Masking The Meaningful

Public Choice, 1999

Most would agree that transparency is an important characteristic of effective political institutions. In theory, openness serves as a check on political actors as citizens are able to readily observe their actions and respond accordingly. However, is more transparency always a good thing? One observes many instances where less transparency is preferred to more. Secret ballot voting is one obvious example. Further, increasing transparency is not costless. While there are benefits to more openness, those benefits need to be weighed against the relevant costs. This edited volume of papers prepared for the 10th Villa Colombella Seminar held in Beaune, France, explores these and other issues associated with the economics of transparency. The volume is a collection of ten papers (excluding the Introduction) broken into four parts. Part 1, consisting of three chapters, deals with transparency in democratic contexts. Pierre Salmon and Alain Wolfelsperger are not surprised that some individuals, or groups of individuals, in democratic settings would attempt to distort or hide information. What is more interesting is that obfuscation often exists in democracies for long periods of time despite the existence of political competition. They explore why obfuscation may persist over time. According to their analysis, voters may prefer opaqueness when they cannot judge certain aspects of a policy or when the revelation of certain information would breed discomfort. Further, even if an individual personally values transparency, he or she may not want others to have that same information. From this standpoint, while an individual's utility may increase from personally possessing more information, he also may derive disutility from others having access to that same information. If more information generates net disutility, the individual will prefer that information remains opaque. Russell Hardin contends that deceit on the part of public officials can sometimes be in the public interest while at other times it can harm citizens' welfare. Examples of the former are situations of war or when the government is pursuing a criminal. Hardin also concludes

The Epistemology of Democracy, 2023

Development, 2016

Despite the general claims of triumph and success by its proponents and defenders, the universality and normativity of democracy is currently under scrutiny. Its proponents claim democracy as the most important development in the twentieth century (Sen, 1999). Democracy has been widely accepted as the 'normal' form of government to which all nations are entitledwhether in Europe, America, Asia, or Africa. The assumption is that for a nation to prosper, a democratic state is required. Democracy is hailed as the only system of governance where there is freedom of expression, equality, economic development and peace. Recent academic debates, however, have revealed diverse attitudes toward democracy. On the one hand, there is a general agreement within mainstream scholarshipwhat Kanbur (2002) has called the mainstream of development economicsthat democracy is a requirement for the emergence of accountable and responsive forms of government (Faguet, 2014). This idea has become widely accepted and nourished local and global debates around the sustainability and desirability of democratic regimes. For instance, the 1 May 2014 edition of The Economist in an article on 'What's gone wrong with democracy', argued that: On the other hand, scholars like Ballestrin (2014) call attention to the colonial logic of hegemonic western democracy, and its link to capitalism and the natural disasters and

2016

Acknowledgements v Contents vii List of Tables xi List of Diagrams xv 1. Democratic theory and internationalisation in Europe 1 2. A dogma of political inclusiveness and autonomy 53 3. Political autonomy during internationalisation 73 4. Deliberation during internationalisation 5. Participation during internationalisation 6. A dogma of delegation and alienation of authority 7. Comparing national and international democracy 8. Adapting democratic theory to internationalisation References Appendices Dissertation series v Acknowledgements Some time ago, in a hot and airless archive of despairingly little interest to my research, I remember planning to use this page not mainly for acknowledging the contributions of those who helped me to start and bring this project to an end, but rather to give the full details of those institutions and persons who had succeeded in substantially delaying the progression of my work. Now, at a secure distance from fruitless archive sessions, I cannot remember any of those sarcastic formulations that I prepared and meditated on for quite some time-and instead I find myself with nothing but a strong wish to express my most sincere gratitude to all those other persons who have generously shared their knowledge with me. If this sudden feeling of reconciliation has anything to do with a thesis being finished, the following persons, among others, helped me to do so and, more importantly, to get a moment's peace of mind. It has been a great pleasure, and a great intellectual asset, to be supervised by Kjell Goldmann. The Seminars on Internationalisation and European Politics at the Stockholm Department of Political Science that he chaired for some years together with Ulrika Mörth-who inspired an early formulation of what was to become my research problem-provided a venue in which I benefited from thoughtful comments by

Democracy as a Fantasy - And as Collective Cognitive Dissonance, 2024

This paper critically examines the concepts of democracy and their implementation in modern societies. It argues that democracy in its original form referred to direct participation of citizens in decision-making, as seen in some ancient Greek city-states, but contemporary democracies are essentially representative models where power is centralized in elected officials. While representative democracy enables governance at large scales, it lacks meaningful citizen participation. The paper also posits that democracy cannot truly exist as an objective phenomenon and can only be observed subjectively. It frames the widespread belief in democracies among citizens as a form of "collective cognitive dissonance," where societies hold contradictory beliefs about the ideals of democracy versus the realities of implementation. By analyzing democracy through the lenses of objectivity, subjectivity and cognitive dissonance, the paper provides a novel perspective on the social and philosophical nature of democratic governance.

2007

The Epistemology of Democracy, 2023

This is the first edited scholarly collection devoted solely to the epistemology of democracy. Its fifteen chapters, published here for the first time and written by an international team of leading researchers, will interest scholars and advanced students working in democratic theory, the harrowing crisis of democracy, political philosophy, social epistemology, and political epistemology. The volume is structured into three parts, each offering five chapters. The first part, Democratic Pessimism, covers the crisis of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, public epistemic vices, misinformation and disinformation, civic ignorance, and the lacking quantitative case for democratic decision-making. The second part, Democratic Optimism, discusses the role of hope and positive emotions in rebuilding democracy, proposes solutions to myside bias, and criticizes dominant epistocratic approaches to forming political administrations. The third and final part, Democratic Realism, assesses whether we genuinely require emotional empathy to understand the perspectives of our political adversaries, discusses the democratic tension between mutual respect for others and a quest for social justice, and evaluates manifold top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy making. Hana Samaržija is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her papers on countering epistemic injustice and seeking epistemically high-quality alternatives to democracy have been published in Social Epistemology and other academic journals as well as in the edited book The Philosophy of Fanaticism: Epistemic, Affective, and Political Dimensions (Routledge, 2022).

1998

Democracy is recognized as the primary vehicle for the fulfilment of individual and collective aspirations, the articulation of interests, and the nurturing of civil society. Globalizing forces have underpinned the spread of this message across the globe. Yet the march of democratization is highly contested and politicized and there is little consensus on what democracy is or should be. This volume brings together preeminent scholars from around the world in a collection of essays that point to a changing and broadening agenda of democracy. Themes addressed include challenges to democracy in established democracies and in transitional societies, the media and communications, globalization, criteria of democracy, religion, culture, civil society, and the internationalization of the democratic ethos. While democracy has been given a new lease on life in the post-Cold War context and its sphere of applicability has widened beyond the state closure, this book highlights the limitations ...