The paradox of persisting opposition

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 109-146

  Goodin, Robert E ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Bayesian rationality; consensus; political opposition

Indexed keywords

EID: 85004435372     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X02001001005     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Georg Simmel, ‘The Phenomenon of Outvoting’, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950; originally published 1908): 239-249, p. 248.
2. Richard Wollheim, ‘A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy’, in Philosophy, Politics & Society, second series, edited by P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962): 71-87. Wollheim's talk in terms of what ‘ought be done’ allows for equivocation among different senses of ‘ought’. Talking instead in terms of what is ‘true’ (or, as suggested by David Estlund, ‘The Persistent Puzzle of the Minority Democrat’, American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989): 143-151, what one ‘believes’ [implicitly: ‘to be true’]) avoids those evasions.
3. Donald D. Weiss, ‘Wollheim's Paradox: Survey and Solution’, Political Theory 1 (1973): 154-170, claims that none of them work. I share Brian Barry's sense that all of them would, as voiced in his ‘Wollheim's Paradox: Comment’, Political Theory 1 (1973): 317-322. Many of these moves were anticipated by Simmel in ‘The Phenomenon of Outvoting’.
4. Grofman et al., ‘Thirteen Theorems in search of the Truth’; David Estlund, ‘Opinion Leaders, Independence and Condorcet's Jury Theorem’, Theory & Decision 36 (1994): 131-162; List and Goodin, ‘Epistemic Democracy’.
5. James Hawthorne, ‘Voting in Search of the Public Good: The Probabilistic Logic of Majority Judgements’ (Mimeo., Department of Political Science, University of Oklahoma, 2001), p. 26.
6. For this reason, Hawthorne, ‘Voting in Search of the Public Good’, p. 28 dubs his Theorem 3, reporting Condorcet through Bayes, the ‘Convincing Majorities Theorem’.
7. In ways analogous to Grofman et al., ‘Thirteen Theorems in Search of the Truth’, pp. 268–269 or Hawthorne, ‘Voting in Search of the Public Good’. This is a speculation, to be sure, but it is beyond the scope of this article to attempt a proof.
8. Grofman et al., ‘Thirteen Theorems in Search of the Truth’, pp. 268–269.
9. Hawthorne, ‘Voting in Search of the Public Good’, pp. 13 ff.
10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 358, for example, dismisses the relevance of the Condorcet jury theorem in two lines, saying that ‘it is clear that the votes of different persons are not independent. Since their views will be influenced by the course of the discussion, the simpler sorts of probabilistic reasoning do not apply.’
11. Hawthorne, ‘Voting in Search of the Public Good’.
12. David E. Bell, Howard Raiffa and Amos Tversky, editors, Decision Making: Descriptive, Normative and Prescriptive Interactions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
13. Robert E. Goodin, ‘Voting Through the Looking Glass’, American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 420-434.
14. Following Waldron, ‘Democratic Theory and the Public Interest’, pp. 1327–1328.
15. Waldron, ‘Democratic Theory and the Public Interest’, p. 1324.
16. Robert A. Dahl, editor, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Robert A. Dahl, editor, Regimes & Oppositions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); Ghita Ionescu and Isabel de Madariaga, Opposition (London: Watts, 1968).
17. Simmel, ‘The Phenomenon of Outvoting’.
18. For example, in the exchange between Cohen, ‘An Epistemic Conception of Democracy’ and Jules Coleman and John Ferejohn, ‘Democracy and Social Choice’, Ethics 97 (1986): 6-25.
19. Robert E. Goodin, ‘Do Motives Matter?’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989): 405-420.
20. Mark N. Franklin, Thomas T. Mackie, Henry Valen et al., Electoral Change: Responses to Evolving Social and Attitudinal Structures in Western Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
21. Miller, ‘Information, Electorates and Democracy’. Adam Przeworski, ‘Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense’, in Democracy's Value, edited by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 23-55, pp. 29–31.