Shai Agmon

Democratic competition is often analogised to market competition, where parallel efforts to satisfy preferences produce efficient outcomes—namely, parallel competition. A contrasting model is offered by adversarial legal systems, where social benefits stem from structured mutual interference between opposing sides—namely, friction competition. These models rely on distinct mechanisms, each effective under different conditions. This chapter argues that while both are essential to democracy, contemporary theorists and reformers systematically over-emphasise the parallel model. This imbalance distorts the structure of democratic competition; from constitutional design and voting rules to campaign strategy and the media environment. The chapter also highlights how the value of friction is increasingly discounted not only in democratic politics, but also within legal systems and market economies. In short, democratic institutions need more—not less—structured and beneficial forms of friction.

While moral arguments for limiting market expansionism proliferate, a fundamental question has been left unanswered: the moral limits of what, exactly? Moral Limits of Markets (MLM) theorists tend to employ different terms – markets, putting a price tag, buying and selling – interchangeably and inconsistently to describe the phenomenon they are troubled by. I clarify this ambiguity by offering a novel taxonomy of different dimensions of exchange I identify as the sources of the normative concerns of most MLM arguments: Alienation, Commodification, Marketization, Privatization. This taxonomy allows us to better understand why and what about ‘markets’ should be limited.

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design.

Despite being largely overlooked in the literature, Israel provides a rare example of what a full decade of twenty-first century populism in power looks like. Based on an examination of rhetoric and policymaking between 2009 and 2019, this article brings the writing on the subject up to date and highlights the unique traits of Israeli populism. In so doing it establishes that Israeli populism has been mainstreamed to a remarkable extent and currently encompasses almost all right-wing parties in the country’s legislature. Moreover, it shows that the Israeli case embodies a variety of populism which has yet to be acknowledged in the literature – neither economic nor cultural in character, but rather based on national security issues. The concept of ‘security-driven populism’, introduced here, could prove useful to researchers studying other populist regimes that do not fit neatly into the ‘culture versus economy’ debate, which has dominated the field for years.

The adversarial legal system is traditionally praised for its normative appeal: it protects individual rights; ensures an equal, impartial, and consistent application of the law; and, most importantly, its competitive structure facilitates the discovery of truth – both in terms of the facts, and in terms of the correct interpretation of the law. At the same time, legal representation is allocated as a commodity, bought and sold in the market: the more one pays, the better legal representation one gets. In this article, I argue that the integration of a market in legal representation with the adversarial system undercuts the very normative justifications on which the system is based. Furthermore, I argue that there are two implicit conditions, which are currently unmet, but are required for the standard justifications to hold: that there is (equal opportunity for) equality of legal representation between parties, and that each party has (equal opportunity for) a sufficient level of legal representation. I, therefore, outline an ideal proposal for reform that would satisfy these conditions.

A well-known objection to prioritarianism, famously levelled by Mike Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, is that it wrongly ignores the unity of the individual in treating intra-personal cases like inter-personal cases. In this paper we accept that there should be a moral shift between these cases, but argue that this is because autonomy is a relevant consideration in intra-personal but not inter-personal cases, and one to which pluralist prioritarians ought to attend. To avoid this response, Otsuka and Voorhoeve must assume we know nothing about the subjective information of the person being chosen for. But we show that this commits them to two controversial assumptions: that welfare consists in an objective list of goods, and – if one accepts an unorthodox but plausible account of the relationship between risk aversion and rationality – that there is only a narrow range of rational risk aversions. Only prioritarians who accept both these assumptions are on the hook of Otsuka and Voorhoeve’s objection; for all others, the examples have insufficient information, and so lose their sting.

Thomas Jefferson’s famous proposal; whereby a state’s constitution should be re-enacted every 19 years by a majority vote; purports to solve the intergenerational problem caused by perpetual constitutions: namely that laws which were enacted by people who are already dead bind living citizens without their consent. I argue that the model fails to fulfil its own normative consent-based aspirations. This is because it produces two groups of people who will end up living under laws to which they did not give their consent: citizens who reach the voting age after the re-enactment process; citizens who did not assent to being obliged by the majority vote’s results. I reject possible responses to my argument by showing that they result in making the model either impractical or redundant. The remainder of the paper discusses whether implementing the model would enhance the consent-based legitimacy of the modern state.