Turnout is in decline in established democracies around the world. Where, in the mid-1800s, 70–80 percent of eligible voters regularly participated in US Presidential elections, turnout has averaged just 53.7 percent since 1972. Average turnout in general elections in the UK has fallen from 76.6 percent during the period 1945–92, to 64.7 percent since 1997. Average turnout in Canadian federal elections has fallen from 74.5 percent during the period 1940–79, to 62.5 percent since 2000. For most democrats, these numbers are a cause for alarm. Compulsory voting is amongst the most effective means of raising turnout. However, compulsory voting is also controversial. Most of us think that coercion may only be employed against the citizenry if it is backed by a justification of the right kind. Opponents of compulsory voting charge that no such justification is available. This article resists this line of argument in two ways. First, I offer an argument from free-riding which, though gestured towards by others, and widely criticized, has yet to be defended in any depth. Second, I consider a range of objections to compulsory voting as such, arguing that none succeeds.
Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political decision-making. Many of the most interesting among these involve reliance on lotteries in one way or another – as a means of distributing the franchise, selecting representatives, or making social choices. Advocates of these ‘lottocratic’ systems contend that they retain the egalitarian appeal of democracy, while promising improved political outcomes. The aim of this article is to defend democracy (or, at least, universal suffrage and majority rule) against the challenge posed by these proposals. I argue, firstly, that lottocratic systems necessarily involve the establishment of objectionable social and political inequalities in a way that democracies do not. Secondly, I raise a number of doubts with respect to the purported instrumental benefits of these proposals.
In recent years, several actors at the sub-national level (e.g. California, British Columbia, New York City) have taken unilateral steps to mitigate climate change by reducing their emissions. These developments have commanded considerable attention in the empirical literature. In this piece, we consider the philosophical dimensions of climate action at the sub-national level. Specifically, we argue that climate action at the sub-national level is an instance of a more general class of cases in which the failure of some collective agent to discharge some duty to which it is subject entails duties for the sub-collectives of which it is comprised to partially discharge that duty. We begin, then, with a discussion of such cases, and a defence of the devolution principle, which sets out conditions under which such duties arise. We then set out the argument with respect to sub-national political communities’ duties to take action on climate change, specifically. The article concludes by considering complications arising out of the inevitable fact of partial compliance, drawing upon recent work in the literature on slack-taking duties.
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