The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society 2024 Gaus Memorial Prize has been awarded to Yale Ph.D. student Victor Wu, for his paper, “The Normative Implications of Complexity: Selection and Function in the Design of Pluralistic Political Systems.”
The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society, an international organization with the mission to encourage the interaction and cross-fertilization of three intellectual disciplines that are, in their history, deeply intertwined and that now, and going forward, have much to offer one another.
The Gaus Memorial Prize is available to currently enrolled graduate students, and is awarded for the essay that best exemplifies this spirit of innovation in PPE. The winner receives a financial award and the opportunity to present the essay at an afternoon session at the Annual PPE Society Conference.
Abstract:
This paper makes three interrelated interventions within contemporary political theory. First it argues that many theorists, in particular those debating the relative merits of election versus sortition (or electoral democracy versus lottocracy), neglect the extensive institutional pluralism and corresponding selection-mechanism pluralism of democratic political practice. Second and most importantly, it argues their approaches to normative theorizing and institutional design are methodologically flawed. This is because pluralistic political systems are complex systems in which political ideals are often achieved primarily as system-level emergent properties, rather than as direct properties of their elements. Normative theories which fail to explain how their favored political ideals will be realized and sustained through the interactions between heterogeneous offices and institutions are thus inadequate. Third, the paper develops the foundations for a functionalist approach to institutional design more appropriate for pluralistic political systems. The key concepts are the normative function of the office within the larger political system and the selection mechanism chosen—including election, sortition, and relatively undertheorized options such as appointment and self-selection—along with two design principles: incentive alignment and personality alignment between officeholders and offices. Using this framework, the paper revisits two familiar topics: political partisanship and judicial selection.