In recent years, a number of political theorists have aimed to restore the central role of parties in democratic life. These theorists have especially highlighted two key normative functions of ...parties: linkage and public justification. In this article, I argue that these two functions are often in tension. First, I illustrate how this tension manifests itself in liberal democracies. Second, I explain that parties’ ability to fulfil each of the two functions is strongly affected by the electoral system under which they operate: while first-past-the-post encourages party linkage but hinders public justification, the opposite is true of proportional representation. Third, I argue that a mixed electoral system can best guarantee the balance between parties’ linkage and justificatory functions. Fourth, I suggest a number of proposals for party reforms that could help mixed electoral systems to balance party linkage and public justification while preventing the re-emergence of the tension between them within parties.
This article defends a republican understanding of food sovereignty, according to which food sovereignty is the freedom of people to make choices related to food production, distribution and ...consumption in a non-dominated way, that is, without being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled interference of governments, international bodies and multinational corporations. Food sovereignty as non-domination, the article claims, should be guaranteed through the creation of (and the enhancement of existing) international agencies enforcing and monitoring impartial rules concerning food production, distribution and consumption, based on deliberation conducted according to publicly acceptable reasons both within and across states. Crucially, such agencies should be subject to the scrutiny and contestation of both official bodies and social movements. The republican model of food sovereignty, the article concludes, offers a more realistic framework than currently dominant participatory models of food sovereignty for tackling issues of food production, distribution and consumption in contemporary diverse societies.
Much of the recent literature on freedom of speech has focused on the arguments for and against the regulation of certain kinds of speech. Discussions of hate speech and offensive speech, for ...example, abound in this literature, as do debates concerning the permissibility of pornography. Less attention has been paid, however, at least recently, to the normative foundations of freedom of speech where three classic justifications still prevail, based on the values of truth, autonomy and democracy. In this paper we argue, first, that none of these justifications meet all four intuitive desiderata for an adequate theory of free speech. We go on to sketch an original relational view of free speech, one which grounds its value in the recognition that speakers grant each other when engaging in speech practices, and its limits in the republican ideal of non-dominated co-exercisable liberty. We briefly illustrate the relational approach’s implications for the debate on hate speech regulation and for the response to fake news.
Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the ...records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multi-dimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one.
This article critically examines four specific aspects of Avner de Shalit’s book Cities and Immigration. First, it argues that the influx of cosmopolitan migrants, which de Shalit considers ...unproblematic for destination cities, may in fact pose a challenge to some cities’ ethos, and to the ethos of specific neighbourhoods within cities. Second, it contends that gentrification, contrary to what de Shalit suggests, may sometimes hinder rather than promote social mixing and migrants' integration. Third, it claims that most of the examples of mutual assimilation (de Shalit’s preferred model of inclusion) provided by de Shalit concern superficial interactions and exchanges between members of different groups. This raises both the empirical question of whether deeper forms of mutual assimilation are possible and the normative question of whether they are desirable. Fourth, it takes issue with two concrete policy recommendations advanced by de Shalit: the first involves assessing potential matchings between source and destination cities in order to advise migrants where to move; the second concerns prioritizing immigrants who might be better capable than others of facilitating the integration of future immigrants, due to their values, religion, or country of origin.
Like many countries, the Philippines faced severe economic, social, and political challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 President Duterte issued an executive order announcing a ...national state of emergency that introduced a highly restrictive system for community quarantine and lockdown. While these measures led international observers to rank the Philippines' pandemic response among the worldʼs most stringent, it is unclear whether subsequent health outcomes were sufficient to justify the severity. In this article, we evaluate discrepancies between COVID- 19 policy goals and outcomes in the Philippines via a compelling but under-utilized method of democratic deliberation, the 'mini-public'. The mini-public that we held brought together a random sample of citizens who heard testimony from local public health experts and political leaders, and then used this information in conjunction with their own experiences to identify policy shortcomings and develop recommendations for policymakers. The most substantial challenges to the government's pandemic response were reported to be inadequate enforcement and under-resourcing of government officials tasked with policy implementation. These challenges created a disconnect between policy objectives and their performance in practice. We conclude by summarizing the mini-public participants' recommendations.
Accent bias, namely, an unwarranted prejudice toward interlocutors based on the sound of their speech, is a subtle yet powerful feature in the political life of language. This is especially so in ...democratic polities characterized by a diverse soundscape. The powerful and often covert nature of accent bias, and its capacity to generate significant epistemic injustice, poses a critical challenge to democratic theory and praxis, by challenging its commitment to liberty, equality, inclusivity, and reciprocity, and the very process of democratic reasoning. This article offers a comprehensive and empirically supported analysis of the political life of accent and advocates the cultivation of a sense of metalinguistic awareness among political actors, professional and otherwise, in order to counter the considerable risk of accent bias in democratic life. This cultivation draws on a conception of language that is socially embedded and dialogic and that can contribute to a more informed democratic theory of language.
Is our moral cognition “colored” by the language(s) that we speak? Despite the centrality of language to political life and agency, limited attempts have been made thus far in contemporary political ...philosophy to consider this possibility. We therefore set out to explore the possible influence of linguistic relativity effects on political thinking in linguistically diverse societies. We begin by introducing the facts and fallacies of the “linguistic relativity” principle, and explore the various ways in which they “color,” often covertly, current normative debates. To illustrate this, we focus on two key Rawlsian concepts: the original position and public reason. We then move to consider the resulting epistemic challenges and opportunities facing contemporary multilingual democratic societies in an age of increased mobility, arguing for the consequent imperative of developing political metalinguistic awareness and political extelligence among political scientists, political philosophers, and political actors alike in an irreducibly complex linguistic world.
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