The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust. The anti-democratic possibility …
What do Americans think?
Public opinion research raises many difficult questions. (See an earlier post on this topic.) We would like to know what Americans are thinking about current circumstances and issues; we'd like to know how those attitudes differ across social groups; and we'd like to have a basis for attempting to explain changes in attitudes over time. …
How good is deliberative democracy?
The basic idea of deliberative democracy is an appealing one. Suppose we are faced with this basic problem of social choice. There is an important issue facing a community. There are a small number of policy options that might be chosen. The community wants to choose among these options "democratically." There are several ways in …
Power elites after fifty years
When C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite in 1956, we lived in a simpler time. And yet, with a few important exceptions, the concentration of power that he described continues to seem familiar by today's standards. The central idea is that the United States democracy -- in spite of the reality of political parties, …
What holds a country together?
When you consider the enormous differences that exist across regions and traditions in the United States, it raises an interesting question: what factors serve to knit this population together into a single polity? We don't share a single set of cultural values, a single religion, or a single political tradition. So what helps this population …
Rawls’s schematic sociology
John Rawls offers an interesting thought along the way in his development of the theory of justice, on the question of the stability of a well-ordered society. Basically, the idea is that a set of principles of justice need to satisfy a condition of publicity and social stability: the principles need to be such that, …
Understanding Society 