DEMOCRACY RESEARCH
My research on democracy explores the implications of people’s interests in privacy for the ways we think about the democratic institutions, conventions and rights and, in particular, for the way we think about the ethics of voting. Recent work has critically explored philosophical arguments for public voting and compulsory voting and against judicial review. The ethics of voting has largely been ignored by philosophers and democratic theorists. I hope to change that, by showing the variety of considerations which might properly determine people’s votes; the variety of reasons why people might be justified in not voting; and the variety of procedures, in addition to elections, by which people might govern themselves democratically.
Contemporary Democratic Theory: A Critical Introduction, a book which I am writing for Oxford University Press, provides a sophisticated introduction to contemporary debates in democratic theory. It will have chapters on procedural and substantive conceptions of democracy, on individual and group rights, on the roles of competition and deliberation in democratic decision making, as well as on judicial review and democracy as a human right. The book draws on examples such as the NICE’s Citizens Council, where citizens can participate as patients and as members of the council in determining what forms of healthcare are available to us on the NHS. NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) was established in 1999 by the Labour Government to provide national guidance on the clinical efficacy and cost effectiveness of medical treatments and techniques. More views on these aspects of the democratic process are included in a paper I am currently finishing, ‘Democracy, Deliberation and Public Service Reform: the Case of NICE’ for the ‘Citizen, State and Society’ stream of an ESRC-funded project on Democracy and Public Service Reform, organised by the 2020 Public Services Trust.
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