Rousseau's Anti–Agenda-Setting Agenda and Contemporary Democratic Theory

John T. Scott

American Political Science Review, 2005, vol. 99, issue 1, 137-144

Abstract: In his recent article, “Rousseau on Agenda-Setting and Majority Rule” (2003), Ethan Putterman examines how the democratic principle of popular majority rule might be reconciled with agenda-setting by legislative experts through an analysis of Rousseau's political theory. He argues that Rousseau accomplishes this reconciliation through a novel separation of powers between the legislative and the executive powers where the sovereign people delegates the exclusive power to initiate laws to the executive. Putterman thereby identifies as a solution to the problem of democratic self-legislation what Rousseau sees as the most important danger to it. At issue is not merely the correct interpretation of Rousseau's theory, for Putterman's argument raises far-reaching questions concerning the compatibility of democratic principles and institutions. After demonstrating that Putterman is incorrect that the sovereign people in Rousseau's state delegate the power of legislative initiative, I examine how Rousseau anticipates and addresses a related question central to contemporary democratic and social choice theory: the problem of preference aggregation through voting in the absence of agenda-setting institutions.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:99:y:2005:i:01:p:137-144_05

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().