Project begun: Tuesday, April 4, 2006 This draft begun: June 3, 2008, version as of July 8, 2009 For presentation at the Ex Uno Plures. Welfare Without Illusion, a conference sponsored by the European Center for the Study of Public Choice and the Research Centre for International Economics September 14-16, 2009 at Sapienza University of Rome.. Presentation Draft SOME DEMOCRACIES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: USING NEED SATISFACTION TO EVALUATE DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE* Joe A. Oppenheimer, Professor Department of Government & Politics University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742* (301) 405 - 4113 www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/oppenheimer e-mail: [email protected] Norman Frohlich, Professor Emeritus I.H. Asper School of Business University of Manitoba and Department of Social and Preventive Medicine University of Montreal e-mail: [email protected] & Maria Dimitriu, Graduate Student Department of Government & Politics* with Cyrus Aghamolla, Student Department of Government & Politics* KEY WORDS: Democracy, constitutional evaluation, social welfare, needs, social justice * This work was greatly assisted by the opportunity we had to work with Gillian Brock, at the University of Auckland. She had the insight to integrate literature on satisfying basic needs into our arguments and experiments on distributive justice. The Philosophy Department of the University of Auckland afforded us a wonderful environment to consider these questions. Earlier, our work with Eduardo Frajman was crucial in developing our thinking regarding the relation between democracies and welfare. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has supported this work from its onset while the Universities of Manitoba, Maryland and Montreal all have helped support this research over various time periods. Comments by Karol Soltan, Peter Levine and other members of the Maryland CP4 Workshop were very helpful, as were comments by Karen Kaufmann, Eric Uslaner and others in the Maryland American Politics Workshop. Drafts were presented at the Faculty Research Seminar, Philosophy Department, University of Auckland; the 11th International Social Justice Conference, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, August 2-5, 2006; and the 2008 American Political Science Meetings, in Boston; and the Western Political Science Association Meetings in Vancouver 2009.Some Democracies are More Equal than Others Oppenheimer, Frohlich, Dimitriu & Aghamolla Page ii ABSTRACT Democracy is often justified as a political system which protects and increases the welfare of its citizens. The welfare of an individual may be tractable, but citizens are a group, and so there is a need to characterize aggregate welfare. This requires some way of comparing and aggregating the welfare of individuals into a measure of social welfare. This problem is notoriously difficult, yet there are some hopeful findings. A growing body of ethical reasoning and empirical data indicates that there is broad cross-national consensus on one central normative aspect of welfare: meeting the basic needs of the severely disadvantaged in society. All the developed liberal democracies have adequate resources to provide for these. This prompts us to propose a new metric for evaluating the performance of the developed liberal democracies: the extent to which they provide for their citizens' basic needs. This avoids the thorny problems of characterizing overall welfare. We provide some preliminary measures which demonstrate significant divergence across democracies in the OECD and examine some of the statistical patterns that emerge. Since the divergence in performance cannot simply be attributed to differences in values or disparities in resources this suggests further research into the role of political structures, in explaining the disparities. SOME DEMOCRACIES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: USING NEED SATISFACTION TO EVALUATE DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE Joe Oppenheimer, Norman Frohlich, Maria Dimitriu & Cyrus Aghamolla INTRODUCTION In this paper we consider criteria that should be used to evaluate the performance of the political systems in developed democracies. We develop and operationalize indicators, report our findings and conclude with a discussion of the results and their implications. The justification of governments has shifted over the millennia. From satisfying the demands of the gods, we have come down to caring for citizens’ mundane needs. Not that our ancient forebears were concerned exclusively with the deities. Aristotle argued allegorically that diners were the best judges of the chef. After numerous revolutions and some considerable evolution, democracy has become the current front-runner as the system that is the best to insure that the political feast satisfies those at the table. For the economically developing states, some arguments persist for supporting other governmental structures but for the developed states, the debate is essentially over. However, like the ancient gods, there are many forms that democracy can take. Identifying the particular form which performs best is a difficult task: one for which no consensus exists. How are we to judge governmental performance among the ‘old-line,’ stable democratic states? How are we to develop a metric for the satisfaction of the citizens? Of course, political performance has many different aspects: physical security, economic performance, delivery of social welfare, stability, durability, etc. The initial problem we face, then, is the selection of basic performance criteria that can, somehow, be tied into a coherent and justifiable bundle. Only after that does it make sense to move on to the tasks of measurement and evaluation. In this essay, we explore the difficulties of constructing such a metric, propose a relatively simple solution, and develop some implications of such a metric for comparing the political performance of the advanced democracies. In this paper we argue that the considerable differences in how citizens (and especially needy citizens) fare in the developed democracies can serve as a basic marker of social welfare. TheSome Democracies are More Equal than Others Oppenheimer, Frohlich, Dimitriu & Aghamolla Page 2 normative importance of the satisfaction of basic needs1 makes performance on that dimension a worthy candidate for a metric of democratic performance. By focusing on “needs”, this paper