Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 876-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Q. Wilson ◽  
Edward C. Banfield
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
A Value ◽  
Self Interest

Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voter's self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

The Relational Public

2021 ◽  
pp. 073527512110046
Author(s):  
Paul Starr
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
The Public ◽  
Shared Stories ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

This article sets out three ways of conceiving publics: (1) an organic conception, the public as the body politic; (2) an individualized conception, the public as an aggregate of individuals, grouped by social categories; and (3) a relational conception, in which publics are defined as open-ended networks of actors linked through flows of communication, shared stories, and civic or other collective concerns. These conceptions have emerged not only through theoretical reflection but also as the result of historical and institutional developments. Building on work from Tarde and Habermas down to recent theorists, I seek to advance the relational conception, suggest its implications for research, and highlight its connection to contemporary developments in both theory and society.

scholarly journals Public Opinion and Public Policy in Advanced Democracies

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wlezien
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Government

The representation of public opinion in public policy is of obvious importance in representative democracies. While public opinion is important in all political systems, it is especially true where voters elect politicians; after all, opinion representation is a primary justification for representative democracy. Not surprisingly, a lot of research addresses the connection between the public and the government. Much of the work considers “descriptive representation”—whether the partisan and demographic characteristics of elected politicians match the characteristics of the electorate itself. This descriptive representation is important but may not produce actual “substantive representation” of preferences in policy. Other work examines the positions of policymakers. Some of this research assesses the roll call voting behavior of politicians and institutions. The expressed positions and voting behavior of political actors do relate to policy but are not the same things. Fortunately, a good amount of research analyzes policy. With but a handful of exceptions noted below, this research focuses on expressed preferences of the public, not their “interests.” That is, virtually all scholars let people be the judges of their own interests, and they assess the representation of expressed opinion no matter how contrary to self-interest it may seem.

Sex, Work, and the Victorians

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Nicola J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stimulation Of

Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.

Top-up

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-313
Author(s):  
Jean Drèze
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Bullet Train ◽  
Disastrous Experience

This chapter covers a range of issues that do not fit in earlier chapters. These include urban poverty, universal basic income, the Gujarat model, electoral politics, India's bullet train, the economics of corruption, the aberrations of the caste system, and India's disastrous experience with demonetisation in late 2016. The book concludes with an extended essay on “Development and Public‐spiritedness”. This essay takes issue with the notion, common in economics, that people generally act out of self‐interest. This assumption has no theoretical or empirical basis. Public‐spiritedness, in the sense of a reasoned habit of consideration for the public interest, is a common feature of social life. Expanding the scope of public‐spiritedness is an important aspect of social development.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Jon Elster
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Economic Variables ◽  
The Public ◽  
Group Interest ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Ancien Régime

This chapter emphasizes the incompleteness of knowledge on key economic variables, which is in part due to the reluctance of individuals, from all social classes, to comply with requests for information. It notes how individuals and institutions had an incentive to misreport, exaggerate, or understate their income and property. At a different level, statements by royal officials, venal magistrates, and elected deputies can rarely be taken at face value. The chapter analyzes the universal tendency of speakers or writers to disguise self-interest or group interest as the public interest. It also argues that by the end of the ancien régime, public opinion was considered a poor substitute for publicity as it is often based on rumors rather than on facts in the public domain.

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND: SELF-INTEREST, THE PUBLIC INTEREST, AND SOCIOTROPIC VOTING

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Roderick Kiewiet ◽  
Michael S. Lewis-Beck
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Interest

Responding to prisoner sexual assaults

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Dumond ◽  
Doris A. Dumond
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
Promising Practices ◽  
Skill Levels ◽  
The Public ◽  
Prison Rape Elimination Act ◽  
The Status ◽  
Correctional Settings

Sexual abuse in detention has been called ‘the most serious and devastating of non-lethal offenses which occur in corrections,’ because its impact upon survivors of such abuse, and ultimately society, is so profound. Given the proper tools, training, and resources, corrections can and will eliminate prisoner sexual violence. However, we must realize that corrections is a subset of the body politic itself. It is subject to budget shortfalls, political pressure, and the broader attitudes of the public. Adequate financial and programmatic resources must be mobilized to ensure appropriate staff skill levels to keep jails and prisons safe. Safe, well-run jails and prisons can, if properly used, help keep communities safe. The general public will have to be convinced to join this dialogue if we are ever to have safe, constitutionally adequate correctional settings. Corrections can, and must, together with its community partners, respond with vision and leadership to make corrections facilities safe places where human rights and dignity are protected, and the most vulnerable among us can emerge stronger and healthier than they went in. This chapter will explore the status of sexual violence in United States correctional settings in the 21st Century; examine what is currently known about sexual victimization in America’s jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities; discuss the successes and promising practices facilitated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003; consider the challenges that continue to exist; and make recommendations for addressing the issues.

Seeds of Cynicism: The Struggle over Campaign Finance, 1956–1974

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian E. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Financing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Source Of Infection ◽  
Disclosure Laws ◽  
Private Financing

“It is a cesspool, it is a source of infection for the body politic,” Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) warned his fellow senators in 1973 about the private financing of elections. “[I]f it doesn't stop, there are going to be good men in this hall right here today who are going down the drain, not that you are guilty, not that you have done anything wrong, but that the public is disenchanted with all of us, and they are going to want somebody new and say I want a fresh one here.” From 1971 through President Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress enacted the boldest campaign finance reforms in American history, including strong disclosure laws, public financing for presidential elections, contribution and spending limits, and an independent enforcement commission. Despite these reforms, after only a decade under the new laws, citizens still felt that campaign finance was corrupt.

The Public Life of Contemporary Australian Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McCooey
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Status ◽  
Traditional Function ◽  
Transnational Discourse

Since the late 1990s, complaints about the status of poetry, and the parlous state of poetry publishing, have been commonplace in Australia and other Anglophone nations. Concomitant with this discourse of decline (a transnational discourse with a surprisingly long history) is a discourse of return, in which poetry is presented as returning to public culture (often through the literalized voice of the poet) to reoccupy the place it putatively held in earlier, if not premodern, times. Poetry’s engagement with public themes and the public use of poetry continue to be important, if sometimes overlooked, elements of Australian literary culture. Indeed, despite its apparent marginality, contemporary poetry could be said to have what may be called an “ambiguous vitality” in public life. While other forms of media continue to dominate public culture, poetry nevertheless remains public, in part by occupying or being occupied by those other forms of media. In other words, contemporary poetry’s ambiguously vital presence in public culture can be seen in the ways it figures in extra-poetic contexts. Such contexts are manifold. For instance, poetry—and the figure of the poet—are mobilized as tropes in other media such as films and novels; poetry is used as a form of public/political speech to articulate crisis and loss (such as at annual Anzac ceremonies); and it is used in everyday rituals such as weddings and funerals. Public culture, as this list suggests, is haunted by the marginal discourse of poetry. In addition, poetry’s traditional function of commenting on the body politic and current political debates continues, regardless of the size of the medium’s putative audience. Recent poetry on the so-called “War on Terror,” the Stolen Generation, and asylum seekers illustrates this. But contemporary Australian poetry engages in public life in ways other than the thematization of current public events. Poets such as Jennifer Maiden, John Forbes, and J. S. Harry exemplify a group of poets who have figured themselves as public poets in a self-consciously ironic fashion; acknowledging poetry’s marginality, they nevertheless write poetry as if it had or may have an extra-poetic efficacy.

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