The obesity problem as a challenge to liberal political theory

Policy Herding as a Challenge to Political Persuasion∗

Can rationally ignorant voters and informed politicians lead to persistently inefficient policies in a democracy? A long tradition of thought in political science and economics has answered negatively, due to the averaging out of randomly uninformed voters or persuasion attempts in a competitive setting. Rather, explanations for the persistence of inefficient policies has focused on interest gr...

Geertz’s Challenge: Is It Possible to Be a Robust Cultural Pluralist and a Dedicated Political Liberal at the Same Time?

We seem to be in need of a new variety of politics, a politics which does not regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much irrationality, archaic and ingenerate, to be suppressed or transcended . . . . It depends on developing a less simplistically demonizing, blankly negative attitude toward it as a relic of some savage or some early stage of human existen...

POlitical theOry as a VOcatiOn

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...

Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: Liberal consociation as political prescription

Democracies have two basic choices for managing ethnic, national, and religious diversity. They may seek to construct a single all-embracing public identity through “ integration ” or try to accommodate dual or multiple public identities through “ consociation. ” These are the two dominant, broad-based prescriptions that are offered for addressing the confl ict in Iraq. In this article, we argu...

Liberal trade laws linked to obesity.