Suchergebnisse

The denial of voting rights to certain types of persons continues to be a moral problem of practical significance. The disenfranchisement of persons with mental impairments, minors, non-citizen residents, non-resident citizens, and criminal offenders is a matter of controversy. How should we think morally about electoral exclusions? What should we conclude about these particular cases? This book proposes a set of principles, called the Critical Suffrage Doctrine, that defies conventional beliefs on the legitimate denial of the franchise.

In you had no other choice, which of the following two systems would you prefer to appoint a legislative assembly? One is he enfranchisement lottery (EL). Roughly, it is a scheme whereby a random sample of the population that would be enfranchised under universal suffrage is drawn prior to every election and compulsorily votes after participating in a program designed to provide ample information about the alternatives on the ballot (see Lopez-Guerra, 2011). The other system is lottery voting (LV). In his commentary to my article, Ben Saunders (2012: pp.1) describes it as follows: after votes have been compulsorily cast under universal suffrage, 'rather than the majority winning automatically, a single, randomly selected vote determines the outcome'. Saunders contends that LV is preferable to EL. In what follows, I challenge this claim. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This article compares the 'enfranchisement lottery', a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the 'one person, one vote' principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose.