‘A Liberal Defence of Compulsory Voting’: Some Reasons for Scepticism

McDowell on Reasons, Externalism and Scepticism

This formulation of content externalism is very weak, in that most content externalists will want to be more robust—and, of course, more specific—in their construal of the role that environmental factors can play in determining the content of mental states, and will typically take environmental factors to be relevant to the determination of the content of just about any mental state. Neverthele...

Compulsory Voting and Income Inequality

What difference does it make if the state makes people vote? The question is central to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy, and to contemporary policy debates in a variety of countries over what actions states should take to encourage electoral participation. By focusing on a rare case of abolishing compulsory voting in Venezuela, we show that not forcing p...

Republican Liberty and Compulsory Voting

This paper starts from four observations: (1) voter turnout is declining in established democracies; (2) low turnout means socio-economically unequal turnout; (3) compulsory voting is an effective means to increase turnout; (4) even low-turnout countries, however, have neither introduced nor even contemplated a legal obligation to vote. A closer look at the arguments against compulsory voting s...

Government of the People: A Case for Compulsory Voting

Some Desiderata for Liberal Supertrees

Although a variety of supertree methods has been proposed, our understanding of these methods is limited. In turn, this limits the potential for biologists who seek to construct supertrees to make informed choices among the available methods. In this chapter we distinguish between supertree methods that offer a conservative synthesis of the relationships that are agreed upon or uncontradicted b...