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born 1956 United States
Ian Shapiro (born September 28, 1956) is an American political scientist, working as Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.
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An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.
A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.
Three ways to Be a democrat (1994)
No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.
The State of Democratic Theory (2003)
Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.
The Flight from Realityin the Human Science (2005)
Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....
The further institutional designers try to move along the continuum toward explicit proactive systems that force integration in exclusionary and racist societies, the more they will learn about how much redesign of ethnic antipathy is feasible in them.
Contrary to the rationalist followers of the American economist Kenneth Arrow, for whom the instability of majority rule was a problem, Dahl’s Madisonian insight was that instability is actually an advantage. It keeps majorities fluid in ways that stop politics from becoming winner-take-all contests in which losers might as well reach for their guns.
Wealthy people used to find democracy frightening. The reason was simple: the poor, once enfranchised, should be expected to soak the rich. This fear bred elite resistance to expanding the franchise, particularly beyond the propertied classes. Nor did this fear, and the reasoning behind it, go unnoticed on the political left.
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