Melissa Schwartzberg
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 485297 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Melissa Schwartzberg |
| PRENOMES | Melissa |
| SOBRENOME | Schwartzberg |
| ASSINATURA | SCHWARTZBERG M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1554-6535 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 130 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Peers, equals, and jurors
We consider the Levellers' conception of equality relative to their contemporaries during the Civil War(s) period. We compile a corpus of hundreds of seventeenth−century pamphlets and combine this with novel word embedding techniques trained on millions of Early Modern English documents to make statements about word “meanings.” We focus on understanding of the phrase “peers and equals” (and its variants). We provide quantitative and qualitative e…
Athenian Democracy and Distrust
The Currency of Politics is a major contribution to the history of economic thought, a history too often neglected by political theorists. Especially important are Eich’s arguments about the fragility of trust, and the way in which money both enables and undermines such trust. In his words, monetary trust “does not simply imply the enforcement of existing contracts but the realization of a more fundamental, and more equitable, social contract tha…
Active and Passive Citizens
Constitutional Fallacies
Democratic Law
The question of how communities may author their own laws, thereby manifesting autonomy (“self-legislation”), arises throughout the history of political thought. In Democratic Law, her Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinguished contribution to this long inquiry: she argues that law’s value within democratic societies rests on its communicative capacity, enabling citizens to express their recognition of each other’s …
Analytical Democratic Theory
A prominent and publicly influential literature challenges the quality of democratic decision making, drawing on political science findings with specific claims about the ubiquity of cognitive bias to lament citizens' incompetence. A competing literature in democratic theory defends the wisdom of crowds, drawing on a cluster of models in support of the capacity of ordinary citizens to produce correct outcomes. In this Letter, we draw on recent fi…
Intuitions about the epistemic virtues of majority voting
The Condorcet Jury Theorem, along with empirical results, establishes the accuracy of majority voting in a broad range of conditions. Here we investigate whether naïve participants (in the U.S. and Japan) are aware of this accuracy. In four experiments, participants were provided with information about an assembly voting to decide on one of two options, one being better than the other. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were provided with speci…
Democratic Failure
Today we confront the prospect that some of the world’s oldest and most durable democracies may be backsliding, at risk of failure. But how should we conceptualize and measure democratic failure, given the imperfect nature of all existing political regimes? How should we identify those institutions that might be most vulnerable? Democratic Failure draws together leading scholars from philosophy, political science, and law to clarify the key chall…
Institutional Bargaining for Democratic Theorists (or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Haggling)
Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decision making, though political theorists typically doubt that processes that permit the exercise of unequal power and the use of threats can yield legitimate outcomes. In this review, we trace the development of theories of institutional bargaining from the standpoint of pluralism and positive political theory before turning to the treatment of bargaining…
Political Legitimacy
Justifying the Jury
The jury is a paradigmatic example of a democratic institution that may be justified strictly oninstrumentalandepistemicgrounds: its ability to yield just outcomes. Yet why should we have confidence in its ability? The jury's reliability derives from the jurors' status as local experts (hierarchical equality), as well as near-universal eligibility and selection by lot (horizontal equality): This dual egalitarianism is a condition of the jury's ep…
Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement
Jeremy Waldron’s Law and Disagreement (1999) is a landmark work in jurisprudence and in democratic theory. In retrospect, it also constitutes an intervention into a methodological debate over the aims of political theory, defending the study of institutions over work attending to the ends and ideals of a good society. A crucial insight of LD is the value of equal respect for the judgment of citizens and of legislatures. By entrenching rights in c…
Wealth
An in-depth political, legal, and philosophical study into the implications of wealth inequality in modern societies. Wealth, and specifically its distribution, has been a topic of great debate in recent years. Calls for justice against corporations implicated in the 2008 financial crash; populist rallying against “the one percent”; distrust of the influence of wealthy donors on elections and policy—all of these issues have their roots in a large…
Insomnia and Other Constitutional Pathologies
The publication of Richard Tuck's 2012 Seeley Lectures constituted an important event in intellectual history and political theory. The Sleeping Sovereign reflects the depth of Tuck's nearly forty years of historical inquiry into the concepts of rights, reason of state, and freedom, beginning with Natural Rights Theories . The leading member of the “Cambridge school” of the study of the history of political thought in the United States, and the F…
A Discussion of Josiah Ober’s The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece
Ancient Greece has long exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of modern political science. But until fairly recently, this influence has largely been philosophical, related to the origins of many theoretical concepts—including the concept of politics itself—in the ancient world. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece , Josiah Ober offers a synoptic and ambitious social theoretical account of the ancient Greek world, the sources of its po…
Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many
Aristotle's "doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude" (DWM) has become a canonical reference for political theorists, particularly supporters of epistemic approaches to democracy. Yet the excessive focus on the collective capacity of the many has obscured a more promising defense of democracy within Aristotle's work. Despite Aristotle's infamous arguments defending unequal merit and hierarchical relationships, his account of citizenship is striki…
Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges
Epistemic democracy defends the capacity of “the many” to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability. Epistemic democrats marshal substantial evidence from the history of political thought and a set of models to support their claims. The essay assesses this evidence and argues in favor of more empirical testing. It also cautions against using the contextually limited evidence of wise decisions as a basis fo…
Counting the Many
Symposium
Counting the Many
Supermajority rules govern many features of our lives in common: from the selection of textbooks for our children's schools to residential covenants, from the policy choices of state and federal legislatures to constitutional amendments. It is usually assumed that these rules are not only normatively unproblematic but necessary to achieve the goals of institutional stability, consensus, and minority protections. In this book, Melissa Schwartzberg…
Between Science and Engineering
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
The Ferocity of Hope
Research Article| July 01 2011 The Ferocity of Hope:Accountability and the People's Tribunate in Machiavellian Democracy Melissa Schwartzberg Melissa Schwartzberg Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Democracy and Legal Change. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2011) 20 (2): 216–225. https://doi.org/10.5325/goodsociety.20.2.0216 Vie…
Shouts, Murmurs and Votes
The arbitrariness of supermajority rules
There may be good general grounds for the adoption of supermajoritarian thresholds, but no such general arguments can justify the selection of a specific threshold. Although the benefits of supermajority rules, especially in the context of constitutional-amendment procedures, may outweigh the costs of their ex ante indeterminacy, the technically unjustifiable nature of specific thresholds means that those who are disadvantaged under such rules ca…
Democracy and Legal Change
Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges
Epistemic democracy defends the capacity of “the many” to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability. Epistemic democrats marshal substantial evidence from the history of political thought and a set of models to support their claims. The essay assesses this evidence and argues in favor of more empirical testing. It also cautions against using the contextually limited evidence of wise decisions as a basis fo…
Athenian Democracy and Legal Change
The ancient Athenians regarded their ability to modify their laws as a fundamentally democratic trait; indeed, the faculty of "pragmatic innovation" was well known throughout the Greek world and was widely viewed as a key advantage that Athens had over its rival, Sparta. The Athenian commitment to legal change endured despite disastrous consequences at the end of the fifth century, a comprehensive revision of the laws, and the complication of leg…
Voting the General Will
Scholars exploring the logic of Rousseau's voting rules have typically turned to the connection between Rousseau and the Marquis de Condorcet. Though Condorcet could not have had a direct influence on Rousseau's arguments about the choice of decision rules in Social Contract, the possibility of a connection has encouraged the view that Rousseau's selection of voting rules was based on epistemic reasons. By turning to alternative sources of influe…
Justifying the Jury
The jury is a paradigmatic example of a democratic institution that may be justified strictly oninstrumentalandepistemicgrounds: its ability to yield just outcomes. Yet why should we have confidence in its ability? The jury's reliability derives from the jurors' status as local experts (hierarchical equality), as well as near-universal eligibility and selection by lot (horizontal equality): This dual egalitarianism is a condition of the jury's ep…
Analytical Democratic Theory
A prominent and publicly influential literature challenges the quality of democratic decision making, drawing on political science findings with specific claims about the ubiquity of cognitive bias to lament citizens' incompetence. A competing literature in democratic theory defends the wisdom of crowds, drawing on a cluster of models in support of the capacity of ordinary citizens to produce correct outcomes. In this Letter, we draw on recent fi…
Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many
Aristotle's "doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude" (DWM) has become a canonical reference for political theorists, particularly supporters of epistemic approaches to democracy. Yet the excessive focus on the collective capacity of the many has obscured a more promising defense of democracy within Aristotle's work. Despite Aristotle's infamous arguments defending unequal merit and hierarchical relationships, his account of citizenship is striki…
Shouts, Murmurs and Votes
Rousseau on Fundamental Law
How can we understand Rousseau's use of entrenched fundamental law? Given that absolute sovereignty is of paramount importance to Rousseau, and given that he rejects the possibility of binding the future, fundamental law might be viewed as a paradoxical restraint on the sovereign. However, through a consideration of their substantive form, and of the procedural mechanisms of enactment and abrogation, these laws are shown to serve an ‘enabling’ pu…
Institutional Bargaining for Democratic Theorists (or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Haggling)
Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decision making, though political theorists typically doubt that processes that permit the exercise of unequal power and the use of threats can yield legitimate outcomes. In this review, we trace the development of theories of institutional bargaining from the standpoint of pluralism and positive political theory before turning to the treatment of bargaining…
Symposium
Between Science and Engineering
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
The arbitrariness of supermajority rules
There may be good general grounds for the adoption of supermajoritarian thresholds, but no such general arguments can justify the selection of a specific threshold. Although the benefits of supermajority rules, especially in the context of constitutional-amendment procedures, may outweigh the costs of their ex ante indeterminacy, the technically unjustifiable nature of specific thresholds means that those who are disadvantaged under such rules ca…
Jeremy Bentham on Fallibility and Infallibility
Jeremy Bentham's arguments regarding fallibility and infallibility comprise a fundamental and distinctive dimension of his democratic theory. Writing against the assertion of infallibility in religious, political, and legal contexts, Bentham claimed that authorities encouraged a popular belief in their own infallibility as a means of corrupting the people's faculties of judgment. In so doing, rulers were able to secure their own interests against…
Insomnia and Other Constitutional Pathologies
The publication of Richard Tuck's 2012 Seeley Lectures constituted an important event in intellectual history and political theory. The Sleeping Sovereign reflects the depth of Tuck's nearly forty years of historical inquiry into the concepts of rights, reason of state, and freedom, beginning with Natural Rights Theories . The leading member of the “Cambridge school” of the study of the history of political thought in the United States, and the F…
Rousseau on Fundamental Law
How can we understand Rousseau's use of entrenched fundamental law? Given that absolute sovereignty is of paramount importance to Rousseau, and given that he rejects the possibility of binding the future, fundamental law might be viewed as a paradoxical restraint on the sovereign. However, through a consideration of their substantive form, and of the procedural mechanisms of enactment and abrogation, these laws are shown to serve an ‘enabling’ pu…
Athenian Democracy and Legal Change
The ancient Athenians regarded their ability to modify their laws as a fundamentally democratic trait; indeed, the faculty of "pragmatic innovation" was well known throughout the Greek world and was widely viewed as a key advantage that Athens had over its rival, Sparta. The Athenian commitment to legal change endured despite disastrous consequences at the end of the fifth century, a comprehensive revision of the laws, and the complication of leg…
Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Vox Sagittae
On April 19, 2005, after just four rounds of voting, the College of Cardinals announced that 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been selected as the new pope. This announcement startled many. To be sure, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly a quarter of a century Ratzinger had helped select the vast majority of the cardinals who gathered to choose a successor to John Paul II, so his selection as pope coul…
Jeremy Bentham on Fallibility and Infallibility
Jeremy Bentham's arguments regarding fallibility and infallibility comprise a fundamental and distinctive dimension of his democratic theory. Writing against the assertion of infallibility in religious, political, and legal contexts, Bentham claimed that authorities encouraged a popular belief in their own infallibility as a means of corrupting the people's faculties of judgment. In so doing, rulers were able to secure their own interests against…
Response to Corey Brettschneider's review of Democracy and Legal Change
Thanks to Corey Brettschneider for his generous and perceptively critical review of my work and to Jeff Isaac for inviting us to discuss these issues
Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online
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Voting the General Will
Scholars exploring the logic of Rousseau's voting rules have typically turned to the connection between Rousseau and the Marquis de Condorcet. Though Condorcet could not have had a direct influence on Rousseau's arguments about the choice of decision rules in Social Contract, the possibility of a connection has encouraged the view that Rousseau's selection of voting rules was based on epistemic reasons. By turning to alternative sources of influe…
Democracy and Legal Change
Ratification Rules and the New (and Old) Constitutional Convention
Shouts, Murmurs and Votes
The arbitrariness of supermajority rules
There may be good general grounds for the adoption of supermajoritarian thresholds, but no such general arguments can justify the selection of a specific threshold. Although the benefits of supermajority rules, especially in the context of constitutional-amendment procedures, may outweigh the costs of their ex ante indeterminacy, the technically unjustifiable nature of specific thresholds means that those who are disadvantaged under such rules ca…
The Ferocity of Hope
Research Article| July 01 2011 The Ferocity of Hope:Accountability and the People's Tribunate in Machiavellian Democracy Melissa Schwartzberg Melissa Schwartzberg Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Democracy and Legal Change. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2011) 20 (2): 216–225. https://doi.org/10.5325/goodsociety.20.2.0216 Vie…
Counting the Many
Supermajority rules govern many features of our lives in common: from the selection of textbooks for our children's schools to residential covenants, from the policy choices of state and federal legislatures to constitutional amendments. It is usually assumed that these rules are not only normatively unproblematic but necessary to achieve the goals of institutional stability, consensus, and minority protections. In this book, Melissa Schwartzberg…
Between Science and Engineering
Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider …
Counting the Many
Symposium
Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges
Epistemic democracy defends the capacity of “the many” to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability. Epistemic democrats marshal substantial evidence from the history of political thought and a set of models to support their claims. The essay assesses this evidence and argues in favor of more empirical testing. It also cautions against using the contextually limited evidence of wise decisions as a basis fo…
A Discussion of Josiah Ober’s The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece
Ancient Greece has long exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of modern political science. But until fairly recently, this influence has largely been philosophical, related to the origins of many theoretical concepts—including the concept of politics itself—in the ancient world. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece , Josiah Ober offers a synoptic and ambitious social theoretical account of the ancient Greek world, the sources of its po…
Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many
Aristotle's "doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude" (DWM) has become a canonical reference for political theorists, particularly supporters of epistemic approaches to democracy. Yet the excessive focus on the collective capacity of the many has obscured a more promising defense of democracy within Aristotle's work. Despite Aristotle's infamous arguments defending unequal merit and hierarchical relationships, his account of citizenship is striki…
Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement
Jeremy Waldron’s Law and Disagreement (1999) is a landmark work in jurisprudence and in democratic theory. In retrospect, it also constitutes an intervention into a methodological debate over the aims of political theory, defending the study of institutions over work attending to the ends and ideals of a good society. A crucial insight of LD is the value of equal respect for the judgment of citizens and of legislatures. By entrenching rights in c…
Wealth
An in-depth political, legal, and philosophical study into the implications of wealth inequality in modern societies. Wealth, and specifically its distribution, has been a topic of great debate in recent years. Calls for justice against corporations implicated in the 2008 financial crash; populist rallying against “the one percent”; distrust of the influence of wealthy donors on elections and policy—all of these issues have their roots in a large…
Insomnia and Other Constitutional Pathologies
The publication of Richard Tuck's 2012 Seeley Lectures constituted an important event in intellectual history and political theory. The Sleeping Sovereign reflects the depth of Tuck's nearly forty years of historical inquiry into the concepts of rights, reason of state, and freedom, beginning with Natural Rights Theories . The leading member of the “Cambridge school” of the study of the history of political thought in the United States, and the F…
Justifying the Jury
The jury is a paradigmatic example of a democratic institution that may be justified strictly oninstrumentalandepistemicgrounds: its ability to yield just outcomes. Yet why should we have confidence in its ability? The jury's reliability derives from the jurors' status as local experts (hierarchical equality), as well as near-universal eligibility and selection by lot (horizontal equality): This dual egalitarianism is a condition of the jury's ep…
Political Legitimacy
Intuitions about the epistemic virtues of majority voting
The Condorcet Jury Theorem, along with empirical results, establishes the accuracy of majority voting in a broad range of conditions. Here we investigate whether naïve participants (in the U.S. and Japan) are aware of this accuracy. In four experiments, participants were provided with information about an assembly voting to decide on one of two options, one being better than the other. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were provided with speci…
Political science (29 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Law and economics (16 obras) · Democracy (14 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras)