Utilitarianism and other aggregationist moral theories view the public interest or the general welfare as an aggregate of individual goods. But critics of these theories question whether there is adequate justification for employing the concept of an aggregate social good. How are we supposed to sum up individual interests? Is it even possible to compare the utilities of different people or to assign values to individual utilities that can be added or subtracted? If not, how is the general good to be aggregated? Critics have also raised concerns about the aggregative approach in ethics - concerns about its implications for distributive justice, individual liberty and democratic institutions. The essays in this volume explore these issues and address related questions. Some of them examine specific objections to aggregation, others analyze the very idea of a social good or social welfare. Other essays discuss the application of aggregative principles to particular problems.
How Political Parties Respond focuses specifically on the question of interest aggregation. Do parties today perform that function? If so, how? If not, in what different ways do they seek to show them
"Without question, the 1902 Pirates aggregation was the greatest of those three squads. This definitive historical account examines the record-breaking 1902 Pittsburgh season, the politics that shaped
This book addresses the question of why a party system with a modest number of nationally oriented political parties emerges in some democracies but not others. The number of parties and nationalization are the product of coordination between voters, candidates, and party leaders within local electoral districts and coordination among candidates and elites across districts. Candidates and voters can do and do coordinate locally in response to electoral incentives, but coordination across districts, or aggregation, often fails in developing democracies. A key contribution of this book is the development and testing of a theory of aggregation incentives that focuses on the payoff to being a large party and the probability of capturing that payoff. The book relies on in-depth case studies of Thailand and the Philippines, and on large-n analysis to establish its arguments.
An understanding of the origins of earnings distributions is of central importance for any public policy which has the aim of combating economic inequality. The aim of this book is to provide a satisfactory theoretical foundation which could serve as the rational basis for such policies. The approach, strongly influenced by human capital theory, is especially novel in that it permits individual analyses at three interconnecting levels of aggregation using the same basic microeconomic model: the level of earnings distribution within age groups; the level of the overall earnings distribution across all age groups; and the distribution of lifetime earnings. The analysis demonstrates the interdependence between age composition, inequality, and public distribution policy. It also addresses the question of how differences between individuals are transformed into income differences.
How Political Parties Respond focuses specifically on the question of interest aggregation. Do parties today perform that function? If so, how? If not, in what different ways do they seek to show them
