Taking dictatorship seriously: a reply to Quesada

Antonio Quesada (Public Choice 130:395–400, 2007) argues that a dictator has no more than two to three times the ‘average power’ of a non-dictatorial voter. If Quesada is correct, then his argument has major consequences for social choice theory; for instance, it warrants reconsidering the significance of Arrow’s Theorem. If Quesada is incorrect, however, then his position is dangerously misleading. This paper argues that Quesada is wrong. His argument depends on his own formal account of power, an account that is implausible because it disregards a basic insight common to the standard characterisations of voting power: the idea that one has power over an outcome to the extent that one is able to change that outcome. Claims about power have a counterfactual component; to assert that an individual actually has determined an outcome is also to make an assertion about what would have been the case had that individual acted differently. We can employ David Lewis’s influential account of counterfactuals to show, contra Quesada, that in a dictatorship, non-dictatorial individuals and groups cannot possibly determine a social preference. In short, Quesada is fundamentally mistaken about power, and thus also about the distribution of power in a dictatorship.     

Taking adoption seriously

He is the former Assistant Executive Director of both the Child Welfare League of America and the Day Care and Child Development Council of America. He has published widely on the issue of adoption. Among other works, he served as the chief editor of the Adoption Fact Bookand co-authored the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Adoption.     

Taking disability rights seriously

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001, xxix +278 pp. Ruth O'Brien, Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, xiv +288 pp. Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003, ix +278 pp. Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and the Case against Disability Rights, Louisville: Avocado Press, 2003, xvii +296 pp. Old political science is characterized by exclusion: exclusion of people who “don't matter,” sometimes on account of where they live, on account of gender, on account of ethnicity, and sometimes on account of other factors. One such factor, disability, has too often been neglected by political scientists and our students.     

Proximity and directional theory compared: Taking discriminant positions seriously in multi-party systems

This paper tackles the problem of comparison between proximity and directional voting in 27 European multi-party systems. This is a previously unaddressed aspect of European spatial issue voting. We focus on the spatial voting theories as predictors of vote intention, evaluating the extent of proximity and directional voting. We describe the influence of identical predictions on the comparison of these theories. Our multilevel analysis of the 2009 European Election Study data shows more empirical support for proximity voting than directional voting in the countries analyzed. It does this by clearly differentiating between those cases where it is possible to compare proximity and directional voting and where this is impossible. Nevertheless, the prevalence of proximity theory decreases in more polarized party-systems.     

Representation as a median mandate: Taking cross‐national differences seriously

The extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems ( CSES 2007 ), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.     

Rejoinder to mead

As I understand him, Mead makes two arguments. First, he argues that relying on reasoning from general principles to answer practical questions of public management can be misguided if the policy analyst deliberately or inadvertently ignores available evidence. Of course he is right. As the purpose of the symposium was to invite public management scholars to use general principles to decide on the relative merits of mandatory and voluntary workfare, however, the authors, who are not experts in welfare reform, cannot be faulted for being unfamiliar with the evidence. It was their intellectual approaches to the problem that I sought to broach.     

Justice: Plain Old and Distributive: Rejoinder to Charles Taylor

This paper argues that the views of Charles Taylor on justice in income and wealth distribution are fallacious, especially in regard to issues such as private property rights, justice, human rights, and theft. As to this last point, Taylor maintains it is possible, under certain circumstances, to “legitimately steal.” We regard this as a philosophical howler of the first order. We also demur from his contention that equity and equality can be used as synonyms.

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Embodying the Deepest Contradiction: A Rejoinder to Alan Rudy

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Alexander Wilson: The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez . Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. 1992.

Simon Schama: Landscape and Memory . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1994.