John Meadowcroft

Community Politics, Representation and the Limits of Deliberative Democracy

Community Politics has been a political strategy of the Liberal Party, now the Liberal Democrats, since 1970. It involves a critique of traditional representational relationships and argues for a participatory democracy based upon deliberation to build consensus out of competing interests. Whilst the associated campaigning techniques have made the third party an important force in local government, this article uses new empirical evidence to assess the success of the strategy in transforming representational relationships and extending popular participation in local government. It is argued that its success in respect of these objectives has been limited, principally because of popular disenchantment with political parties and the inherent tensions and limitations that accompany popular participation in deliberative democratic structures.

Political Recruitment and Local Representation: The Case of Liberal Democrat Councillors

A case study of Liberal Democrat councillors is used to investigate models of local political recruitment. Quantitative survey data shows that Liberal Democrat councillors match the narrow socio-economic profile of representatives found in all modern democracies. Analysis of qualitative interview data on the recruitment of Liberal Democrat councillors suggests that while some councillors can be characterised as rational actors, judging the costs and benefits of council service, the importance of the informal negotiation between potential recruits and established political actors has been underestimated in accounting for the opportunity essential to local political recruitment.

Hayek's Slippery Slope, the Stability of the Mixed Economy and the Dynamics of Rent Seeking

F. A. Hayeks The Road to Serfdom continues to provoke intense scholarly debate focused on the validity of Hayeks central claim that a mixed economy is inherently unstable and economic intervention will inexorably lead to totalitarianism if pursued for a sustained period. This article presents empirical evidence which shows conclusively that it is the mixed economy that has proved remarkably stable, whereas laissez-faire and totalitarian regimes have proved inherently unstable. It is argued that this empirical outcome can be explained by the dynamics of rent seeking and Hayeks failure to anticipate that the state could control more than half of national income without requiring a totalitarian apparatus to control and direct production and consumption. The implications of the failure of Hayeks argument for our conceptualisation of freedom and power in the context of the modern democratic state and our understanding of the relationship between economic and political freedom are considered.

Patients, Politics, and Power: Government Failure and the Politicization of U.K. Health Care

This article examines the consequences of the politicization of health care in the United Kingdom following the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. The NHS is founded on the principle of universal access to health care free at the point of use but in reality charges exist for some services and other services are rationed. Not to charge and/or ration would create a common-pool resource with no means of conserving scarce resources. Taking rationing decisions in the political realm means that the values and priorities of individual patients are marginalized and the preferences of powerful organized groups able to capture the political process dominate. The key lesson for international health care reform is that the politicization of health care via the NHS has not led to the realization of egalitarian ends but rather has empowered vested and organized interests at the expense of individual patients.

Side constraints, Lockean individual rights, and the moral basis of libertarianism

The brilliant discussion in Chapter 3 of Robert Nozicks Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) is vitiated by an illicit slide between “some” and “all” or, better, between “to some extent” and “entirely.” In this chapter Nozick discusses the moral theory background to his Locke an libertarian doctrine of individual moral rights. He seeks to show that structural features of the account of moral requirements and permissions that most of us accept turn out to be reasons also to accept the more controversial Lockean libertarianism. The brilliant part of the discussion describes the structure of a non-consequentialist deontological moral theory that denies that each person ought always to do whatever would produce the impartially best outcome, even if the idea of the best outcome is interpreted as the greatest overall fulfillment of individual moral rights ranked by their moral importance. In this connection Nozick introduces the idea of a “side constraint” and of a morality that consists of side constraints, in whole or in part. This discussion advances our understanding of moral theory. We are all in Nozicks debt for this advance even if at the end of the day the case for accepting a consequentialist theory proves compelling.

The European Democratic Deficit, the Market and the Public Space: A Classical Liberal Critique

This article argues that attempts to utilize a Habermasian conception of the public space as a remedy for the democratic deficit deemed to be inherent within the political institutions of the European Union (EU) are unlikely to prove successful. It is argued that the instrumental goal demanded of the public space is contrary to the communicative rationality intrinsic to the Habermasian model. Moreover, the Habermasian conception of the public space as an arena independent of both the market and the state is non-operational because a public space independent of the market is inconceivable. An alternative conceptualization of the public space, focusing on the role of the market as a communicative process, and an alternative remedy for the European democratic deficit, focusing on liberal representative democracy, are proposed.

Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan: On Public Life, Chile, and the Relationship between Liberty and Democracy

Abstract This article places recent evidence of Hayeks public defense of the Pinochet regime in the context of the work of the other great twentieth-century classical liberal economists, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan. Hayeks view that liberty was only instrumentally valuable is contrasted with Buchanans account of liberty situated in the notion of the inviolable individual. It is argued that Hayeks theory left him with no basis on which to demarcate the legitimate actions of the state, so that conceivably any government action could be justified on consequentialist grounds. Furthermore, Friedmans account of freedom and discretionary power undermines Hayeks proposal that a transitional dictatorship could pave the way for a genuinely free society. It is contended that Hayeks defense of Pinochet follows from pathologies of his theories of liberty and democracy.

Violence, Self-Worth, Solidarity and Stigma: How a Dissident, Far-Right Group Solves the Collective Action Problem

How do dissident, far-right groups overcome the collective action problem inherent to political organisation in order to recruit sufficient activists willing to bear the costs of participation and not free-ride on the participation of others? An original ethnographic study of the UK anti-Islamic street protest organisation, the English Defence League, shows that it solved the collective action problem by supplying selective incentives to members in the form of the club goods of access to violence, increased self-worth and group solidarity. These benefits were offset against the costs of stigma, time, money and unwanted police attention that also accompanied English Defence League membership. The personal benefits the English Defence League provided to its members enabled it to supply what Mancur Olson has termed the first unit of collective action, but limited its ability to supply the additional units required to build a broader, more mainstream movement.

Economic and Political Solutions to Social Problems: The Case of Second-hand Smoke in Enclosed Public Places

This article utilises a case study of the problem of second-hand smoke in enclosed public places to examine economic and political solutions to social problems. The responses of economic actors to this problem are examined via review of a number of pre-existing case studies of private arrangements in bars and restaurants prior to the introduction of smoking bans. The responses of political actors are examined via a study of the legislative process that led to the ban on smoking in enclosed public places introduced in England in 2007. This empirical evidence supports the view that economic decision-making leads to a plurality of different accommodations of different preferences, suggestive of inter-subjective learning, whereas political decision-making leads to exclusive, all-or-nothing solutions indicative of an adversarial approach to decision-making and the imposition of one groups preferences on the whole population.

The Rise and Fall of the English Defence League: Self-Governance, Marginal Members and the Far Right:

What determines the success or failure of far-right organisations? This article uses new qualitative data to explain the sudden rise and subsequent decline of the English Defence League, an anti-Islamic, street protest organisation established in the UK in 2009. We explain the rise and fall of the English Defence League through the lens of the theory of collective action to show that the English Defence League initially motivated activism by supplying selective incentives that were enhanced by the participation of others. The pursuit of ‘participatory crowding’ led to indiscriminate recruitment into the organisation that enabled numbers to expand into the thousands, but ultimately caused the English Defence League’s downfall because it resulted in the presence of large numbers of ‘marginal members’ with low levels of commitment whose subsequent exit was decisively destructive. Self-governance mechanisms to ensure greater loyalty from members could have prevented the English Defence League’s decline but would also have limited its initial success.