convey their conclusions to decision-makers. Theorists have argued that deliberative minipublics can give observers evidence about counterfactual, "enlightened" public opinion---what the people would think about an issue, if they had the opportunity to deliberate with their fellow citizens. If the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic are received in this spirit and members of the public revise their opinions upon learning them, then deliberative minipublics could be a means of bringing actual public opinion into closer conformity with counterfactual, enlightened public opinion. We formalize a model of this theory and report the results of a survey experiment designed to test its predictions. The experiment produced evidence that learning the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic influenced respondents’ policy opinions, bringing them into closer conformity with the opinions of the participants in the deliberative minipublic.
"Effects of Deliberative Minipublics on Public Opinion: Experimental Evidence from a Survey on Social Security Reform" (with Ines Levin) International Journal of Public Opinion Research 30(1) (2018): 51--78.
Abstract: This paper examines the potential influence of deliberative minipublics on public opinion. Using data from a large-scale survey experiment with national coverage, we investigate whether learning the conclusions of a deliberative minipublic affects observers’ support for changes to the Social Security program. Survey respondents in the primary treatment conditions were exposed to the findings of deliberative citizens’ panels regarding proposed changes to Social Security. Respondents in control groups did not receive any information about the deliberative minipublic. Overall, our results suggest that deliberative minipublics have some ability to affect public opinion even if members of the public acquire only minimal information about them. In particular, they are able to influence the opinions of relatively uninformed citizens. The results also suggest, however, that the effects may be limited in their extent and magnitude—at least in the scenario, modeled by our experiment, in which citizens acquire only minimal information about deliberative minipublics.
"Popular Rule in Schumpeter's Democracy," Political Studies 64(4) (2016): 1071--1087.
Abstract: in this paper I argue that existing democracies might establish popular rule even if Schumpeter’s notoriously unflattering picture of ordinary citizens is accurate. Some degree of popular rule is in principle compatible with apathetic, ignorant, and suggestible citizens, contrary to what Schumpeter and others have maintained. The people may have control over policy, and their control may constitute popular rule, even if citizens lack definite policy opinions and even if their opinions result in part from elites' efforts to manipulate these opinions. Thus, even a purely descriptive, ‘realist’ account of democracy of the kind that Schumpeter professed to offer may need to concede that there is no democracy without some degree of popular rule.
"Social Choice and Popular Control", Journal of Theoretical Politics 28(2) (2016): 331--349.
Abstract: In democracies citizens are supposed to have some control over the general direction of policy. According to a pre-theoretical interpretation of this democratic norm, the people have control if elections and other democratic institutions compel officials to do what the people want, or what the majority wants. This interpretation of popular control is hard to reconcile with insights from social choice theory. Some commentators---Riker (1982), most famously---have argued that these insights should cause us to abandon the idea of popular rule as traditionally understood. This paper presents a formal theory of popular control that responds to the challenge from social choice theory. It makes precise a sense in which majorities may be said to have control over the direction of policy even if the majority preference relation has an empty core, i.e., even if it's true that, no matter which policy agenda elected officials pursue, a majority would prefer they pursue a different agenda.
"Theorems and Models in Political Theory: An Application to Pettit on Popular Control", The Good Society 24(1) (2015): 98--117.
Abstract: in his recent book, Phillip Pettit presents a model of popular control over government, according to which it consists in the government being subject to those policy-making norms that everyone accepts. In this paper, I provide a formal statement of this interpretation of popular control, which illuminates its relationship to other interpretations of the idea with which it is easily conflated, and which gives rise to a theorem, similar to the famous Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem states that if government policy is subject to popular control, as Pettit interprets it, and policy responds positively to changes in citizens' normative attitudes, then there is a single individual whose normative attitudes unilaterally determine policy. I use the model and theorem as an illustrative example to discuss the role of mathematics in normative political theory.
"Disagreement and Epistemic Arguments for Democracy", Politics, Philosophy & Economics 12(2) (May, 2013): 135--154.
Abstract: Recent epistemic arguments for democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. They aim to do so without presupposing any narrow, controversial view of what the outcomes of democratic procedures should be, much as a good justification of a particular scientific research design does not presuppose the hypothesis that the research aims to test. This paper considers whether this aim is achievable. It asks, in particular, whether epistemic arguments can be reconciled with the commonly held view that disagreement about which laws and policies should be enacted is a fundamental, permanent feature of democratic politics and imposes constraints on how we understand the value of democratic procedures.
