José Luis Martí

Productivity Growth in Private Equity-Backed Family Firms

We study the reluctance of family firms to accept private equity (PE) investors and the impact of PE on family firms’ performance. We analyze the productivity growth in a sample of 257 PE–backed family firms, 143 of which were run by the founding generation. We compare these firms with both non–PE–backed family firms and non family PE–backed firms. We find that family firms accessing PE show lower productivity growth before the initial PE round, which is driven by an imbalance between inputs and output, especially in founder–controlled firms. Our results also confirm the positive impact of PE involvement on productivity growth in founder–controlled firms.

Legitimate actors of international law-making: towards a theory of international democratic representation

ABSTRACT This article addresses the identity of the legitimate actors of international law-making from the perspective of democratic theory. It argues that both states or state-based international organisations, and civil society actors should be considered complementary legitimate actors of international law-making. Unlike previous accounts, our proposed model of representation, the Multiple Representation Model, is based on an expanded, democratic understanding of the principle of state participation: it is specifically designed to palliate the democratic deficits of more common versions of the Principle of State Consent. Second, it endorses a qualified version of the Principle of Civil Society Participation, one that is much more restrictive and more critical of the democratic defects of civil society actors than most of its current supporters. Finally, it reveals how the democratic strengths and deficits of both models are best approached as mirroring one another and need to be combined in a complex account of representation.

Pluralism and consensus in deliberative democracy

Abstract A central discussion in the theory of deliberative democracy in recent decades has focused on whether democratic deliberation, and consequently those participating in it, should aim, at least ideally, for political consensus. Thus, pluralist deliberative democrats have criticized the consensualist approach to deliberative democracy for neglecting the moral importance of political disagreement because of their fixation with reaching consensus. The debate between these two positions, initiated in the 1990s, has evolved in recent years toward more precision and sophistication. However, some vagueness and ambiguities remain in many of the contributions and prevent us from getting an exact idea of the object of discussion. This article starts making further distinctions about several types of agreement and disagreement in order to clarify much more precisely the exact niche of dispute between these two views. They do not need to disagree on the value of many forms of disagreement and consensus. Their dispute consists only in a controversy about the relative value of post-deliberative, operative, substantive, legislative, regulatory, or adjudicative reason-based consensus as opposed to the corresponding reason-based disagreement. Finally, the article argues that this relatively small niche is made smaller by certain considerations. The most important of them is that this controversy remains at a high theoretical level and lacks practical importance: it only affects the kind of personal ideal commitment or aspiration that virtuous deliberators should have when entering into a deliberative process, and has no concrete consequent institutional implications.

Dworkin on external skepticism and moral permissions

This article discusses Ronald Dworkin’s first objection against what he calls external moral skepticism, the view that denies truth-value to moral judgments. According to that objection, an external skeptic denies that substantive moral judgments can be true. But, at the same time, the objection goes, what follows from the skeptical view is that all actions are morally permissible, which is in itself a substantive moral judgment. We call this ‘the self-defeating argument.’ We argue that the objection’s success depends on how we interpret the idea of moral permission, an issue Dworkin does not clearly resolve. Against his objection, we advance two different arguments. First, once we learn what role the idea of moral permission plays in morality, we can see that any plausible view of some agent’s moral permission must acknowledge its complex character, and that the existence of a moral permission must have some impact on the balance of moral reasons for other agents. On this understanding, it is false that it follows solely from external skepticism that everything is permissible. Second, we argue that even if permissions have a simple character, not a complex one, they are plausible only when framed within a moral constellation of rights and obligations. So understood, it is, again, false that it follows from external skepticism that everything is permissible.

The Law in Arendt

The 40th anniversary of the death of Hannah Arendt (1906–75) is near, and despite the enormous importance and influence of the German thinker, notwithstanding the vast amount of secondary literature she has generated, a certain type of work about her has been lacking. Such a work would analyse from diverse perspectives the contributions that Arendtmade to the study andunderstanding of the law. As Richard J Bernstein, the famous pragmatist philosopher of the New School for Social Research and an international specialist in Arendt, states in his foreword to the volume I am presently reviewing, this is ‘one topic in Arendt that has not been examined in a sustained and systematicmanner’ (vi). Arendtwas not a prominent legal philosopher, nor did she make many capital contributions to the understanding of the idea of the law. But legal issues of a different sort occupied a fundamental role in her political and moral philosophy, and she made specific contributions to certain areas, mainly international and human rights laws, which are still of some importance. This alone was sufficient reason to produce Hannah Arendt and the Law. The book has the explicit aim of providing ‘the first systematic engagement with the many, varied and interesting things which Hannah Arendt had to say about, but also to, the law’ (xvii). It is certainly not the first work to explore Arendt’s ideas about the law, but it offers an unprecedented and comprehensive view through a

1. The Spanish Context

new world, but to make everyone’s world better and better, and to allow them to participate in defining it. (Prego 2001) The interviewer highlighted Zapatero’s defense of freedom as a central value and then asked him how in his view freedom could be reconciled with the Left, since promoting it seemed to produce social inequalities. This was Zapatero’s reply: The pursuit of freedom, of the human beings’ capacity of choice in their own lives, is the ultimate end of the best progressive ideology. But to make this possible the value of equality must play its own role. For people to be politically free, they must be equal under the law. I see equality as an instrument for people’s freedom. Equality is always presumed to be a value of the Left; it is our essence .. . [but] I am trying to recover the recognition of socialism’s best origins: a progressive thought that values freedom as well as equality, and one that does not propose uniformity, but recognition of diversity. This is what it means to be republican. (Prego 2001) What Zapatero was trying to emphasize is that freedom is neither alien to the socialist tradition, nor needs to be at odds with equality. This idea was actually captured by a simple and traditional dictum in Spanish socialism that he emphatically employed: “socialism is freedom” (de Toro 2007, 210). According to Zapatero, freedom is closely connected not only with equality, but also with democracy and with the empowerment of the citizenry. To have “good democratic patterns,” for him, is to have “good patterns of freedom in any place of the community,” to give freedom Copyrighted Material