Making Voting Pay

Those who regard low turnout as a particular problem for democracy are sometimes led to endorse compulsory voting as a solution. However, even if there is a moral duty to vote, such legal coercion seems illiberal. This article, by appeal to the analogous case of blood donations, suggests that we should consider instead paying people incentives to vote. This would achieve the aim of increasing turnout, particularly among underrepresented groups, without threatening individual liberty in the way that compulsion seems to.     

Making electoral democracy work

This note presents a new electoral studies research program that will examine party and voter behaviour in 27 elections (national, supra-national, and sub-national) in five countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland) and that includes a series of experiments designed to complement the analyses of these 27 elections. The purpose is to ascertain how the rules of the game, especially the electoral system, and the competitiveness and salience of elections influence the reciprocal relationship between voters and parties.     

Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

Making moral incentives pay

Politicians often appeal to moral principles as a least-cost method of enforcing their policy demands. To do so effectively, they must understand how such principles fit into ordinary people's decision functions. Here I distinguish three ways for formally representing moral principles. One reduces morality to enlightened self-interest, denying that morality has any special place in the decision calculus. Another, while acknowledging that people do internalize moral principles per se, enters them into utility functions as just another consumption good. Truly strong moral principles, however, are best represented by a third model of seriously held moral principles which must be kept formally apart from mundane considerations. Such principles are as precarious as they are powerful. Policy-makers who want to tap them must respect the formalisms that make them strong, most typically by shielding moral principles from contamination by egoistic impulses.This is a revised version of a paper read at the 1978 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association in New York. I am grateful to Stanley Benn for prodding that prompted this essay and to Brian Barry, David Braybrooke, Joseph Carens, Russell Hardin, Martin Hollis and David Miller for advice on its improvement.     

China: Making a Friend

The United States and China are the two most powerful countries in current global affairs, and Amitai Etzioni has put forward ideas for improving the relationship between the two powers. In his article, “China: Making an Adversary,” Etzioni argues that “adversarial predispositions” in the United States may be turning China into an adversary. My article draws on Etzioni’s insights to think further about how China can be made into a friend.     

Making Sense of Our Lives

Williams, B. (2005) In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument , ed. G. Hawthorn. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Williams, B. (2006) The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy , ed. M. Burnyeat. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Williams, B. (2006) Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline , ed. A. W. Moore. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.