Secrecy and Publicity in Votes and Debates

Jon Elster

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107083363
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316028513
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham's Political Tactics, this volume offers the first comprehensive discussion of the effects of secrecy and publicity on debates and votes in committees and assemblies. The contributors - sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars - consider the micro-technology of voting (the devil is in the detail), the historical relations between the secret ballot and universal suffrage, the use and abolition of secret voting in parliamentary decisions, and the sometimes perverse effects of the drive for greater openness and transparency in public affairs. The authors also discuss the normative questions of secret versus public voting in national elections and of optimal mixes of secrecy and publicity, as well as the opportunities for strategic behavior created by different voting systems. Together with two previous volumes on Collective Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Majority Decisions (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the book sets a new standard for interdisciplinary work on collective decision-making.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Public Voting and Political Modernization: Different Views from the Nineteenth Century and New Ideas to Modernize Voting Procedures
• 2 Semi-public Voting at the Constituante
• 3 The Introduction of the Vote by Ballot in the Elections of the Magistrates by the General Council of the Republic of Geneva (1707)
• 4 Suffrage and Voting Secrecy in General Elections
• 5 Secret Voting in the Italian Parliament
• 6 Open Decision-Making Procedures and Public Legitimacy: An Inventory of Causal Mechanisms
• 7 How Publicity Creates Opacity: What Happens When EU Ministers Vote Publicly
• 8 Secret-Public Voting in FDA Advisory Committees
• 9 E pluribus unum: Disclosed and Undisclosed Votes in Constitutional/Supreme Courts
• 10 Why Open Voting in General Elections Is Undesirable
• 11 Open-Secret Voting
• 12 Secret Votes and Secret Talk
• Index