The 2024 Gaus Memorial Essay Prize Winner Announced!
The PPE Society is pleased to announce the winner of the fourth annual Gerald Gaus Memorial PPE Essay Prize.
The 2024 Gaus Memorial Prize goes to Victor Wu (Yale), for his paper, “The Normative Implications of Complexity: Selection and Function in the Design of Pluralistic Political Systems.”
Wu will receive a financial award from the PPE Society and the opportunity to present his work in a session with two other senior scholars at the 2024 Annual PPE Society Meeting in New Orleans, LA.
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.
Winner Bio:
Victor C. Wu is a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Substantively, his main research interests are in democratic theory, organizational theory, and philosophy of social science. Methodologically, his main interest is in “political theory as political science.” Previously, he was a Yenching Scholar at Peking University and an artillery officer in the United States Marine Corps.