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Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Ethics and Political Philosophy
Methodological Nationalism, Migration, And Political Theory, Alexander Sager
Methodological Nationalism, Migration, And Political Theory, Alexander Sager
Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations
Political theorists of migration have largely operated within a conceptual scheme that treats the nation-state as the natural political unit for analysis at the expense of transnational, regional, and local analyses. Migration is discussed in the contexts of nation-building or in an international framework of autonomous, sovereign states. I show that this paradigm of “methodological nationalism” ignores transnational networks, associations, and organizations and global social and economic structures. This in turn, blinds political theorists to questions of agency and structure and to causal relations that entail moral responsibilities. My aim is to show how debates on migration and distributive justice …
The Hanford Advisory Board: A Case Study In Democracy, Technology, And Representation, Alexander Sager, Alex Zakaras
The Hanford Advisory Board: A Case Study In Democracy, Technology, And Representation, Alexander Sager, Alex Zakaras
Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations
Highly technical policy decisions present daunting challenges for democracy. In order to hold public officials accountable, citizens must be able to see how policy decisions stand to affect their interests. If they are unable to do so, they can find themselves exposed to bureaucratic domination through the discretionary power of bureaucrats, scientists, or policy experts. One of the major tasks of empirically informed democratic theory is to analyze and evaluate practices and institutions that use public participation to try to render highly technical public decision-making more accountable to the public, and therefore more legitimate. This paper presents a case study …