Exiles as Stakeholders

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-140
Author(s):  
Ashwini Vasanthakumar
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Boundary Problem ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Moral Hazards ◽  
Competing Interests

This chapter examines how much influence exiles are entitled to wield in the homeland. I situate this question in the broader boundary problem in democratic theory: how to determine who is entitled to participate in collective decision-making. I examine two leading principles of inclusion, and then elaborate on and apply the stakeholder principle: insofar as exiles have particular interests at stake, they are entitled to a correspondingly weighty say. The stakeholder principle admits of a hierarchy of stake and say, which protects against the moral hazards of ‘long-distance nationalism’ while reaffirming that identification alone entitles exiles to some say. I outline three types of interests exiles can have at stake and illustrate the competing interests within a stakeholder community, and the problem of some exiles having disproportionate influence. The stakeholder principle correctly diagnoses worries about ‘armchair revolutionaries’: the problem with exile influence is not when exiles have a say, but when they have too much of a say relative to others.

Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110434
Author(s):  
Sean WD Gray
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Democratic System

Contemporary democratic theory is focused on empowering the voices of citizens in collective decision-making. The opposite of voice is silence. Increasingly, citizens are remaining silent rather than vocally participating in politics. Among democratic theorists, silent citizenship is equated to civic disengagement and disempowerment. I expand this view by theorizing the conditions under which silence is also a political expression. My analysis identifies four types of silence that can politically communicate. The resulting framework draws out the communicative dimension of silence, providing new tools to assess the unique interpretative challenges and dangers that silent citizenship presents for a democratic system.

scholarly journals Collective decision making in complex systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Ivana Jankovic
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Organizational Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Epistemic Value ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Economic Organizations

This paper aims to offer arguments in support of epistemic value of collective decision-making, as well as to identify factors that contribute to its success. Given that this form of decision-making is present in various fields of human action, we will present the parallels between decision-making in the economic organizations and in democratic theory. Noting the similarities in the development of decision-making theory in those two areas and the general shift from individual to collective cognitive competencies, we will argue that the specific insights of organizational theory came should be applied to democratic decision-making if we are to improve it. More specifically, we will argue that the Page?s cognitive model of collective decision-making, that came from modern organizational theory, based on the logic of diversity, can well be justified and applied to the democratic, especially deliberative institutions for solving political problems.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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