Democratic Legitimacy and the 2000 Election

Law and Philosophy -     

Mass Administrative Reorganization,Media Attention,and the Paradox of Information

How does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? The authors argue that an agency's salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. This argument is evaluated in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government using probit and heteroscedastic probit regression models. The evidence suggests that termination is less likely for agencies salient in newspapers popular with the government's core supporters but not those read by its minority coalition partner. We also find that agencies with greater overall newspaper salience as well as younger agencies have a higher error variance.     

Unity of effort requires unity of object: why industry should not be involved in formulating public health policy

This paper provides a framework for examining the general issue of public health authorities' collaboration with industry. The framework distinguishes between industry involvement in the development of public health policy and the implementation of policy‐driven interventions. A distinction is also made between industries marketing products conducive to good health versus products that impact negatively on public health (e.g. alcohol and energy‐dense, nutrition‐poor food and beverage industries). Drawing on concepts with respect to the effectiveness of military coalitions, it is argued that a common goal (i.e. ‘unity of object’) is a prerequisite for optimal co‐operation (i.e. ‘unity of effort’) between collaborators in any sphere of activity. However, this vital precondition does not exist in the public health arena because the end goals of industry and those of public health are fundamentally different, if not opposed (i.e. profits to owners/shareholders versus the social good). It is argued that because of this fundamental disjunct between industry profit goals and the public good, unity of effort will always be compromised in any form of collaboration with industry, and particularly where public health policies and interventions are designed to negatively impact on product consumption. Hence, while industry can be asked to co‐operate in implementing public health policy initiatives, industry should never be involved in developing policy initiatives. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz's El Laberinto de la Soledad

This article explores how certain presuppositions govern our interpretations of this canonical text by Octavio Paz. I trace its biographical and textual origins, the book's peculiar reception, some of its multiple intellectual sources, and the problem of genre and how these hermeneutic discourses and epistemological tools interact. Structure (the relationship between psychology and history), rhetorical strategies and central symbols and metaphors that give the book its unity and complexity are also discussed. I conclude that we can read this hybrid work simultaneously as essay, narrative text, autobiography and modern epic myth: it is both an analytic or ironic deconstruction and an imaginative, symbolic construction of individual and collective identity.     

Opinion Backlash and Public Attitudes: Are Political Advances in Gay Rights Counterproductive?

One long‐recognized consequence of the tension between popular sovereignty and democratic values like liberty and equality is public opinion backlash, which occurs when individuals recoil in response to some salient event. For decades, scholars have suggested that opinion backlash impedes policy gains by marginalized groups. Public opinion research, however, suggests that widespread attitude change that backlash proponents theorize is likely to be rare. Examining backlash against gays and lesbians using a series of online and natural experiments about marriage equality, and large‐sample survey data, we find no evidence of opinion backlash among the general public, by members of groups predisposed to dislike gays and lesbians, or from those with psychological traits that may predispose them to lash back. The important implication is that groups pursuing rights should not be dissuaded by threats of backlash that will set their movement back in the court of public opinion.