It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal – that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding – reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.
A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to cheat on behalf of their clients. Ho
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Proportional representation is often thought a democratic ideal. But whatever proportional representation's virtues in ordinary politics, it is poorly suited to sustaining democratic legitimacy in what might, speaking loosely, be called constitutional politics. Proportional representation may fairly balance citizens' views concerning incremental policy innovation. But proportional representation succeeds less well at uniting individual citizens' wills into a sovereign decision concerning the basic structure of the social contract. This is not just an abstract problem. Many of the world's most mature democracies (including especially in Europe) face constitutional choices in this loose sense-choices concerning the scope and character of their political orders. At the same time, citizens of the mature democracies are losing confidence in the democratic practices and institutions through which these and other constitutional decisions must inevitably be made. The mismatch between proportional representation and constitutional politics contributes to the current crisis of democratic legitimacy in Europe and, surprisingly, also in the United States. European democracies' explicit embrace of proportional representation makes it natural for the argument to take up the European case. The American case is included in part for its own sake, as the nature and even the existence of an American drift towards de facto proportional representation is not widely appreciated. The American case is also included because it might introduce novel ideas to this Working Paper Series' European audience, which will naturally have attended only casually to recent American developments.
AbstractMembers of the US Congress held over 25,000 town hall meetings over the last eight years, and yet we know very little about the role that these events play in American politics. In this article, we present new data on congressional town hall meetings held in the 114th to 117th Congresses (2015–2022) to explore why politicians hold such meetings. In short, we do not find consistent evidence that electoral vulnerability drives legislators to their districts. Nor do we find support for claims of a zero‐sum tradeoff between lawmaking and district representation. However, members of the president's opposition party clearly and consistently host more town hall meetings, suggesting that party messaging may be at the heart of this often‐overlooked congressional behavior.
Abstract Foreign aid has served as an important policy tool for centuries, yet international relations research essentially treats it as a novel, post-World War II phenomenon. We argue that documenting aid-like activities in earlier historical periods helps shed new light on the systemic political dynamics of aid giving. We introduce a framework that links aid giving to the status quo in international politics and populate the framework with a diverse set of historical and contemporary cases, including Western and non-Western donors. Our analysis reveals striking similarities between the ways in which donor governments from diverse regions, historical periods, and international systems have utilised aid and other forms of concessional finance to pursue international political goals. Our findings suggest that by considering the pre-Marshall Plan roots of aid researchers can more effectively link foreign aid provision to rising power dynamics, international formal and informal hierarchies, and other research agendas in international relations. Our analysis also points to the need for greater attention to non-Western and pre-World War II evidence in understanding the link between aid and systems of international relations that have been less prevalent in the post-Marshall Plan era.
We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual-level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff-pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover the underlying preferences for giving (trade-offs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others). Two further experiments augment the analysis. An extensive elaboration employs three-person budget sets to distinguish preferences for giving from social preferences (trade-offs between the payoffs of others). And an intensive elaboration employs step-shaped sets to distinguish between behaviors that are compatible with well-behaved preferences and those compatible only with not well-behaved cases. (JEL C72, D64)
