Participatory Democracy Revisited

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Pateman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Active Area ◽  
Democracy Promotion ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Form

Over the past two decades we have heard an historically unprecedented volume of talk about and praise of democracy, and many governmental, non-governmental, and international organizations have been engaged in democracy promotion. Democracy is a subject that crosses the boundaries in political science, and within my own field of political theory there has been a major revival of democratic theory. In political theory, argument about “democracy” is usually now qualified by one of an array of adjectives, which include cosmopolitan, agonistic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 John Dryzek could write that “deliberative democracy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory).” Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democracy, but its influence has spread far outside universities.

scholarly journals The Political Theory of Parties and Partisanship: Catching Up

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Russell Muirhead ◽  
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Political Rivalry

Despite their centrality to modern democracy, until recently political parties were relegated to the margins of normative democratic theory, taking a back seat to social movements, civil society associations, deliberative experiments, spaces for local participatory government, and direct popular participation. Yet, in the past 15 years, a burgeoning literature has emerged in democratic theory focused directly on parties and partisanship; that is our focus in this review. We locate three main normative defenses of parties: one centered in the special role parties can play in political justification as agents of public reason, a second that looks to the way parties contribute to deliberation, and a third that focuses on the partisan commitment to regulated political rivalry and peaceful rotation in office. In this last connection, we survey work on the constitutional status of parties and reasons for banning parties. We then consider the relation of partisanship to citizenship, and in a fourth section we turn to the ethics of partisanship. Parties and partisanship are interwoven but separable: If partisans are necessary to realize the value of parties, the reverse holds as well, and parties are necessary to realize the value of partisanship.

Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Muirhead
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Median Voter ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Positive Theory ◽  
Median Voter Theorem ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Models Of Democracy

Anthony Downs’s Economic Theory of Democracy has been marginalized in normative democratic theory, notwithstanding its prominence in positive political theory. For normative theorists, the “paradox of voting” testifies to the reality of moral motivation in politics, a species of motivation foreign to Downs’s theory and central to the ideals of deliberative democracy that normative theorists developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The deliberative ideal displaced aggregative conceptions of democracy such as Downs’s model. The ensuing segmentation of normative democratic theories that assume moral motives (like deliberative democracy) and positive models of democracy that assume selfish motives (like Downs’s theory) leaves both without the resources to diagnose the persistence of ideological partisanship and polarization that beset modern democracies. Engaging Downs’s theoretical contributions, especially the median voter theorem, would constitute a salutary step toward a democratic theory that integrates normative and positive theory.

Informal International Law-Making as a New Form of World Legislation?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramses A. Wessel
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Public Authority ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Domestic Legislation ◽  
New Form ◽  
Informal Rules ◽  
Law Making

AbstractLaw-making by formal, intergovernmental international organizations received abundant attention over the past years. The aim of the present contribution is to investigate whether the notion of 'word legislation' would also be appropriate in the case of 'informal international law-making'. It is argued that this could be the case when international public authority is exercised, in which case 'informal' rules have effects similar to domestic legislation.

scholarly journals From public reason to deliberative democracy

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-256
Author(s):  
Ivan Mladenovic
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper I shall investigate the relationship between public reason and deliberative democracy, mainly as it is presented in Rawls?s later political theory. Against the critics who claim that Rawls has no deliberative democratic theory, I shall argue that he presented a complex view of public deliberation that contains a set of formal and substantive requirements derived from the idea of public reason. My main aim in this paper is to defend and further elaborate the thesis that Rawls?s later political theory is crucially important for deliberative democracy. Furthermore, in light of the recent literature on deliberative democracy, I examine the relevance of Rawls?s view for addressing some current problems, but also look at some limits of the public reason perspective.

Political realism and epistemic democracy: An international perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-205
Author(s):  
Zhichao Tong
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Political Realism ◽  
Epistemic Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Authority ◽  
The Relationship

The article joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats in contemporary democratic theory and aims to put epistemic democracy on a more secure footing. Yet, unlike those who explore the question from the bottom-up by analyzing the relationship between “truth” and the “fact of disagreement” within the context of domestic political discourse, I adopt a top-down approach animated by political realism and situate democracy within the actual world that we live in: a competitive ecology of states and regimes. The article thus has two purposes. For those who are interested in the recent revival of realism in political theory, it shows how it can be combined with both the epistemic paradigm in democratic theory and the realist research program in international relations, including the neo-positivist strand that has dominated the field over the past four decades. And for those who see themselves as epistemic democrats, it provides a powerful realist argument to defend their conception of democratic authority against criticisms made by procedural democrats.

scholarly journals Institutional Bargaining for Democratic Theorists (or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Haggling)

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Jack Knight ◽  
Melissa Schwartzberg
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Institutional Reform ◽  
Central Mechanism ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Bargaining Process ◽  
Political Decision Making

Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decision making, though political theorists typically doubt that processes that permit the exercise of unequal power and the use of threats can yield legitimate outcomes. In this review, we trace the development of theories of institutional bargaining from the standpoint of pluralism and positive political theory before turning to the treatment of bargaining in the influential work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Their ambivalence about bargaining gave rise to a new focus on the value of negotiation and compromise but this literature constitutes an unstable midpoint between the justificatory ambitions of deliberative democracy and the desire to provide plausible models of political decision making. Instead of advocating changes in mindset or motivation, we argue that a fair bargaining process requires institutional reform, as well as a justificatory framework centered on the preservation of egalitarian decision making.

Sociology, political science and anthropology: institutionalization, professionalization and internationalization in Argentina

2005 ◽  
Vol 44 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 227-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Murmis
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Political Science ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
National Level ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Full institutionalization of sociology, anthropology and political science occurred in Argentina in the late 1950s. While sociology started out as an established field having radically broken with the past of the discipline, both anthropology and political science established linkages with traditional versions of their fields. Although there were differences between them, the three disciplines evolved through a process of frequent crises, resulting mostly from military interventions at the national level. Institutionalization brought with it an expansion of the labor market and the opportunities for obtaining research funds, thus generating growing professionalization. This expansion as well as the response of social scientists to repression in universities was strongly related to links with foreign foundations and international organizations. Until 1983, the dramatic history of the social sciences was marked by disappearances (desapariciones) and exile. In recent years the three disciplines have grown and diversified.

Political Theory and Political Scientific Research

1971 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Laslett
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rational Knowledge

IN THIS COMMENT ON THE TWO TREATISES ON TOLERATION COMPOSED for us by Preston King and Bernard Crick, I wish to raise three quite familiar questions. The first is how far the growth of toleration in the past, its prevalence in the present and its fostering in the future, may be related in any society to the general level of information,education and enlightenment, of rational knowledge and discourse, there obtaining. This vague issue can only be handled superficially in so short a space, but it has to be faced, though not directly tackled by King and Crick, because it seems to me to be entailed by the other two. They are, how far specifically political knowledge about present and past actions, beliefs and behaviour – political science in fact – is itself related to the tendency towards toleration. Finally, how effective the raising of the extent of enlightenment, general or politicalscientific, is likely to be in creating tolerant attitudes and tolerant practice.

scholarly journals What Is Democratic Theory?

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. v-xx
Author(s):  
Rikki Dean ◽  
Jean-Paul Gagnon ◽  
Hans Asenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Special Issue

What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently posed. Indeed, the last time this precise question appears in the academic archive was exactly forty years ago, in James Alfred Pennock’s (1979) book Democratic Political Theory. This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as political theory, political science, social theory, philosophy, economic theory, and public policy/administration – each of which have asked the “what is” question of themselves on regular occasion. The premise of this special issue is, therefore, to pose the question anew and break this forty-year silence.

Sovereignty and Social Dynamics

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 825-837 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Modes Of Thought

The ceaseless struggle of opposing ideas is the historical continuum of political theory. However concrete the situation which launches a particular conflict, all too often the struggle of ideas continues long after the objective scene of the conflict has moved on to quite different fields, long after new problems have outmoded old solutions, and long after new ways of thinking should have revised or displaced old concepts. This intellectual problem of continuity of ideas and of modes of thought is, of course, no more than the reflection of the larger issue of the liberation of human society from the “dead hand of the past.” The solution of this problem is no easy one, entailing as it does careful discrimination and emphasis upon the quality of “deadness,” but many reasoned attempts are being made toward this end.The forms which these attempts are taking in the field of political theory (including the concept of sovereignty, which is the subject of this paper) and of political science in general are several. We have had an increasing, and productive, “realistic presentation of the facts of the governmental process” which has served to deflate such overweening concepts as that of sovereignty.

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