Why do people vote? What factors contribute to people’s eventual voting choice, and which factors that seem like they should be relevant are actually meaningless in the aggregate? Political scientists have long investigated questions of how people end up at their eventual voting choice, and the relative strength of the decisive factors are still debated …
Continue reading “Voting: Comparing the Michigan and Columbia Models”
The past few decades have seen the closure of many local news operations across the US. Political science studies suggest that the loss of local news outlets results in more polarization amid the local population as well as reliance on less reliable sources of news. Sometimes, the dearth of local news does not remain. Sometimes, …
Continue reading “Chevron Starts News Site in Texas News Desert: The Third Level of Power at Work”
Welcome to the third and final part of this series! A brief recap of weeks one and two: Liberal pluralism involves competing interest groups and relies on aggregation of these interests, which are automatically known to people. Deliberative democracy is a system in which political discussions lead people to discover common interests. The third broad …
Liberal pluralism is the version of democracy that we explored in the last post, a vision of democracy that focuses on group dynamics within a society and how these groups advance their own interests. A second theoretical vision of democracy, deliberative democracy, offers a very different version for how this system of governance is supposed …
Continue reading “Visions of Democracy: Deliberative Democracy”
How is democracy supposed to work in theory? As it turns out, scholars do not agree on this question. There can be vast differences between theories as to the basic functions of democracy and how the government interacts with its citizens. These different theories of democracy result in different diagnoses of the major problems facing …
As far as I can tell, there is no good explanation of this concept online, which is quite surprising. The only comprehensive document explaining the term on the Internet is a 1939 essay by the philosopher FSC Northrop, which is not written in the most accessible manner. Thus, here is an explanation of epistemic correlation. …
Should our society be a pure meritocracy? Most people’s intuitions are that the answer should be yes, because the idea that everyone should get their positions in a society based on their own merits and not arbitrary factors is inherently appealing. We’ve all encountered instances where a disastrously incompetent buffoon was placed into a well-paying …
Deadlock in Washington. A public that is hopelessly divided into two circles with no overlap. The oft-stated narrative about a polarized United States suggests that ideological divisions within the US, usually conceptualized as the distance between Republicans and Democrats, are dire. Partisan media outlets love to feed into this us-versus-them account, fueling the conception that …
Continue reading “A Polarized America? An Examination of the Partisan Schism in the US”
Earlier this month on 2 October, 2021, American economist Anthony Downs died at the age of 91. Throughout his life, Downs made major contributions to fields such as political choice theory and the economics of housing and transportation. This post will explore his major work “An Economic Theory of Democracy.” The widely cited and read …
Continue reading “Anthony Downs’ Economic Theory of Democracy”
Social movements of all kinds start out with the best of intentions. Their founding members have bold, transformative visions for society, and call for radical change on multiple fronts. Too often, however, these social movements become absorbed into the dominant economic, political, and social system. This integration of social movements into mainstream, “acceptable” society is …
Continue reading “What is Cooptation (of Social Movements)?”
Green Humanist 