Archon Fung
Biographic Data
| ID | 3620716 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Archon Fung |
| GIVEN NAMES | Archon |
| FAMILY NAME | Fung |
| SIGNATURE | FUNG A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-0629-6762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1917 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Exploring Democratic Deliberation in Public Health
When Democracy Breaks
Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Curiously, both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume’s collaborators—experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters—explore eleve…
Empowering Affected Interests
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 …
Conflict of interest in government
Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere
The Internet has democratized speech, creating a forum for public self-expression and connecting billions of speakers and listeners who never could have found each other before. The forum is not without faults, to be sure, but never before have so many people been afforded so many opportunities to speak, be heard, and share information with others. Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalisation is making everyone into a p…
Can transparency and accountability programs improve health? Experimental evidence from Indonesia and Tanzania
We assess the impact of a transparency and accountability program designed to improve maternal and newborn health (MNH) outcomes in Indonesia and Tanzania. Co-designed with local partner organizations to be community-led and non-prescriptive, the program sought to encourage community participation to address local barriers in access to high quality care for pregnant women and infants. We evaluate the impact of this program through randomized cont…
When Deliberation Produces Persuasion rather than Polarization
This article proposes a new statistical method to measure persuasion within small groups, and applies this approach to a large-scale randomized deliberative experiment. The authors define the construct of ‘persuasion’ as a change in the systematic component of an individual's preference, separate from measurement error, that results from exposure to interpersonal interaction. Their method separately measures persuasion in a latent (left–right) pr…
Afterword
Since the first generation of deliberative democratic theory, and the ‘deliberative turn’ in the 1990s, many societies around the world have become more institutionally fragile, multi-dimensionally unjust, and deeply divided. Does deliberative democracy have a constructive role to play in in these more challenging times in politics? As scholars of deliberation widen their ambit to explore broader forms of political communication, interactions bet…
The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation
Citizens can avoid polarization and make sound decisions
Four Levels of Power
Putting the Public Back into Governance
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large‐ and small‐scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technol…
How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation
The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of…
Can Democracy Be Saved
Minutes of the August 28, 2013, Apsa Council Meeting
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Does Transparency Improve Governance
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of transparency—the provision of information to the public—to improve governance in both developed and developing societies. In this article, we characterize and assess the evolution of transparency from an end in itself to a tool for resolving increasingly practical concerns of governance and government performance. After delineating four distinct varieties of transparency, we …
Minutes of the October 6, 2012 Apsa Council Meeting
An emergency meeting of the American Political Science Association Council was held in Washington, DC on October 6, 2012. The meeting was called to order at 8:30 a.m. by President Mansbridge
Infotopia
In Infotopia, citizens enjoy a wide range of information about the organizations upon which they rely for the satisfaction of their vital interests. The provision of that information is governed by principles of democratic transparency. Democratic transparency both extends and critiques current enthusiasms about transparency. It urges us to conceptualize information politically, as a resource to turn the behavior of large organizations in sociall…
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…
Conference Theme Statement
As the world becomes more interdependent and its governance more complex, both within and between nation-states, the two biggest resources for human cooperation — persuasion and legitimate coercive power — become harder to generate across cultural and linguistic lines and sovereign boundaries. Yet the future will require more of these resources. To help societies meet the needs for political interactions of increasing complexity and scale, politi…
Continuous Institutional Innovation and the Pragmatic Conception of Democracy
In every society in many arenas, the reality of collective decision ;making falls far short of the democratic ideal in countless ways. These shortfalls include disenfranchisement, unequal influence operating through formal and informal mechanisms, political apathy and alienation, misinformation, and misperception. Part of the solutions to these challenges lies in a sound democratic constitution. But there is no once-and-for-all solution. Instead,…
La place de l'intérêt particulier et le rôle du pouvoir dans la démocratie délibérative
Cet article avance, à contre-courant de toutes les théories délibératives existantes, que les intérêts particuliers doivent être pris en compte dans la délibération démocratique. Deux conditions sont cependant nécessaires afin que l'inclusion des intérêts particuliers dans la délibération apparaisse légitime : l'idéal-régulateur d'absence de pouvoir coercitif et l'encadrement des intérêts particuliers par des principes de justice. Ceci conduit à …
Le projet de la démocratie radicale
Les démocrates radicaux cherchent à promouvoir des institutions qui soient à la fois participatives et délibératives. Le fonctionnement démocratique classique basé sur le gouvernement représentatif peine à respecter ces deux dimensions. Il est par ailleurs difficile d'améliorer simultanément celles-ci. La délibération et la participation constituent deux objectifs distincts, et les efforts visant à promouvoir l'une peuvent se faire au détriment d…
Reinventing Democracy in Latin America
From time to time, a region of the world captures the attention of social scientists because people there achieve some important human value to an extent greater than the rest of us have managed to do. In the 1970s, the Scandinavian and Northern European social democracies earned the world's envy for their remarkable accomplishments in equality, solidarity, and welfare. Accordingly, many social scientists sought to understand the political and ec…
Full Disclosure
Empowered Participation
Deepening Democracy
As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century—representative democracy plus technobureaucratic administration—seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. “Democracy” as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based compe…
Survey Article
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 11, Issue 3 p. 338-367 Survey Article: Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design Choices and Their Consequences Archon Fung, Archon Fung Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Archon Fung, Archon Fung Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 August 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00181Citations: 470Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest …
The Place of Self‐Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy
Full Disclosure
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, …
Associations and Democracy
Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest and research into the connections between associations and democracy. This article divides the question of associative contributions to democracy into four component parts: What (a) contributions do (b) different kinds of associations make to advance (c) contesting ideals of democratic governance in various (d) political contexts? Associations enhance democracy in at least six ways: th…
Deliberation before the Revolution
Deliberative democracy is a revolutionary political ideal that requires fundamental changes in political institutions, bases of collective decision making, and the distribution of resources. Perhaps because of its revolutionary character, accounts of deliberation in political theory thus far have offered little guidance for actors in actually-existing democratic circumstances. This article develops an ethical account of deliberative democratic ac…
Does Transparency Improve Governance
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of transparency—the provision of information to the public—to improve governance in both developed and developing societies. In this article, we characterize and assess the evolution of transparency from an end in itself to a tool for resolving increasingly practical concerns of governance and government performance. After delineating four distinct varieties of transparency, we …
Empowered Participation
Infotopia
In Infotopia, citizens enjoy a wide range of information about the organizations upon which they rely for the satisfaction of their vital interests. The provision of that information is governed by principles of democratic transparency. Democratic transparency both extends and critiques current enthusiasms about transparency. It urges us to conceptualize information politically, as a resource to turn the behavior of large organizations in sociall…
Democratic Theory and Political Science
This article develops two conceptual tools to synthesize democratic theory and the empirical study of institutions. The first is a standard to assess conceptions of democracy calledpragmatic equilibrium. A conception of democracy is in pragmatic equilibrium just in case the consequences of its institutional prescriptions realize its values well and better than any other feasible institutional arrangements across a wide range of problems and conte…
Accountable Autonomy
The city of Chicago hardly seems fertile ground for deliberative democratic institutions to take root and bear fruit. Although its history and environs have many contradictory strands—a tradition of machine politics, insular administrative bureaucracies installed in reaction to political manipulations, a vibrant tradition of neighborhood activism, extreme socioeconomic inequality typical of urban areas in the United States—none is particularly fr…
The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies
Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies ar…
Deliberative Democracy and International Labor Standards
Political theorists have argued that the methods of deliberative democracy can help to meet challenges such as legitimacy, effective governance, and citizen education in local and national contexts. These basic insights can also be applied to problems of international governance such as the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of labor standards. A participatory and deliberative democratic approach to labor standards would push the labor–s…
How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation
The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of…
Reinventing Democracy in Latin America
From time to time, a region of the world captures the attention of social scientists because people there achieve some important human value to an extent greater than the rest of us have managed to do. In the 1970s, the Scandinavian and Northern European social democracies earned the world's envy for their remarkable accomplishments in equality, solidarity, and welfare. Accordingly, many social scientists sought to understand the political and ec…
Continuous Institutional Innovation and the Pragmatic Conception of Democracy
In every society in many arenas, the reality of collective decision ;making falls far short of the democratic ideal in countless ways. These shortfalls include disenfranchisement, unequal influence operating through formal and informal mechanisms, political apathy and alienation, misinformation, and misperception. Part of the solutions to these challenges lies in a sound democratic constitution. But there is no once-and-for-all solution. Instead,…
Empowered Participation in Urban Governance
In the early 1990s, the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) allocated $400 million in public funds for Minneapolis neighborhood groups to spend on improvement projects over the coming 20 years. NRP created the most financially empowered structure of neighborhood governance in any American city. This article describes the institutional design of NRP and then explores several of its political, social and economic consequences. In particular, …
When Deliberation Produces Persuasion rather than Polarization
This article proposes a new statistical method to measure persuasion within small groups, and applies this approach to a large-scale randomized deliberative experiment. The authors define the construct of ‘persuasion’ as a change in the systematic component of an individual's preference, separate from measurement error, that results from exposure to interpersonal interaction. Their method separately measures persuasion in a latent (left–right) pr…
After Backyard Environmentalism
This article develops a model of environmental regulation that promises to be at once more flexible, democratic, and effective than the familiar methods of central command or market-based control. Local units-such as firms, factories, or regional ecosystem management authorities-enjoy the autonomy to determine their environmental protection goals and methods to reach them. In exchange for this latitude, they report their plans and progress to cen…
Can transparency and accountability programs improve health? Experimental evidence from Indonesia and Tanzania
We assess the impact of a transparency and accountability program designed to improve maternal and newborn health (MNH) outcomes in Indonesia and Tanzania. Co-designed with local partner organizations to be community-led and non-prescriptive, the program sought to encourage community participation to address local barriers in access to high quality care for pregnant women and infants. We evaluate the impact of this program through randomized cont…
La place de l'intérêt particulier et le rôle du pouvoir dans la démocratie délibérative
Cet article avance, à contre-courant de toutes les théories délibératives existantes, que les intérêts particuliers doivent être pris en compte dans la délibération démocratique. Deux conditions sont cependant nécessaires afin que l'inclusion des intérêts particuliers dans la délibération apparaisse légitime : l'idéal-régulateur d'absence de pouvoir coercitif et l'encadrement des intérêts particuliers par des principes de justice. Ceci conduit à …
Four Levels of Power
Can Democracy Be Saved
Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere
The Internet has democratized speech, creating a forum for public self-expression and connecting billions of speakers and listeners who never could have found each other before. The forum is not without faults, to be sure, but never before have so many people been afforded so many opportunities to speak, be heard, and share information with others. Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalisation is making everyone into a p…
Exploring Democratic Deliberation in Public Health
Making Rights Real
In recent years various pro-choice theorists have asserted that the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision undermined access to abortion by removing the possibility for a social consensus established through ordinary legislative processes and by de-mobilizing abortion rights activists and galvanizing the right-to-life movement. These claims can be refuted through a counterfactual analysis of the alternative political scenarios. It is argued that abortion acc…
After Backyard Environmentalism
This article develops a model of environmental regulation that promises to be at once more flexible, democratic, and effective than the familiar methods of central command or market-based control. Local units-such as firms, factories, or regional ecosystem management authorities-enjoy the autonomy to determine their environmental protection goals and methods to reach them. In exchange for this latitude, they report their plans and progress to cen…
The Labor of Development
Accountable Autonomy
The city of Chicago hardly seems fertile ground for deliberative democratic institutions to take root and bear fruit. Although its history and environs have many contradictory strands—a tradition of machine politics, insular administrative bureaucracies installed in reaction to political manipulations, a vibrant tradition of neighborhood activism, extreme socioeconomic inequality typical of urban areas in the United States—none is particularly fr…
Deepening Democracy
As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century—representative democracy plus technobureaucratic administration—seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. “Democracy” as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based compe…
Survey Article
Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 11, Issue 3 p. 338-367 Survey Article: Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design Choices and Their Consequences Archon Fung, Archon Fung Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Archon Fung, Archon Fung Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 August 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00181Citations: 470Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest …
Deliberative Democracy and International Labor Standards
Political theorists have argued that the methods of deliberative democracy can help to meet challenges such as legitimacy, effective governance, and citizen education in local and national contexts. These basic insights can also be applied to problems of international governance such as the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of labor standards. A participatory and deliberative democratic approach to labor standards would push the labor–s…
Associations and Democracy
Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest and research into the connections between associations and democracy. This article divides the question of associative contributions to democracy into four component parts: What (a) contributions do (b) different kinds of associations make to advance (c) contesting ideals of democratic governance in various (d) political contexts? Associations enhance democracy in at least six ways: th…
Gestion de proximité et démocratie participative
Future Directions for Public Deliberation
The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies
Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies ar…
Deliberation day
Deliberation before the Revolution
Deliberative democracy is a revolutionary political ideal that requires fundamental changes in political institutions, bases of collective decision making, and the distribution of resources. Perhaps because of its revolutionary character, accounts of deliberation in political theory thus far have offered little guidance for actors in actually-existing democratic circumstances. This article develops an ethical account of deliberative democratic ac…
Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance
The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions to…
Empowered Participation in Urban Governance
In the early 1990s, the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) allocated $400 million in public funds for Minneapolis neighborhood groups to spend on improvement projects over the coming 20 years. NRP created the most financially empowered structure of neighborhood governance in any American city. This article describes the institutional design of NRP and then explores several of its political, social and economic consequences. In particular, …
Full Disclosure
Governments employ public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, these policies are freque…
Minipublics
Activists, foundations, and even some scholars interested in improving the quality of the public sphere have pursued an array of modest projects that attempt to create more perfect public spheres. They convene citizens, in the dozens or hundreds or thousands, but certainly not in the millions or tens of millions, in self-consciously organized public deliberations. Following Robert Dahl, I will call these efforts minipublics . 2 Sometimes they res…
Full Disclosure
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, …
Democratic Theory and Political Science
This article develops two conceptual tools to synthesize democratic theory and the empirical study of institutions. The first is a standard to assess conceptions of democracy calledpragmatic equilibrium. A conception of democracy is in pragmatic equilibrium just in case the consequences of its institutional prescriptions realize its values well and better than any other feasible institutional arrangements across a wide range of problems and conte…
Full Disclosure
Empowered Participation
The Place of Self‐Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy
La place de l'intérêt particulier et le rôle du pouvoir dans la démocratie délibérative
Cet article avance, à contre-courant de toutes les théories délibératives existantes, que les intérêts particuliers doivent être pris en compte dans la délibération démocratique. Deux conditions sont cependant nécessaires afin que l'inclusion des intérêts particuliers dans la délibération apparaisse légitime : l'idéal-régulateur d'absence de pouvoir coercitif et l'encadrement des intérêts particuliers par des principes de justice. Ceci conduit à …
Le projet de la démocratie radicale
Les démocrates radicaux cherchent à promouvoir des institutions qui soient à la fois participatives et délibératives. Le fonctionnement démocratique classique basé sur le gouvernement représentatif peine à respecter ces deux dimensions. Il est par ailleurs difficile d'améliorer simultanément celles-ci. La délibération et la participation constituent deux objectifs distincts, et les efforts visant à promouvoir l'une peuvent se faire au détriment d…
Reinventing Democracy in Latin America
From time to time, a region of the world captures the attention of social scientists because people there achieve some important human value to an extent greater than the rest of us have managed to do. In the 1970s, the Scandinavian and Northern European social democracies earned the world's envy for their remarkable accomplishments in equality, solidarity, and welfare. Accordingly, many social scientists sought to understand the political and ec…
Political science (42 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (29 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Democracy (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Economics (15 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Deliberation (12 works)