Jan 14, 2019 Brian Bix
“Legislative intention” is one of those concepts that many people use without recognizing the complexity of the underlying idea. The issue of statutory interpretation is frequently characterized as being a disagreement between “intentionalists” and “textualists,” an argument regarding what role, if any, lawmakers’ intentions should be given in determining the meaning and application of statutes. However, even if one starts from the position that legislative intentions are important, there is a further question regarding which intentions we are talking about.
This is where Marcin Matczak’s article, Three Kinds of Intention in Lawmaking, comes in. Matczak analyzes legislative intentions using the analytical structure J. L. Austin offered for talking about the intentions of everyday speech: locutionary intentions, illocutionary intentions, and perlocutionary intentions. The first, locutionary intentions, refers to (“semantic”) meaning—what the speaker was trying to say. The second, illocutionary intentions, refers to the type of speech act intended. Austin was well known for pointing out that utterances sometimes change things in the world—e.g., “I now pronounce you man and wife” can change the legal status of the individuals involved (he called such utterances “performative”). More generally, a set of words can be intended to be a special kind of utterance: e.g., a promise, request, order, etc. Austin’s third category, perlocutionary intentions, regard how the person making the utterance hopes to change the world through the words chosen (e.g., getting other people to do things because the speaker has made certain promises, requests, or orders).
Matczak’s article asserts that the debates about statutory interpretation have wrongly emphasized locutionary (semantic) intentions; certainly, many of the commentators described (or self-described) as “intentionalists” emphasize semantic intentions. However, as Matczak points out, legislation is usually drafted by people other than the lawmakers; the semantic intentions thus belong to the drafters, not the legislators. Beyond this, there is no reason to suppose that all the lawmakers who voted for a bill shared identical understandings of its meaning, and there is no obvious way to aggregate differing semantic intentions.
Some commentators described, or self-described, as “intentionalists” (and a few constitutional “originalists”) focus on a different kind, or different aspect, of intention: the proposed effects of a law—intentions about how a legal rule will be applied (in Austin’s and Matczak’s terminology, “perlocutionary intentions”). However, as Matczak points out, some of the same problems arise here as with semantic intentions: it is highly unlikely that all those who support a proposed legal rule have the same views about how it would or should be applied. As Matczak argues (and here, as the article notes, he is agreeing with Joseph Raz), what lawmakers who vote for a bill do share is an intention to make the rule a valid law in that jurisdiction. These are illocutionary intentions: to make a certain kind of utterance—here, passing a law.
However, if we do not obtain the meaning of legislation from the semantic intentions of the drafters (because they are not legal officials) or from the intentions of the lawmakers (because they do not agree), where do we get meaning? Matczak’s response summarizes the views of “anti-intentionalist” theorists of language like Ruth Millikan: “the semantic content of the text does not depend on anyone’s intention or state of mind but rather on the history of language tools (words, sentences, etc.) used in that text” (P. 661.) What the article advocates is more of an objective, “reasonable person” approach to meaning, rather than the sort of strict intentionalism advocated by Larry Alexander and (in his most recent writings) Stanley Fish.
In general, Matczak’s work is a worthy addition to the literature on legislative intention, joining theorists like Ronald Dworkin, Andrei Marmor, and Joseph Raz, in reminding us that figuring out which (what kind of) intentions can be used in statutory interpretation is not as easy as we generally believe.
Dec 18, 2018 Edward Rubin
Nicholas R. Parrillo, The Endgame of Administrative Law: Governmental Disobedience and the Judicial Contempt Power, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1055 (2018).
What happens when a federal court issues a definitive order to a federal agency and the agency takes a how-many-divisions-does-the-Pope-have position in response? The answer that comes to mind is that the court can find the agency or its officials in civil or criminal contempt. But when is that finding available, how often is it used, what sanctions are attached to it, and what is their effect?
Nicholas Parrillo answers those questions in this comprehensive and carefully reasoned article. He collects (using a methodology described in an on-line appendix) all the records of federal court opinions “in which contempt against a federal agency was considered at all seriously” and all the records of district court docket sheets “in which a contempt motion was made…against a federal agency.” (P. 696.) After analyzing the results, Professor Parrillo concludes that while district courts are willing to issue contempt findings against federal agencies and officials, appellate courts almost invariably reverse any sanctions attached to such findings. But he also finds that the appellate courts reverse on case-specific grounds that do not challenge the authority of courts to impose sanctions for contempt, and that findings of contempt, even without sanctions, can operate effectively through a shaming mechanism. This article provides unique and valuable documentation about contempt, the “endgame of administrative law” and an obviously important element of our legal system. In addition, it contains major implications about the nature of the appellate process and about the normative force of law itself.
While Professor Parrillo does not explicitly identify the interpretive theory that appellate courts employ in reviewing trial court imposition of contempt sanctions, he strongly indicates that it is de novo review, followed by a sort of strict scrutiny regarding the conclusion. The reason, his research reveals, is the obverse of the reason why appellate courts review trial court findings of fact with a deferential standard.
The deference standard is based on the recognition that the trial judge has heard the witnesses, examined the physical evidence in detail, and reached her conclusion based on this experiential and intensive interaction with the litigating parties and the facts at issue. The de novo review and strict scrutiny that appellate courts apply to contempt sanctions are based on the sense that the trial judge has had this same experiential and intensive interaction and gotten angry at the agency.
Recognizing the truth of Aesop’s adage that “familiarity breeds contempt,” appellate courts, on the basis of their greater distance from the incompetent or recalcitrant agency, seem to employ stringent review of contempt sanctions to counter the trial judge’s ire. Their opinions indicate that they are concerned about the disruption of the agency’s mission and the impact on the public fisc that would result from imposition of the sanction. This constitutes an important insight into the nature of appellate review, one linked to the emerging literature on law and emotions. In addition to correcting legal errors, the appellate courts make use of their distance from the tumult of trial and of the abstract, discursive character of their own procedures to correct errors of excessive emotional engagement and thus increase the perceived rationality of the law.
Although sanctions for contempt are rarely imposed by trial courts and almost never upheld at the appellate level, Professor Parrillo does not conclude that findings of contempt are without effect. Rather, both the agency and its individual officials regularly make intense and sustained efforts to avoid being subject to such findings. The reason, Professor Parrillo suggests, on the basis of the language in judicial opinions and statements by agency officials, is that contempt has a powerful shaming function. “Federal agency officials,” he writes “inhabit an overlapping cluster of communities…[that] recognize a strong norm in favor of compliance with court orders.” (P. 777.)
He thus provides, in the somewhat technical context of administrative law, specific confirmation of Max Weber’s sociological insight that government authority is derived from its normative force, an insight echoed in jurisprudence by H.L.A. Hart and in democratic theory by Robert Dahl. Stalin, from a position of absolute power and amoral cynicism, may have thought the Pope’s power resided only in any military force that he possessed, but both the leaders and members of a democratic society must accept and rely upon shared norms of legality in order for such a society to function.
This raises the question of civil disobedience; as Professor Parrillo points out at the end of the article, such disobedience is generally based on a countervailing norm. Federal officials, whose position is defined by law, are not likely to believe in any norm that would justify disobedience to law. A number of President Trump’s actions, however, suggest that he sees himself outside this legal context, not on the basis of a countervailing norm but as a cynical assertion of power. Professor Parrillo’s article serves as a reminder of the crucial role that norms of legality play in our system of government, and the need for all public officials to sustain them absent a convincing and deeply felt countervailing norm that they are willing to assert and defend.
Dec 3, 2018 Sam Fox Krauss
In the mid-aughts, philosophers began to seriously consider the following question: how should you revise a belief, if at all, upon learning that you disagree with someone you trust? This has come to be known as the problem of peer disagreement. It’s a vexing problem. In the face of disagreement, our inclination is to remain confident. Yet, it is difficult to say why we should: if you think your friend is equally smart, and she reviewed the same information, what reason do you have to think that, in this particular case, you’re right and she’s wrong? On the other hand, if we should become much less confident, this seems, as philosopher Adam Elga puts it, rather spineless. And, while disagreement may prompt you to recheck your math on a split bill, it’s unlikely you’d rethink the morality of abortion. What, if anything, about the cases licenses distinct treatment?
Philosophers have proposed various responses. But, until recently, a search for “peer disagreement” in the legal literature would have yielded few results. Thankfully, a slew of articles has remedied this. Alex Stein writes on tribunals whose members come to the same conclusion, but for different reasons, and, separately, about post-conviction relief in light of conflicting expert testimony. Youngjae Lee writes about disagreement and the standard of proof in criminal trials. And, although they do not explicitly engage with the philosophical literature, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule discuss how judges on multimember courts ought to take into account the votes of their colleagues. William Baude and Ryan Doerfler’s article, in part a response to Posner and Vermeule, is required reading for anyone interested in disagreement and adjudication. Baude and Doerfler discuss what judges should do when they find out that other judges, or academics, disagree with them about a case. They land upon a moderate conciliationist position: become less confident when the disagreeing party is a “methodological friend,” and not otherwise.
This is in line with what some philosophers propose. The thought is something like this: if you think, before hearing some case, that a certain colleague on the bench would be as likely as you to get the right answer, then, upon disagreeing with her, it would be irrational (in the strict, philosophical sense) to think that you are right and she is wrong. After all, you share the same interpretative method and you heard the same legal arguments. This is why you thought you’d be equally likely to come to the right answer. When you disagree, it’s surprising. Thus, you ought to count the disagreement with the methodological friend as evidence, but not necessarily decisive evidence, that you’ve erred.
Baude and Doerfler’s view is moderate because it treats the disagreement as evidence that you’ve erred only when the disagreement is with a methodological friend. A disagreement with a non-friend provides no new evidence. Of course your originalist friend disagrees with you if you think originalism is bunk. As Baude and Doerfler put it while discussing the deep disagreement between Justices Scalia and Breyer, “…judges have had ample opportunity to rationally update themselves on the basis of those fundamental disputes. Hearing, one more time, that their colleagues have a different approach tells them nothing new.” (P. 12.)
Baude and Doerfler do a service to the discipline by contributing to a small but seemingly growing literature that attempts to draw applicable lessons from abstract work of contemporary analytic philosophers.
Oct 17, 2018 Robin Kar
Whether by statute or executive order, many agencies are required to produce cost-benefit analyses when proposing significant regulations and to justify decisions in its terms. The reason is not that cost-benefit analysis is perfect. Even its most thoughtful proponents recognize it has limitations. According to Matthew Adler and Eric Posner, for example, “[m]odern textbooks on [cost-benefit analysis] are plentiful, and some of them are optimistic about the usefulness of the procedure, but most of them frankly acknowledge its serious flaws and the inadequacy of standard methods for correcting these flaws.”
Most proponents of cost-benefit analysis nevertheless suggest that when it comes to agency decision-making, no better and feasible alternative currently exists. Whether that is true depends on what the alternatives are. I have recently found A Reliability-Based Capabilities Approach useful in this regard. I believe it offers the right building blocks to articulate an alternative, capabilities approach to agency decision-making that may prove useful in a wide range of domestic policy contexts.
Capabilities approaches, as pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, are by now well known. Though there are many different ways to develop the idea, all begin with the conceptual claim that what is intrinsically valuable for people is not the resources they have, or just any subjective mental states, but rather what people are able to be or do. Whereas orthodox cost-benefit analysis relies heavily on willingness to pay to measure “costs” and “benefits” and thus typically uses market data or surveys to “price” most “costs” and “benefits,” capabilities approaches do not assume that everything of value must be priceable by a market. Capabilities approaches recognize that human welfare can also be multi-dimensional: deficits in one capability need not always be compensable through benefits to another. This means that it is not always useful to present things in terms of one aggregate measure.
Capabilities approaches have proven enormously influential in some contexts. The United Nations, for example, uses a capabilities approach to produce several metrics, like the Human Development Index and the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index. These metrics have been widely used to guide policy decisions in many development contexts, but capabilities approaches have thus far had much less impact on domestic policy analysis.
What explains this difference in application? One reason relates to liberal concerns for value neutrality. Whatever its limitations, cost-benefit analysis at least has the merit of being sensitive to the changing preferences of a population, insofar as they are reflected in the market. By contrast, once one goes beyond the basic conceptual claims of capabilities approaches mentioned above, their application typically requires some method to settle which capabilities are intrinsically valuable and how to weigh them. This can pose a problem for liberal methods of decision-making because values are contested in free societies.
For some time now, I have thought that some of the conceptual claims made by capabilities are undeniable. I have nevertheless shared the concern that capabilities approaches may not be sufficiently value-neutral for widespread use in domestic policy contexts by federal agencies. A Reliability-Based Capability Approach has prompted me to reexamine that view. The article develops a mathematically rigorous method to quantify the societal impacts of certain hazards, using a capabilities approach. Though the piece is focused on hazards, I believe these methods could be extended to produce a capabilities approach to evaluate legal regulations that avoids the charge of illiberalism.
When assessing liberal concerns with capabilities approaches, it can help to distinguish between two different types of capabilities. There are some capabilities that almost everyone agrees are valuable or even necessary for a good life. I will call these “basic capabilities.” Examples would include the capability to be healthy, to avoid premature mortality, and to have shelter. Then there are other capabilities, which different people in a free society might choose to exercise in different amounts (or sometimes not at all) based on their different conceptions of the good. I will call these “non-basic capabilities.”
I see potentially useful aspects to A Reliability-Based Capability Approach when it comes to measuring the impacts of legal regulations on both basic and non-basic capabilities. The article begins with a mathematical formalism that uses vectors to represent different achieved functionings (which are valuable beings or doings) of individual persons. (A vector is just a quantity in an n-dimensional space that can be represented as an arrow with a direction and magnitude. In this case, the n dimensions reflect the n classes of achieved functionings that will be measured.) These vectors are then transformed into vectors of indices of these achieved functionings. Standard empirical methods can be used to predict the likely outcomes of hazards (or regulations, I suggest, by extension) on these indices.
The article allows for the definition of certain thresholds of “acceptability” and “tolerability” of any component of an index. It then offers a mathematical approach, based in systems analysis, which allows one to calculate the “acceptability” and “tolerability” of a predicted outcome and return a “non-acceptable” or “non-tolerable” conclusion if any predicted functioning for an individual falls below a set threshold for that type of functioning. It should be noted that “functionings,” in the language of capabilities approaches, are achieved beings or doings, whereas “capabilities” are abilities to achieve valuable beings or doings. Functionings can only be presumed to provide good proxies for capabilities when it comes to basic capabilities, which almost no one would fail to pursue if they were capable.
The authors suggest using democratic processes to determine what capabilities are valuable and what thresholds should be used to make these determinations. But there is another possibility. With suitable modification, these equations could be used to determine what thresholds of “acceptability” and “tolerability” are implied for each basic capability, within a larger group, by a proposed regulation. This might be done by combining information about the predicted average and standard deviations for each component. When it comes to basic capabilities, which everyone agrees are valuable, I believe it would provide useful information to know whether these implicit thresholds would be increased or lowered by a proposed regulation.
Consider, for example, a capabilities-based measure that is similar in spirit and might be integrated into such a framework: quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). An agency that is considering two different regulations, which decrease the overall costs of healthcare, might find that both are cost-benefit justified. One set of regulations might nevertheless be predicted to lower the implied minimal acceptability or tolerability thresholds for quality-adjusted years of life because it decreases the costs for certain luxury health services (i.e., services that some people may decide to purchase but do not extend QALYs) while making it harder for many other people, who have less financial resources, to obtain cheap health services that would greatly extend their quality-adjusted years of life. The other regulation might be predicted to raise these minimum thresholds. All else being equal, the second regulation should be preferred.
Instead of trying to decide in advance how to weigh all these factors, it might be sufficient to render all these facts transparent during the notice and comments period of a proposed regulation. Then more people could know what regulations are actually doing and could respond politically.
By contrast, cost-benefit analysis—at least as it is typically operationalized using willingness to pay to measure the relevant “costs” and “benefits”—tends to obscure some consequences of regulations. There is nothing inherently valuable about willingness to pay. Hence, reliance on this metric only makes sense if differences in willingness to pay are the best available proxies for differences in human welfare. But as the hypothetical example of healthcare in an unregulated market will now show, market prices are often poor indicators of the routes to human welfare.
The problem arises from a combination of cost-benefit analysis with wealth inequality. People who have more resources may be willing to pay relatively large amounts for some health services that do not contribute much at all to QALYs. But many poor people may be unable to afford even some basic healthcare services that are critical for their QALYs. This is not because the capability to be healthy or to avoid premature mortality is less intrinsically valuable to the poor. Nor is it because some lives are more valuable than others. People who are poor must simply make harder choices with their limited financial resources. As a result, orthodox cost-benefit analysis can count small welfare benefits to the rich more heavily than larger welfare benefits to the poor.
That mainstream cost-benefit analysis systematically favors the wealthy is well known among philosophers and economists. The language and formalisms of mainstream cost-benefit analysis nevertheless hide these consequences of regulatory choices from most people. It would be much more transparent if agencies were required to produce not only cost-benefit analyses, when proposing major regulatory changes, but also reports on the likely impacts on the thresholds of acceptability and tolerability for any basic capabilities that may be affected. It is not necessary to decide in advance what the right thresholds should be. Sunshine may often be a sufficient disinfectant.
A different solution is required when it comes to measuring the effects of regulations on non-basic capabilities. These are capabilities that different people may value differently (or not at all) in a free society. I believe that a different idea found in A Reliability-Based Capability Approach may help with this problem as well.
In particular, the article proposes using the standard deviation of indices as a way to measure the variability in achieved functionings that people exhibit with respect to different capabilities. Though the idea would need to be developed, I see in it the embryonic form of an index that could measure peoples’ effective abilities to choose between different achieved functionings and thus pursue different conceptions of the good.
An index of this kind would be just as value-neutral as cost-benefit analysis, but it would not systematically favor the wealthy. Use of it would also address another well-known limitation of cost-benefit analysis. Most people value some things—like community, friendship, and faith—that are neither sold on a market nor could maintain their value if they were. Some other goods and services—like domestic labor within a family—contribute great amounts to human welfare but are not well priced by markets because they are often freely given. Regulations that rely too heavily on cost-benefit analysis tend to overcount values that are commodified (or at least commodifiable) over values that are not. That cannot be good for a society, given everything that people actually value. An index that measures peoples’ capabilities to pursue their personal conceptions of the good, regardless of how much is commodified or commodifiable, would be extremely useful for the law.
Oct 2, 2018 W.A. Edmundson
David Adler,
The Centrist Paradox: Political Correlates of the Democratic Disconnect (May 01, 2018), available at
SSRN.
The very idea of a meaningful left-center-right political spectrum always seemed suspect to me. Many commentators have warned against conflating cultural and economic “wings.” The cultural left wants to get the state out of the bedroom (so to speak). The economic left wants to get the state into the boardroom. The cultural right wants to inject the state into the bedroom, to regulate sexual and procreative matters. The economic right wants the state out of the boardroom, sweeping away pesky regulations of the workplace and the market.
Plainly, one might be on the economic right but on the cultural left, or vice versa. It would be a mistake to try to cram these different dimensions into one. Would someone who happened to fall simultaneously on the economic left and the cultural right count as…a centrist? An outlier? (Gene Debs called socialism “Christianity in action“—where does that put him?)
Set this worry aside, and assume that correlations with, say, attitudes about immigration serve to validate the use of a one-dimensional spectrum. Extensive surveys have been conducted that ask respondents where they place themselves. Some of these surveys go on to ask about attitudes toward democracy and elections and the importance of having a strong, decisive leader unfettered by a congress or parliament. David Adler, a young researcher who recently moved from London to Athens, has looked at this data and has uncovered what he calls the “Centrist Paradox.” Anyone who is concerned about the direction democracies are taking ought to take a careful look, too.
I had always assumed that if social science places a representative person on a left-center-right political spectrum, and independently measures that person’s attachment to democratic ideals, that social science would find that people toward the extremes tend to have a lesser attachment to the norms of democracy, while people in the middle are more attached. As Adler puts it, “there is an intuition that there is an elective affinity between extreme political views and support for strongman politics to implement them.” (P. 2.) (Lenin for the left/ Franco for the Right, as it were.) No research, he finds, has bothered to test this assumption. And—shockingly—it turns out that the reverse is likelier to be true. People in the center appear to be (for the most part) the least attached to democracy.
Adler reports his analysis of data representing the U.S., the U.K., and a number of E.U. countries from 2008 and 2010-16. He says his results are robust when controlling for variables such as income, education, and age (which have been suggested as factors tending toward “populism”). He is careful to distinguish support for democratic principles from satisfaction with democratic outcomes. (P. 7.) While the left and right wings may be less happy with outcomes, it is the center—paradoxically—that is the least happy with the process itself.
The U.S. results are especially striking, and the heaviest gob-smacker of all is that “less than half of the political centrists in the United States view free elections as essential to democracy—over thirty percent less than their center-left neighbors.” (P. 4.) Free elections! This is far more disturbing than polls that indicate the Bill of Rights lacks majority support. Those amendments are meant to constrain majority power, so the majority can be expected to chafe. A Bill of Rights, like a separation of powers, is essential to liberal democracy, but not to democracy per se. But if free elections are not essential to democracy, what is? Even Hungarian Premier Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy”—not to mention a host of sham democracies—is wedded to free elections. Yet, Adler’s analysis finds that a majority of self-identified U.S. centrists rejects the almost tautological proposition that free elections are the essence of democracy.
Trying to wrap my head around what Adler seems to have uncovered, I ask myself what other commonsense assurances have to be called in for re-examination if he is right. Many assume that, in “our” democracy, the center will tend to check the excesses of any extreme candidate. The landslide losses of “far-right” Barry Goldwater to “centrist” Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and “far-left” George McGovern to “centrist” Richard Nixon in 1972, are the cautionary tales directed at “fringe” insurgencies. A polarizing candidate is supposed to frighten and activate the center, and thus lose. That’s how the system works.
But is there an as-yet untried method by which a polarizing candidate might win over the American center? Perhaps by posturing as uncommonly strong and decisive, even if— especially if!—unfashionably and unapologetically “undemocratic”? If the strong, decisive figure also has an energized base on one extreme, so much the better. (I mean, so much the worse…for our received wisdom.) A strongman with an unshakable base might find polarization to be an effective tactic for exploiting the center’s relative indifference to democratic values.
Sep 5, 2018 Barbara Levenbook
Although in most states and in the federal system, the law’s answer to the title question is “yes,” Youngjae Lee’s answer—with a qualification it will take the rest of this jot to explain—is “no.” To be more precise, his answer, surprisingly, is that it depends on the issue that is liable to disagreement. Making certain assumptions, Lee argues that unanimity is the best rule to adopt for juries reaching decisions about empirical facts in criminal cases. In these circumstances, requiring unanimity among jurors is both most faithful to the beyond-the-reasonable-doubt requirement for conviction and most faithful to the justification of this requirement. But juries must make decisions on all of the elements of crimes (and sometimes on affirmative defenses, I might add); to do this, often juries must make decisions on issues that are at least partly evaluative. (Lee calls them “moral issues.”) Some of his examples come from the core of criminal law: rape (reasonable belief in consent or a reasonable expectation that defendant recognize lack of consent) or homicide (depraved-heart murder, reckless homicide, self-defense). For these decisions, Lee argues, unanimity is not the rule to adopt.
He arrives at these conclusions by assuming a principle of rationality that has lately attracted attention from epistemologists: the “equal weight view.” That view says that if there is disagreement among persons with equal cognitive capabilities and equal access to information (“epistemic peers”), each belief is equally reasonable, and so, has equal weight. Each person should adjust his belief in the direction of those with whom he or she disagrees. In a simple case of 11-1 disagreement where eleven have the highest confidence about the defendant’s guilt, the equal weight view requires that they lower their confidence. Under some circumstances, lowering by the eleven results in an insufficient average level of confidence among all the jurors—insufficient to satisfy the requirement of being beyond a reasonable doubt—so a unanimous verdict of not guilty should be reached. If the sole dissenter is not very confident in his opinion for acquittal, the average belief in the probability of guilt may remain high enough to satisfy the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt and so, a unanimous verdict of guilty should be reached. But not if the level of confidence satisfying the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard is very stringent. Then any amount of dissent regarding conviction leads on the equal weight view to acquittal.
Lee then adds other assumptions. One is that jurors are likely to fail to apply the equal weight view consistently—i.e., they do not always adjust their confidence levels in the face of disagreement with those they recognize as epistemic peers. When this happens, he shows, assuming the equal weight view is correct, a supermajority voting standard will sometimes result in a false conviction. A unanimity rule would lead to either an acquittal or a mistrial, due to a hung jury. Something similar happens under Lee’s next assumption: that it is likely that jurors who are very confident of a defendant’s guilt and applying the equal weight rule will not recognize dissenters as epistemic peers. In both cases, given the undesirability of convicting the factually innocent, the unanimity rule leads to better results when jurors disagree. It generates decisions that approximate ones that jurors would reach if they were more rational, Lee claims. Plus, it is a way of enforcing the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt requirement.
But only for the finding of factual matters. On most of Lee’s earlier assumptions, in an 11-1 split on moral issues, the equal weight thesis would require acquittal. But moral disagreement is common. Lee thinks many splits among jurors on moral issues, with various numbers of dissenters, would, on the equal weight view, have to end in acquittals.
The mechanism that generates this outcome, however, seems wrong. It is inappropriate for disagreeing jurors to alter their opinions on moral issues in accordance with the equal weight view. Lee contends that doing so conflicts with the justification for the criminal jury: the jury reflects the community morality and is the community “conscience.” Lee takes the latter word seriously and tries to explain why respecting a juror’s conscience conflicts with instructing the juror to revise a moral judgment in the face of controversy. Simply put, in moral disagreement, it is not rational to treat another’s conscience and one’s own as equally reasonable.
I don’t think he convincingly pinpoints why, for reasons too lengthy to explain here. However, the case for the inappropriateness of an alternation-and-unanimity requirement for moral decisions can be strengthened. If there is a moral truth to which the community is committed, and if exposing that commitment requires advanced moral skills, then the alteration requirement is inappropriate; for rarely will there be twelve jurors with equal moral abilities. It is unlikely that disagreeing jurors are epistemic peers, contrary to one of Lee’s assumptions. (Lee has misgivings about this not-epistemic-peers response.) If, on the other hand, the question of community morality is about the application of a social norm, it is likely the jurors are epistemic peers. However, social norms are indeterminate at points. (Lee remarks that the evaluative terms in question are “vague.”) If the disputed issue falls into this region, a decision must be made, a precisifying. One can argue for the appropriateness of a majority, or a supermajority, on democratic grounds, perhaps; however, given that there are always deviants from social norms, there is no reason to require unanimity.
I said that Lee answers “no” to the title question, with a qualification. Lee ends his article by suggesting that if beyond a reasonable doubt requires the equal weight view (recall that he has made assumptions that are merely plausible), then it may turn out that jury decisions on moral issues should not be required to be beyond a reasonable doubt, after all.
Jul 24, 2018 Dennis Patterson
Legal positivism—or one style of doing positivist legal theory—is dead. Of course, there are different types of legal positivists in the world. For example, some legal positivists take a page out of the book of their opposite number, natural law theorists. But natural law theory —belief in a single right moral answer to legal questions—is going nowhere. To believe otherwise is to evince embarrassingly bad aesthetic judgment. Better to revive/reframe legal positivism. The way to do that is to return to the work of the master, Hans Kelsen, for it is only through a rethinking of Kelsen that legal positivism can be saved from its most ardent supporters in Oxbridge and North America.
This is the opening gambit to one of the most intriguing books in legal theory in recent memory. Alexander Somek—who has written two brilliant books on EU law and an equally impressive book on global constitutionalism —has produced a book every Anglophone legal theorist should read. To be sure, Somek writes in a style most Anglophone legal philosophers will find off-putting. While references to Hegel and Fichte abound, I have never read anyone who has a comparable command of the secondary literature in Analytic Legal Theory. Somek has read everything (in legal theory, analytic philosophy, German philosophy and more) and his analysis of the work of contemporary analytic legal theorists is itself ample reward for the time needed to consider his arguments.
The book is composed of six chapters, each of which contains small subsections denominated by themes (many expressed in one or two words). Like his Anglo-American contemporaries, Somek wants to elucidate the nature of law. Eschewing social facts (Hartian and Razian positivism) and constructive interpretation (Dworkin), Somek maintains that “[l]aw is first and foremost a relation among people.” (P. 20.) Somek defends this claim with accounts of legal knowledge and sources of law that can broadly be described as “Kelsenian” in inspiration, if not style.
“Knowing the law is a business.” (P. 1.) Thus begins Somek’s account of the nature of law. Of course, money and power surround law. But law can be free of their undue or corrupt influence. The vehicle for this, Somek avers, is truth: “[o]nly by virtue of truth can legal knowledge emancipate itself from the undue influence of money and power.” (P. 2.) In addition to truth, there is a fact of the matter about what the law “really is.” (Id.) Thus, objectivity about law is possible but this is attained only if we understand what the law really is about.
Somek believes sources are an important dimension of the nature of law. But his conception of the role of sources in generating a concept of law is rather different from what one usually finds in the literature. Sources of law connect people through creation of a legal relation (e.g., buyer and seller). It is through these relations that agents mediate their presence with the world. Knowledge of the law is subjective (in the sense of individual agency): all sources of law (precedents, statutes, professional commentary) “give rise to law while drawing on other sources.” (P. 7.) While knowledge of the law is law’s knowledge of itself, “[i]ts point is to attain clarity in singular cases.” (Id.) Finally, when we invoke the law we do so through legal relations the categories of which mediate our relationship to others.
Somek describes his approach to legal theory as “constructivist” about law’s objectivity. He wants to convince us that modern Anglophone positivism errs when it conceives of objectivity as a correct understanding of existing legal materials (think of Raz’s account of law’s authority). Knowledge is knowledge “of the law by the law, that is, of a prior source by a later source.” (P. 80.) This view of sources is misleading, for sources are just “devices that permit us to know what the law is.” (Id.) Recall Dworkin: law (principles) is a matter of “a sense of appropriateness developed in the profession and the public over time.” (P. 4, citing and quoting Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1978).)
Nevertheless, a science of law is possible. A claim to legal knowledge “bearing the stamp of approval by the law necessarily flows from sources of law.” (P. 89.) But legal sources alone are not law, any more than law is the union of primary and secondary rules (according to Hart). Law is more than rules: for one thing, sources require elaboration. Systematic elaboration is as much law as its sources. Elaborations, like cases, require endorsement, specifically the assent of players in the practice: “[j]oined practice is the warrant for the shared belief that is a social fact.” (P. 95.) Not surprisingly, Somek sees the common law not as a system of legal knowledge, but “a system of endorsements.” (P. 104.)
The most intriguing chapter of this interesting book is the fourth one, on The Legal Relation. Somek’s goal in this chapter is to rethink the relationship between morality and law. Through a synthesis of Hegel and John Mackie—together with a clever hypothetical involving proper behavior at classical music concerts—Somek makes some insightful comments on the nature of reasons for action and how best to understand the role of authority in law. In contrast to Raz, whose widely-endorsed “service conception” of authority sees substantive reasons for actions displaced by law’s authority, Somek argues that the authority of law “that emerges from the legal relation is an authority of rights.” (P. 125.) I cannot police the poor conduct of fellow concertgoers because the law prohibits such an intervention. As such, law requires that I yield to another’s reasons for action even as I disdain the perspective which gives rise to it. As Darwall (who is cited and quoted) puts it, second-personal authority is authority to have wants respected. Authority, it turns out, is much more complex (morally and politically) than a technocratic (Somek’s word) account of the concept might indicate.
In the space of such a short review, it is difficult to convey the depth of argument in this engaging book. Somek’s sustained treatment of the secondary literature in contemporary analytic legal theory (Late Legal Positivism) is not to be missed. Somek is a hard-core positivist: there is a fact of the matter about what the law is. As always, his commitment to truth about law sits uneasily with his nod to the work of people like Stanley Fish and his embrace of a skeptical reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise compelling and engaging work.
Jun 27, 2018 Michael Green
Christopher M. Newman,
Hohfeld and the Theory of In Rem Rights: An Attempted Mediation in
The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
Rights come in different types, and the failure to distinguish among them can lead one into errors. So argued Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, who—in two articles published in the Yale Law Journal in 1913 and 1917—offered a highly influential categorization of rights by type. This marvelous collection of essays, edited by Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman and Henry Smith, assesses the Hohfeldian legacy. I’ll largely focus on Christopher Newman’s contribution, which I found particularly helpful. Some property scholars have criticized Hohfeld’s approach as unable to account for the distinctive character of property rights. Newman argues, I think rightly, that the two are compatible.
That Hohfeld was correct to distinguish rights by their type is undisputed. The right that I have to be present on Blackacre by virtue of owning it and the right that I have as a boxer to punch my opponent are clearly different in structure. As Hohfeld would describe it, my right to punch is a privilege only, whereas my right to be on Blackacre includes privileges and claims. X has a privilege with respect to Y that X perform act φ if and only if, by φ-ing, X violates no duty to Y. X has a claim with respect to Y that Y φ if and only if Y has a duty to X to φ. I have a privilege to punch my opponent, because, by punching him, I do him no wrong. But this “right” to punch includes no claim with respect to him: he has no duty to let himself be punched. My right to be on Blackacre, by contrast, includes not only privileges (by being on Blackacre, I violate no duty to you) but also claims (you cannot interfere with my being on Blackacre, for example, by expelling me from it). (For the record, Hohfeld identified two other types of right—powers and immunities—and would say that my rights with respect to Blackacre include them too, but I leave these details aside.)
The cardinal Hohfeldian sin is to assume that a privilege is the same as (or necessarily entails) a claim. Courts really do commit this sin sometimes. Consider the reasoning of the Irish Supreme Court in Fleming v Ireland. (I borrow this example from an excellent article on the Hohfeldian framework by Luis Duarte d’Almeida.) The question the Court faced was whether people can be criminally prosecuted for assisting someone in committing suicide. They cannot be prosecuted if they have a right (read privilege) to assist. But the Court wrongly concluded that no such privilege exists, because if it did it would follow that those possessing the privilege would also have a right (read claim) against the government to defense in their exercise of their privilege. The government would not merely be prohibited from punishing them but also obligated to protect them when they assisted someone’s suicide. Since no such claim existed, the Court concluded that no privilege existed either. But that’s like concluding that a boxer cannot have a privilege to punch his opponent because his opponent has no duty to let himself be punched. That the Court made this mistake does not mean that its conclusion that there is no privilege to assist suicide was wrong, of course. But the conclusion must be justified by substantive arguments, not false claims of deontic necessity.
Although most everyone agrees that Hohfeld’s work is an important starting point in thinking clearly about rights, there is plenty of room for criticism. To bring up one that has always bothered me: Should a privilege be defined purely negatively, as the absence of a duty? The negative definition makes it impossible to distinguish between Jane, who has no legal duties with respect to anyone because she is subject to the legislative jurisdiction of no lawmaker, and Martha, who has no legal duties with respect to anyone because she has been privileged by a lawmaker to act however she wants. In addition, the negative definition makes certain normative conflicts impossible. Nothing about the Hohfeldian framework excludes conflicts of duties (and their correlative claims). Joe can have a duty with respect to Fred to wash Fred’s car and a duty with respect to Fred to not wash Fred’s car. (Perhaps a lawmaker obligated Joe to do both.) But the negative definition of privileges makes conflicts of duties and privileges impossible. If Joe has a duty with respect to Fred to wash Fred’s car, it simply can’t be that Joe has a privilege with respect to Fred to not wash Fred’s car, for the privilege is defined as the absence of the duty. But if duties can conflict with other duties, why can’t they conflict with privileges? Why can’t there be a normative conflict because a lawmaker put a duty on Joe to wash Fred’s car and gave Joe a privilege not to?
Property scholars have focused their criticism on two aspects of the Hohfeldian framework. The first is the granularity of property rights for Hohfeld—the fact that property rights can be individuated into countless privileges, claims, powers, and immunities. This appears to give support to the bundle-of-rights approach to property, which is sometimes understood as the view that the bundle is fundamentally arbitrary. The second is the correlativity of rights under Hohfeld’s framework—the idea that a person’s claim is necessarily correlated with another person’s duty, a person’s privilege with another person’s no-claim, and so on. The property scholars argue that this ignores the way that property rights are in rem, that is, focused on everyone’s relationships to things, instead of individuals’ relationships to one another.
Newman argues that the granularity of rights for Hohfeld can be defended if we understand him as not seeking to offer any account of why rights hang together normatively. To say that property is a bundle of rights is not to say that the bundle is arbitrary. There can be a good story about why those rights belong together (indeed, Newman offers such a story).
Newman’s response concerning Hohfeld’s correlativity thesis is similar. It is unquestionably true that Hohfeld was a vocal opponent of the idea that property rights are directed at things. Like all rights, property rights hold only between individual rights-bearers. To speak of a right in rem is simply a misleading way of describing “a large class of fundamentally similar yet separate rights, actual and potential, residing in a single person (or single group of persons) but availing respectively against persons constituting a very large and indefinite class of people.”
But Newman argues that the in rem character of property rights is actually compatible with the Hohfeldian approach, because it concerns the normative grounding of property rights. It is indeed true that property rights serve a distinctive function, different from the in personam rights of contract or tort. It is essential to have legal rules whose existence and content can be decided simply by looking at things rather than individuals’ relationships to one another. Property rights serve this role. Hohfeld can accept this normative grounding while still insisting that the rights it justifies always involve relationships between individuals.
Thanks to Luís Duarte d’Almeida, Christopher Newman, and James Stern for helpful comments.
Cite as: Michael Green,
Hohfeld and Property, JOTWELL
(June 27, 2018) (reviewing Christopher M. Newman,
Hohfeld and the Theory of In Rem Rights: An Attempted Mediation in
The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld (forthcoming 2018), available at SSRN),
https://juris.jotwell.com/hohfeld-and-property/.
May 30, 2018 Brian Tamanaha
Jurisprudence usually changes gradually and imperceptibly, with large-scale shifts recognizable only with the benefit of hindsight. Seldom does it occur that a single piece signals a dramatic turn in the field. A prime example of a transformation-signaling piece is Karl Llewellyn’s A Realistic Jurisprudence—the Next Stop, announcing the emergence of legal realism. Llewellyn’s article did not itself produce the transformation; rather, he identified a generational shift in jurisprudential thought that was already taking place, and he sought to bring attention to this shift and the themes around which it revolved. The article (and its follow-up, Some Realism About Realism: Responding to Dean Pound) served to crystallize and give a label to what theretofore had been an inchoate development. Following this article, legal realism would be criticized, debated, and elaborated. A new school of jurisprudential thought thus was born.
In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence (2017), edited by Nicole Roughan and Andrew Halpin, might turn out to be another transformation-signaling piece in jurisprudence, though its impact will not be known until a generation has passed. There are several reasons to think it might achieve this stature. For one, like Llewellyn’s piece, this book has a catchy descriptive title that dubs the nascent field “pluralist jurisprudence.” Furthermore, the volume contains ambitious original essays by established, as well as rising, jurisprudential figures from different parts of the world: Nicole Roughan and Andrew Halpin (Introduction and The Promises and Pursuits of Pluralist Jurisprudence), Roger Cotterrell (Do Lawyers Need a Theory of Legal Pluralism?), Maksymilian Del Mar (Legal Reasoning in Pluralist Jurisprudence), Cormac Mac Amhlaigh (Pluralising Constitutional Pluralism), Ralf Michaels (Law and Recognition—Toward a Relational Concept of Law), Sanne Takema (The Many Uses of Law), Joseph Raz (Why the State?), Detlef von Daniels (A Genealogical Perspective on Pluralist Jurisprudence), Stefan Sciaraffa (Two Conceptions of Pluralist Jurisprudence), Neil Walker (The Gap Between Global Law and Global Justice), Margaret Davies (Plural Pluralities of Law), Kirsten Anker (Postcolonial Jurisprudence and the Pluralist Turn), and Martin Krygier (Legal Pluralism and the Value of the Rule of Law). As their titles indicate, the essays cover a range of topics in relation to legal pluralism.
A central organizing theme of the collection, write Roughan and Halpin, is the contrast between monist and pluralist jurisprudence:
[T]raditional jurisprudence is municipal or state-centric jurisprudence. Even if it touches upon international law, it does so from a state centric-Westphalian perspective of viewing international law through the agency or authority of states. It remains, in that sense, monist. By contrast, pluralist jurisprudence involves the recognition of non-state law in a way that is independent of both the agency and the authority of states.
Pluralist jurisprudence recognizes the co-existence of multiple legal forms in social arenas with various sorts of relationships to state law and other forms of law, from integration, to mutual recognition, to fully autonomous and independent co-existence, to outright conflict, and further variations. In addition to state law, these co-existing forms of law mainly include indigenous or customary law, religious law, international law, transnational law, and human rights law.
Another reason to think this volume might signal a transition in jurisprudence is that, like Llewellyn’s piece, it has been preceded by a significant body of jurisprudential work focused on plural legal phenomena. Concepts of Law (2015), edited by Sean P. Donlan and Lukas Heckendorn Urscheler, focuses on legal pluralism from comparative, jurisprudential, and social scientific perspectives. Two recent jurisprudential works that discuss legal pluralism in connection with transnational law are Nicole Roughan’s Authorities: Conflict, Cooperation, and Transnational Legal Theory (2013) and Detlev von Daniels’s The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective (2010). Works on the topic by analytical jurisprudents include Keith Culver and Michael Giudice’s Legalities Borders: An Essay in General Jurisprudence (2010) and Emmanuel Melissaris’s Legal Theory and the Space for Legal Pluralism (2009). Early social legal theory works on legal pluralism include William Twining’s Globalisation and Legal Theory (2000) and my book, A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society (2001). To the foregoing list of books can be added several dozen theoretical articles on legal pluralism published in the past three decades.
A further reason to think In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence is a transformation-marking piece is that, like Llewellyn’s article, the topics taken up within pluralist jurisprudence relate to pressing contemporary legal, political, economic, cultural and social problems and phenomena. Previous generations of Western legal theorists arguably could disregard or overlook religious law, customary law, and indigenous law as marginal legal phenomena not worthy of serious jurisprudential attention—through these are primary forms of law in many parts of the world—but major legal transformations wrought by contemporary globalization can no longer be ignored. A pluralistic jurisprudence is better equipped to deal with the issues of the day than a jurisprudence built exclusively around the state.
Perhaps the most telling indication that this collection reflects a shift in jurisprudence is Joseph Raz’s contribution, Why the State? Raz acknowledges other forms of law, including “international law, or the law of organizations like the European Union, but also Canon Law, Sharia law, the law of native nations, the rules and regulations governing the activities of voluntary associations, or those of legally recognized corporations, and more[.]” Jurisprudence heretofore has focused almost exclusively on state law, he asserts, because until recently the state has been “the most extensive law-like system that is independent or free from external constraints.” Today, however, state law is increasingly subject to external legal constraints by intrusions from transnational law, international law, and human rights law. Raz concludes: the “exclusive concentration on state law was, it now turns out, never justified, and is even less justified today.” This essay represents a remarkable turnaround for Raz, who for decades has advanced a universalistic theory of law built on the state law model.
Whether this collection marks a genuine shift in jurisprudence cannot be known until some time has passed. The contours of what a pluralistic jurisprudence might or should look like are unclear and the contributions to this collection raise many complex questions that go unresolved. Upon completing this volume, a reader may well be left with a disorienting sense of conceptual messiness that recognition of legal pluralism brings, and instead long for the relative clarity of the focus on state law. Discarding this longstanding dominant focus sets jurisprudents adrift with no obvious replacement or mooring. Rather than new approaches, it may turn out, existing jurisprudential theories (like legal positivism) can account for legal pluralism with relatively minor adjustments. Or perhaps entirely novel jurisprudential frameworks must be developed. Whatever occurs, this collection leaves little doubt that jurisprudents must now seriously consider and account for other coexisting legal forms besides state law.
Apr 26, 2018 W.A. Edmundson
This concise and lucid book “is a summary of our current collective understanding of the method by which some societies decide who would govern them.…” (P. VIII.) The author is a professor of politics and economics at NYU, and an esteemed authority in the field of political economy. The book could not be timelier: many of us simply cannot understand how elections got us to where we are now. Bafflement can beget both anger and apathy. Much of the collective social-scientific understanding Przeworski relates will be deflating even for those who have already cast aside illusions. Nonetheless, he urges us to keep on bothering.
The book begins with a reminder that “elections are a modern phenomenon.” (P. 13.) The first national legislative election was held in 1788, to the United States Congress. Since then, elections have become an almost universal norm: today, “all but a handful of countries have legislatures elected by universal [qualified] suffrage and chief executives either elected in popular elections or indirectly by elected parliaments.” (P. 17.) The elections boom was accompanied by, and surely to some degree motivated by, the Rousseavian aspiration to reconcile humankind’s innate freedom with the fact that coercive government is here to stay. This yearning for self-government finds its expression in the rituals of popular elections.
Election rituals vary widely in their forms. Przeworki explains the differences between parliamentary, presidential, and “semi-presidential” electoral systems, and between proportional representation and first-past-the-post methods of composing a legislative assembly. The latter rules tend to determine how many political parties are viable: according to “Duverger’s Law,” presidential systems tend to be two-party, and parliamentary systems to be multi-party. The United States is unusual in using first-past-the-post in a presidential system, and unique among presidential systems in its indirect mode of electing presidents. The upshot is the permanent possibility of a divided government in which a legislative majority opposes a president, and the further possibility that such a president lacks the support of a popular plurality even when elected.
Madison wrote, in Federalist #10, that “the dangers to the holders of property can not be disguised, if they are undefended against a majority without property,” or even against a majority with less property than it thinks fair. This, Przeworki adds, is one thing on which conservatives and socialists have long agreed. Election systems have been devised in various ways to defang the threat while preserving the myth of popular —rather than propertied—sovereignty. The obvious expedient of excluding the unpropertied from the franchise has almost disappeared. Over the two and a half centuries of the electoral era, universal adult suffrage has steadily become the norm all across the globe. But economic inequality persists, and increases, even as formal political equality has become the norm. Why?
Various devices, such as indirect rather than direct election of representatives, tend to entrench incumbents and, with them, the status quo. Counter-majoritarian institutions—such as the presidential veto and judicial review— dampen majority power. The historical trend is toward constitutional judicial review and central-bank independence of the electorate. Another device is a super-majoritarian voting requirement, which bicameralism, in effect, is. Przeworski reports an estimate that congressional legislation needs to have 75% support across the two chambers in order to succeed. (Compare Article V’s requirement a valid constitutional amendment must be ratified by that three-quarters of the states.) With caveats, Przeworski offers “a conjecture about the mechanisms that drive this history. Given the extant trenches, those in power make concessions either when they face a foreboding threat from without or when some of them expect to improve their competitive position by finding allies among those currently excluded [and] whenever particular trenches are conquered, the elites find substitutes to protect their interests. These cycles are repeated over and over.” (Pp. 45-46.) Przeworski does not mention mass incarceration, penal disenfranchisement, and voter ID laws as instances of these obstacles, but he does note the curious fact that of the modern industrialized nations only the US holds national elections on a workday.
Incumbents win, on average, four times out of five. Rejecting more benign explanations, Przeworski suggests that the advantages of incumbency itself account for their success in getting themselves re-elected. He recounts an experience he had one winter living Chicago, trying to get authorities to free his car from the ice encasing it. Calling the City got no response, so his wife called the Democratic precinct captain. “He was at our door in minutes, pointing out that we had not voted in the last municipal election.” (P. 58.) Przeworski instantly gave the expected assurances. Problem solved. Obviously, this anecdote does not itself explain the incumbent advantage. Partisan “clientism” is not so blatant in other US cities; but studies of campaign contributions show that there is an incumbent advantage here, too. Is contribution the reported “pro quo” that indicates an implicit “quid” that the public at large can only guess at?
Przeworski is cautious about the widely held view that money in politics is mainly what stands between us and more representative government: “to date, no consensus has been reached regarding the effectiveness of campaign spending on vote shares.” (P. 65.) Nevertheless, he endorses his colleague Ann Harvey’s finding that “removal of state limits on campaign financing in the United States led to increased Republican vote shares and the election of more conservative candidates.” (P. 66.) But the real problem is structural: “Private ownership of productive resources limits the range of outcomes that can ensue from the democratic process … crucial economic decisions, those affecting employment and investment, are a private prerogative.” (P. 74.) Campaign spending limits don’t touch that.
How do democracies and autocracies compare in terms of economic performance? Autocracies tend to occupy the tails of the bell curve: “while the fastest-growing economies tend to be poor autocracies, so are the economic basket cases.” (P. 101.) Przeworski reports that at any given level of total output, democracies exhibit higher wages better life-expectancy, and lower economic volatility. But he sees an ominous development in the combination of stagnant median income growth and dramatically increased inequality in the democracies: “the erosion of the belief in intergradational [sic] progress may well be historically unprecedented and its political consequences are ominous.” (P. 99.) How have elections allowed this to occur?
Assume majority rule is in force, and the distribution of wealth is on the voting agenda. If we assume further that everyone votes according to self-interest and nothing else (i.e., no one cares what her relative share is), the so-called “median-voter theorem” tells us that the resulting distribution of wealth will tend to equate to that of the the voter whose wealth is such that half of the electorate has more and half has less. Thus, “the coexistence of universal suffrage with economic inequality is hard to fathom.” (P. 104.) Yet, surprisingly, “at every level of per capita income, the extent of inequality is not lower in democracies than in autocracies.” (P. 105.) And he reports the astonishing further fact that although “democratic governments redistribute more income … as income inequality increases from very low to intermediate levels, …they redistribute less as inequality increases once it is already high.” (P. 105 and Fig. 10.1) In other words, across a range of different democracies, low levels of inequality tend to call forth mitigating efforts to dampen further inequality, but high inequality leads to ever higher inequality. Dismissing various other explanations, Przeworski concludes that “the main culprit is that people are not politically equal in economically unequal societies” —meaning, in economically unequal “democratic” societies. (P. 106) Merely formal political equality does not prevent massive inequality of political influence in conditions of high economic inequality; and as substantive political inequality increases, so too does the economic inequality that begat it: “a vicious circle.” (P. 111.)
Elections neither presuppose, nor do they tend to promote, either political or economic equality. As economic inequality increases, elections do less and less to brake it. Nonetheless, elections make civic peace possible. How is this? Przeworski observes that elections facilitate peaceful transitions of power only if the stakes are not too high for the incumbent. “Just imagine that the … incumbent fears that if he loses the forthcoming election, he will exit the office through a window.” (P. 49.) Competitive elections presuppose more than tolerating opposition: they also presuppose that the incumbent may relinquish power without anxiety. Ordinary politics must be low-stakes politics, in this sense. Once the election habit has taken hold, it becomes stronger with each cycle. The “outs” know their turn will come and the “ins” know that if turned out they will be allowed to win themselves back in. So long as the populace also retains its faith in “intergradational progress,” the electoral stakes stay manageably low for all, and the election habit strengthens with repetition.
But, as Przeworski indicates, confidence in intergradational progress is eroding in the western democracies. And his analysis suggests a latent dilemma. The opposition, to be genuine, must give voice to discontent; and, to be effective, it must stoke discontent. But the election habit is based on an unspoken promise of amnesty for the incumbent rascal. Otherwise, an incumbent, who faces the prospect of prison for perceived crimes, will self-defensively misuse the incumbent’s advantage to rig (if not abort) the election process. Where amnesty is the norm, as it must be to keep the stakes low, elections can do little to check top-level official corruption and simony, which can be expected ever to increase unless some breaking point exists. On the other hand, once the amnesty norm is breached, elections cease to be the low-stakes affairs that orderly transitions of power presuppose.
Przeworki, in concluding, reassuringly dismisses the possibility of democracy collapsing in wealthy countries where the election habit has taken hold. But he is concerned about “deterioration” —“although we should not be desperate, we should also not be sanguine. Something profound is going on.” (P. 132). Anyone who shares this concern would do well to bother with this illuminating book.
