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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications…. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
(Federalist papers, 68, Alexander Hamilton)Introduction
In the chapters that make up part II of this book we turn our attention to the democratic devices of our title – the institutional structures that constitute democratic politics. Of course, institutional arrangements differ between democracies, but these relatively fine-grained differences will not be our primary concern. Rather we wish to discuss the broad institutional structures that we take to lie at the heart of almost all modern conceptions of democratic politics: voting and popular elections, representative elections, political parties, and variations on the themes of separating and dividing political powers.
Our aim in these chapters is to provide a discussion of each of these institutional devices in turn, drawing on the analysis of democratic desires provided in part I. Thus the bulk of this chapter will present an account of voting and elections that departs from the standard economic model of these topics precisely because it starts from our more moral and more expressive model of motivation and therefore allows discussion of a wider range of political mechanisms.
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