Democracy Defended - Mackie, Gerry
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Short description/annotation
A theoretical and empirically spirited defence of democratic governance.
Main description
Is there a public good(?)33; A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
Short description/annotation
A theoretical and empirically spirited defence of democratic governance.

Main description
Is there a public good(?)33; A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable, he argues, to be of normative concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Riker's famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says. This spirited defence of democratic institutions should prove both provocative and influential.

Table of contents:
1. A long, dark shadow over democratic politics; 2. The doctrine of democratic irrationalism; 3. Is democratic voting inaccurate(?)33;; 4. The Arrow general possibility theorem; 5. Is democracy meaningless(?)33; Arrow's condition of unrestricted domain; 6. Is democracy meaningless(?)33; Arrow's condition of the independence of irrelevant alternatives; 7. Strategic voting and agenda control; 8. Multidimensional chaos; 9. Assuming irrational actors: the Powell Amendment; 10. Assuming irrational actors: the Depew amendment; 11. Unmanipulating the manipulation: the Wilmot proviso; 12. Unmanipulating the manipulation: the election of Lincoln; 13. Antebellum politics concluded; 14. More of Riker's cycles debunked; 15. Other cycles debunked; 16. New dimensions; 17. Plebiscitarianism against democracy; 18. Democracy resplendent.
Autorenporträt
Gerry Mackie is a Research Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University.
Rezensionen
'This brilliant counterrevolutionary book makes a frontal attack on the widely accepted claim that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem for social choice shows democracy to be impossible, arbitrary, and meaningless. In delightfully direct and jargon-free language, Mackie demolishes the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim, notably in the strong version defended by William Riker and his students. His careful and exhaustive re-examination of all the instances on which Riker based his arguments is particularly valuable. At the same time, he puts up a strong defence - two cheers at least - for the institutions of representative democracy. After this vigorous and rigorous attack, social choice theory will never be the same again.' Jon Elster, Columbia University