Aktuelles am Arbeitsbereich Politische Philosophie
Democracy on a Blockchain: The Cure for Populism? – 09/2004
Announcement: New Working Paper
Democracy on a blockchain: The cure for populism? (in: The Twin Challenges of Populism, forthcoming, with D. Johnson). Preprint online.
A principal-agent problem occurs when an agent (such as an elected representative) has interests that may not align with those of the principal (the constituents), leading to issues like corruption, information asymmetry, or difficulties in monitoring the agent's actions. Blockchain technology offers potential solutions by enhancing transparency through decentralized ledgers, which immutably record the actions of agents, and by improving accountability through smart contracts that automatically enforce agreed-upon conditions. Techno-optimists argue that blockchain technology could significantly reduce the misalignment of interests and strengthen democratic governance. In their new paper, Dylan and Mueller provide a critical appraisal of the idea of "cryptodemocracy" advanced by Allen, Berg and Lane (2019).
New Publications – 08/2024
We are happy to announce two new publications:
An Epistemic Account of Populist Ideology (Episteme 2023). Read online.
Some theorists believe that populism is nothing more than an
assembly of discursive patterns, while others maintain that it is a thin ideology that lacks a coherent set of guiding principles. In this paper, I show that populism can be fruitfully understood as a coherent ideology that rests on four foundational principles.
An Egalitarian Challenge to Increasing Epistemic Value
(Synthese 2023, wiith A. Ebrahimi Afrouzi). Read online.
The standard view in debates on epistemic democracy is that increasing epistemic value is an unconditional good. We show that epistemic value also has a distributive element, which puts doubt on the standard view.