PPPS: “Unhappy Families: Three Ways of Thinking About Imperfect Political Regimes”

I got the idea for this paper while teaching a course on dictatorships and revolutions. The course had little political philosophy content (by design), but we did talk about whether democratic regimes are always to be preferred to non-democratic regimes, and I had a section on “transitional justice” at the end of the trimester. Teaching the course  crystallized a certain dissatisfaction with the emphasis of much recent political theory on questions about the justification of constitutional democracy. The problem was not that I had any objections to the justification of constitutional democracy, but that such discussions seemed to be of little help in evaluating the many kinds of political regimes that actually exist in the world today, and which can be imperfect in a bewildering variety of ways. As a native of Venezuela, I also wondered whether the emphasis of recent political theory on democracy obscured more than it illuminated the ways in which political regimes promote or fail to promote certain values and interests.

In the paper I do two things: first, I develop an analysis of the general idea of a “political regime” that is general enough to apply to existing political regimes (democratic and non-democratic), and flexible enough to capture their differences. I claim that a political regime can be thought of as a system for the division of the labor of political decisionmaking (just as markets are systems for the division of economic labor). The second thing I do is to explore - rather tentatively, it should be said - three criteria that I believe have been historically important in evaluating complex political regimes. The first criterion focuses on the resources and qualities of political decisionmakers. The second focuses on the interests promoted and protected through the operation of systems for the division of political labor. And the third focuses on the stability of such systems with respect to the kinds of characters that they help create and that sustain them.

The paper is perhaps more appropriately seen as a conceptual exploration than as a sustained argument for a particular thesis. To the extent that there is a sustained argument, it is a negative one: none of these criteria for evaluating political regimes is sufficient by itself as a basis for evaluating political regimes, and judgments of political regimes based on one criterion are not necessarily congruent with judgments based on another. All justified regimes may be alike, but all unhappy regimes are unhappy in their own way.

Since this is a relatively long paper, I have abridged it for the podcast presentation; the more detailed written version is here. (A written version of the abridged presentation, which is still a bit long, is here).

Thom Brooks’ useful comments are here. I also look forward to your comments. (Thom’s comments are now up — SCM)

 

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