Mark E Warren
Biographic Data
| ID | 245378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark E Warren |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark E |
| FAMILY NAME | Warren |
| SIGNATURE | WARREN M E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1478-0998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1574 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 70 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Developing a theory of robust democracy
While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered in…
Democratic Innovation and Representative Democracy
We live in a period of hopes and fears for democracy. The fears, however, are now foremost in our minds. Democratic erosion is now taking the perverse form in which institutions long associated with democracy, especially competitive elections, have become vehicles for authoritarian populists to undermine other institutions necessary to democracy, including rights and the rule of law. Yet although the democratic project seems to be backsliding, th…
Empowering Affected Interests: Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World
Many demands for democratic inclusion rest on a simple yet powerful idea. It's a principle of affected interests. The principle states that all those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making that decision. Yet, in today's highly globalized world, the implications of this 'All-Affected Principle' are potentially radical and far-reaching. Empowering Affected Interests brings together a distinguished group of leading democratic …
What kind of power can citizens exercise beyond the state? Globalizing democracy through representative claim-making
Across the developed democracies, there has been a rise in populist nationalism and anti-globalization sentiment aimed at reasserting sovereignty through the state. This article develops the concept of discursive power as an alternative basis for citizens to project their voice and influence into global politics. Discursive power arises from the framing role of ideas in orienting citizen judgements to the possibilities for acting beyond the state…
Democracy and the Corruption of Speech
In the developed democracies, the public discourse of political corruption and conspiracy remains stubbornly pervasive, in spite of the fact that these countries are, comparatively, the cleanest in the world. Everyday talk about corruption expresses a politics of distrust and disaffection, corrodes deliberative responses to political conflict and – most alarmingly – can be mobilized by populist authoritarians who would replace democratic institut…
Corruption and political institutions
Political philosophers rarely take on the topic of political corruption, despite the fact that corruption is so costly to human wellbeing, and so clearly separates well-governed from poorly governed polities. Ceva and Ferretti's book is the most complete attempt to remedy this deficit to date. Their key contribution is to conceptualize institutions in such a way that the offices they define link clearly to public ethics. Officeholders are account…
Why Deliberation and Voting Belong Together
The field of deliberative democracy now generally recognizes the co-dependence of deliberation and voting. The field tends to emphasize what deliberation accomplishes for vote-based decisions. In this paper, we reverse this now common view to ask: In what ways does voting benefit deliberation? We discuss seven ways voting can complement and sometimes enhance deliberation. First, voting furnishes deliberation with a feasible and fair closure mecha…
Authoritarian and Democratic Pathways to Meritocracy in China
Authoritarian and Democratic Pathways to Meritocracy in China
Participatory Deliberative Democracy in Complex Mass Societies
What might participatory deliberative democracy look like in complex, mass societies? Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts (2019) challenges us to revisit this question by taking contemporary democratic theory to task for recommending a variety of shortcuts that would seem to reconcile democratic self-government with complex, mass societies, but do so by requiring ‘blind deference’ of citizens to decisions made by others. Here I make thr…
Can meritocracy replace democracy? A conceptual framework
Influenced by the example of China, a literature is emerging that advocates a modernized version of Confucian meritocracy, often as an alternative to liberal democracy and even democracy itself. We disagree with these arguments. A critical examination of the Chinese practices of meritocracy within the context of a regime that remains authoritarian is noticeably absent in the literature. This article addresses this gap and, in its findings, argues…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
What can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to democratic systems
Can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem‐based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real‐world case: a deliberative mini‐public with…
Deliberative Democracy: An Introduction
We define deliberation minimally to mean mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interests regarding matters of common concern. Deliberative democracy incorporates the requirements that deliberation take place in contexts of equal recognition, respect, reciprocity, and sufficiently equal power for communicative influence to function. These aspirational ideals have inspired a flourishing field, with t…
Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy
Deliberative democracy has been one of the main games in contemporary political theory for two decades, growing enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines. This handbook takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, in philosophy, in various research programmes in the social sciences and law, and in political practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in poli…
Deliberative Polling and the Democratic Innovations Agenda
James Fishkin's Democracy When the People Are Thinking (2018) is a comprehensive account of why Deliberative Polling is now the gold standard for a type of deliberative mini-public. Fishkin's book is nicely theorized, and counts as a major contribution to the empirical study of democratic innovations. The book does, however, leave a number of questions open that we need to frame and answer as we look forward to using innovative processes such as …
Beyond the Self-Legislation Model of Democracy: James Bohman’s Approach to Democratic Theory
James Bohman’s work involves a paradigm shift in how we conceive democracy in complex, pluralized, globalized contexts comprised of multiple, overlapping constituencies that often have broad extension in space and time. He breaks with theories that view democracy as comprised of a bounded demos legislating for itself, and which conceptualize democracy as ways of organizing territorial, state-organized political entities. Elements of a progressive…
Authoritarian Deliberation in China
Authoritarian rule in China increasingly involves a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian command with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation and democracy are usually found together, they are distinct phenomena. Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments like votes and…
A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Theory
Over the last few decades, democratic theory has grown dramatically in its power and sophistication, fueled by debates among models of democracy. But these debates are increasingly unproductive. Model-based strategies encourage theorists to overgeneralize the place and functions of ideal typical features of democracy, such as deliberation or elections. Here I sketch an alternative strategy based on the question: What kinds of problems does a poli…
When is Deliberation Democratic
“Deliberative democracy” is a compound term. In both theory and practice, it connects deliberative influence through reason giving, reciprocity, and publicity to a family of political systems that broadly enable popular control of the state and government through empowerments such as voting, petitioning, and contesting, as well as the electoral and judicial systems that enable them. These empowerments are democratic when they are distributed to, …
Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship
Democracy asks its citizens to make informed judgments about collective matters. Given the scale and complexity of modern polities, however, even the most attentive citizens cannot engage knowledgeably with most of the collective decisions that affect them. For this reason, democratic theorists increasingly conceptualize democratic systems as requiring divisions of cognitive labor, in which citizens trust others to make decisions on their behalf.…
Governance-Driven Democratization
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Practices of Freedom: Decentred Governance, Conflict and Democratic Participation
The shift from government to governance has become a starting point for many studies of contemporary policy-making and democracy. Practices of Freedom takes a different approach, calling into question this dominant narrative and taking the variety, hybridity and dispersion of social and political practices as its focus of analysis. Bringing together leading scholars in democratic theory and critical policy studies, it draws upon new understanding…
A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory
Globalization generates new structures of human interdependence and vulnerability while also posing challenges for models of democracy rooted in territorially bounded states. The diverse phenomena of globalization have stimulated two relatively new branches of political theory: theoretical accounts of the possibilities of democracy beyond the state; and comparative political theory, which aims at bringing non-Western political thought into conver…
La democracia contra la corrupción
En el presente artículo, el autor afirma que la forma de combatir la corrupción es a través de la democracia. Partiendo de la base de que la sociedad civil es el medio conductor para evitar la corrupción, analiza la participación de aquella en la solución de este fenómeno. Asimismo, se pone énfasis en el papel del gobierno y de las asociaciones para la creación de una democracia que, a la larga, deberá combatir al "mal comportamiento de la políti…
A systemic approach to deliberative democracy
'Deliberative democracy' is often dismissed as a set of small-scale, academic experiments. This volume seeks to demonstrate how the deliberative ideal can work as a theory of democracy on a larger scale. It provides a new way of thinking about democratic engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation states, and from local networks to transnational, even global systems. Written by a team of the world's leadi…
The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory
Democratic theorists have paid increasing attention to problems of political representation over the past two decades. Interest is driven by (a) a political landscape within which electoral representation now competes with new and informal kinds of representation; (b) interest in the fairness of electoral representation, particularly for minorities and women; (c) a renewed focus on political judgment within democratic theory; and (d) a new apprec…
What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy
Despite a growing interest in corruption, the topic has been absent from democratic theory. The reason is not a lack of normative issues, but rather missing links between the concepts of corruption and democracy. With few exceptions, political corruption has been conceived as departures by public officials from public rules, norms, and laws for the sake of private gain. Such a conception works well within bureaucratic contexts with well‐defined o…
A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Theory
Over the last few decades, democratic theory has grown dramatically in its power and sophistication, fueled by debates among models of democracy. But these debates are increasingly unproductive. Model-based strategies encourage theorists to overgeneralize the place and functions of ideal typical features of democracy, such as deliberation or elections. Here I sketch an alternative strategy based on the question: What kinds of problems does a poli…
Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Political Development
Authoritarian rule in China is now permeated by a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian concentrations of power with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation is usually associated with democracy, they are distinct phenomena. Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments such…
Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship
Democracy asks its citizens to make informed judgments about collective matters. Given the scale and complexity of modern polities, however, even the most attentive citizens cannot engage knowledgeably with most of the collective decisions that affect them. For this reason, democratic theorists increasingly conceptualize democratic systems as requiring divisions of cognitive labor, in which citizens trust others to make decisions on their behalf.…
Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation
Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the se…
Deliberative Democracy and Authority
The topic of authority only rarely figures into theories of deliberative democracy, no doubt owing to the widely held view that authority is inherently undemocratic. But deliberative democrats need a concept of authoritative decision making, not least because the scale and complexity of contemporary societies radically limit the numbers of decisions that can be made by deliberatively democratic means. I argue for an inherently democratic concepti…
Governance-driven democratization
While democratic reforms of electoral institutions continue, their capacities for deepening democracy are limited by the large, pluralized, complex, and territorial political units through which they work. Much of the institutional innovation in democracy has shifted elsewhere – into ‘governance’, the development and administration of public policy. The democratic potentials of governance reside in the potentially responsive linkages between what…
What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today
As we look back over the landscape of the twentieth century at the beginning of this new millennium, two features stand out in relief. First, this was a bloody century, with Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes alone costing more than 150 million lives. The second feature, materializing mostly in the past fifty years, is a dramatic increase in the number of democratic countries. If, following Freedom House, we define democracies as political syst…
Voting with Your Feet: Exit-based Empowerment in Democratic Theory
Democracy is about including those who are potentially affected by collective decisions in making those decisions. For this reason, contemporary democratic theory primarily assumes membership combined with effective voice. An alternative to voice is exit: Dissatisfied members may choose to leave a group rather than voice their displeasure. Rights and capacities for exit can function as low-cost, effective empowerments, particularly for those with…
What can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to democratic systems
Can deliberative mini‐publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem‐based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real‐world case: a deliberative mini‐public with…
What Should we Expect from More Democracy: Radically Democratic Responses to Politics
THEORIES OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY hold that if individuals were more broadly empowered, especially in the institutions that most directly affect their everyday lives, their experiences would have transformative effects. Individuals would become more public spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests. Transformations such as these would improve the workings of higher-l…
A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory
Globalization generates new structures of human interdependence and vulnerability while also posing challenges for models of democracy rooted in territorially bounded states. The diverse phenomena of globalization have stimulated two relatively new branches of political theory: theoretical accounts of the possibilities of democracy beyond the state; and comparative political theory, which aims at bringing non-Western political thought into conver…
Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption
While corruption has long been recognized as an appropriate object of regulation, concern with appearances of corruption is of recent origin, coinciding with declining trust in government in the mid‐ to late‐1960s. The reasoning that would support regulations of appearances, however, remains flawed, as it depends upon a “public trust” model of public service that is incomplete and often misplaced when applied to political representatives. The jus…
What is Political
Our conceptions of politics ought to: (a) help clarify our normative interests in politics; (b) encompass everyday understandings of politics; and (c) define the domain of politics in ways that serve explanation. Events in the last couple of decades - from the rise of new social movements to the end to the Berlin Wall - have combined with shifts in the culture of expectations within political science to overtake most of our received definitions i…
Max Weber's Liberalism for a Nietzschean World
Weber's commentators often accuse him of lacking a coherent political philosophy because his pluralist-elite theory of democracy seems indifferent to liberal-democratic values. I argue, however, that the core of Weber's political philosophy is a politicized neo-Kantian liberalism, one that produces an ethically significant and positive concept of politics. The problem is rather that Weber's pessimism about institutionalizing positive politics in …
Can Participatory Democracy Produce Better Selves? Psychological Dimensions of Habermas's Discursive Model of Democracy
Participatory democrats hold that when individuals participate in democratic processes they are likely to become more tolerant of differences, more attuned to reciprocity, bettor able to engage in moral discourse and judgment, and more prone to examine their own preferences. These democratic dispositions in turn strengthen democratic processes. Notwithstanding the centrality of this selftransformation thesis to democratic theory, Jiirgen Habermas…
Authoritarian Deliberation in China
Authoritarian rule in China increasingly involves a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian command with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation and democracy are usually found together, they are distinct phenomena. Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments like votes and…
Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion
While not the worst of political pathologies, corruption is the one most likely to be found thriving in electoral democracies. Not as dangerous as war, nor as urgent as terrorism, some have even argued that the little bit of corruption that comes with democracies makes them work better—by lowering transaction costs, reducing the inefficiencies of cumbersome rules, and generally making things happen (Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996; see also Leys 1965…
Liberal Constitutionalism as Ideology: Marx and Habermas
Why Deliberation and Voting Belong Together
The field of deliberative democracy now generally recognizes the co-dependence of deliberation and voting. The field tends to emphasize what deliberation accomplishes for vote-based decisions. In this paper, we reverse this now common view to ask: In what ways does voting benefit deliberation? We discuss seven ways voting can complement and sometimes enhance deliberation. First, voting furnishes deliberation with a feasible and fair closure mecha…
Ideology and the self
Democratic Innovation and Representative Democracy
We live in a period of hopes and fears for democracy. The fears, however, are now foremost in our minds. Democratic erosion is now taking the perverse form in which institutions long associated with democracy, especially competitive elections, have become vehicles for authoritarian populists to undermine other institutions necessary to democracy, including rights and the rule of law. Yet although the democratic project seems to be backsliding, th…
II. Nietzsche and Political Philosophy
Developing a theory of robust democracy
While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered in…
"On Ball, "Marx and Darwin: "A Reconsideration" (Volume 7, No. 4, November 1979)
Nietzsche's concept of ideology
The Politics of Nietzsche's Philosophy: Nihilism, Culture and Power
This article sketches an approach to what might be called the politics of Nietzsche's philosophy. Taking as its point of departure Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism in Western culture, the article aims to show that through his analysis of nihilism Nietzsche raises in an intrinsically political way the philosophical issue of how human agency is possible in an historical world. The methodology Nietzsche follows in constructing the problem provides …
II. Nietzsche and Political Philosophy
The Marx-Darwin Question: Implications for the Critical Aspects of Marx's Social Theory
This article deals with the implications of recently revived analogies between Marx and Darwin for the critical aspects of Marx's thought. Good prima facie reasons exist to be suspicious of such analogies, since they seem to ignore the distinction between sciences of natural objects and Marx's critical theory - an approach that relates explanations of social processes to the intentional and reflexive qualities of human practices. This article arg…
Books in Review
Marx and Methodological Individualism
Max Weber's Liberalism for a Nietzschean World
Weber's commentators often accuse him of lacking a coherent political philosophy because his pluralist-elite theory of democracy seems indifferent to liberal-democratic values. I argue, however, that the core of Weber's political philosophy is a politicized neo-Kantian liberalism, one that produces an ethically significant and positive concept of politics. The problem is rather that Weber's pessimism about institutionalizing positive politics in …
Nietzsche and Political Thought
Friedrich Nietzsche was a troublesome genius, a figure outside the mainstream philosophical tradition whose very apartness has made him central to contemporary philosophy. Nietzsche and Political Thought reclaims the political implications of Nietzsche's work: it shows how his philosophy of power addresses key issues in modern political thought especially those having to do with the historical and cultural nature of human agency.In this thought-p…
On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement. James Der Derian
Liberal Constitutionalism as Ideology: Marx and Habermas
What Is Political Theory/Philosophy
The subdiscipline of political theory and political philosophy continues to suffer some misunderstanding within political science as a whole. Notwithstanding its renaissance in the last decade, political theory/philosophy is still too often characterized in terms that obscure its roles and functions within the discipline. Political theory/philosophy is often referred to as “normative theory” as a way of distinguishing its concerns with values fro…
Ideology and the self
Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism. Bruce Detwiler
Max Weber's Nietzschean conception of power
The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. Richard Wolin
Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation
Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the se…
Can Participatory Democracy Produce Better Selves? Psychological Dimensions of Habermas's Discursive Model of Democracy
Participatory democrats hold that when individuals participate in democratic processes they are likely to become more tolerant of differences, more attuned to reciprocity, bettor able to engage in moral discourse and judgment, and more prone to examine their own preferences. These democratic dispositions in turn strengthen democratic processes. Notwithstanding the centrality of this selftransformation thesis to democratic theory, Jiirgen Habermas…
Marx and Methodological Individualism
In this chapter I pursue two projects, one critical and one reconstructive. The critical project concerns Jon Elster's influential and controversial argument that methodological individualism guides the acceptable aspects of Marx's thought.1 Elster's claim is interesting not just because it breaks with the widely held notion that Marx's thinking does not involve methodological individualism in any sense,2 but also because he uses it to focus on t…
The Cambridge Companion to Habermas
Jurgen Habermas is unquestionably one of the foremost philosophers writing today. His notions of communicative action and rationality have exerted a profound influence within philosophy and the social sciences. This volume examines the historical and intellectual contexts out of which Habermas' work emerged, and offers an overview of his main ideas, including those in his most recent publication. Amongst the topics discussed are his relationship …
What Should we Expect from More Democracy: Radically Democratic Responses to Politics
THEORIES OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY hold that if individuals were more broadly empowered, especially in the institutions that most directly affect their everyday lives, their experiences would have transformative effects. Individuals would become more public spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests. Transformations such as these would improve the workings of higher-l…
Deliberative Democracy and Authority
The topic of authority only rarely figures into theories of deliberative democracy, no doubt owing to the widely held view that authority is inherently undemocratic. But deliberative democrats need a concept of authoritative decision making, not least because the scale and complexity of contemporary societies radically limit the numbers of decisions that can be made by deliberatively democratic means. I argue for an inherently democratic concepti…
Political Readings of Nietzsche
Democratic theory and trust
It is not obvious that trust should be of interest to theorists of democracy – except, perhaps, as an undesirable or unavoidable residue of undemocratic modes of governing and decision-making. After all, democratic progress is most often sparked by distrust of authorities. Innovations in democratic institutions usually involve new ways of monitoring and controlling those in power, on the assumption that, as a rule, those with power cannot or ough…
Reply to Ruth Abbey and Fredrick Appel
I AM INDEBTED to Ruth Abbey and Fredrick Appel for their spirited engagement of my recent review essay, Readings of Nietzsche. Since my own strategy and approach to Nietzsche are the focus of their comments (rather than my substantive criticisms and appreciations of the books under review), I would have been even more indebted had they read, rather than merely referenced, my own work on Nietzsche, especially Nietzsche and Political Thought.' They…
Political science (67 works) · Law (65 works) · Politics (61 works) · Sociology (57 works) · Democracy (49 works) · Law (37 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (27 works) · Political economy (25 works)