Motivation

Sorry in advance for an uncommonly long post. I hope these ideas are helpful, and I look forward to discussion tonight.

Jason’s Paper

In your paper, you address the connection between partisanship and voter turnout, explaining that partisan loyalty makes people more likely to vote. The parallels between this and Deci & Ryan’s self-determination theory may be helpful: to the extent that partisan loyalty fosters a sense of relatedness, it is likely to stimulate intrinsic motivations to vote. The experiments Professor Benkler has described (though I can’t recall reading at this point) about two groups asked to perform a task, with the only difference between them being that one was told, “you’re a team,” and the “team” group consistently outperforming the other group also seems helpful.

You ask for ideas to increase partisan loyalty on page 26. I think you might be better off identifying what might be going on with regard to self-determination theory and instead asking what could increase a sense of relatedness. Maybe this means more “teams” in the form of more parties. Maybe it means forcing voters to register with a party, rather than allowing them to register as independent (query whether this might have negative autonomy effects, and whether a proliferation of available teams could combat them). Another alternative is competitive districting in a different sense than Isaacharoff might suggest: have more polling locations, distributed on a neighborhood basis, and publicize the neighborhoods with the highest turnouts as a percentage of their population. This would avoid the problems associated with a list of names of voters, and because it taps into potentially developed “teams” (preexisting neighborhoods), it might help foster relatedness is ways that the names list could not.

Vanessa’s Paper

Most of your paper at this point is dedicated to exposing the concept of “precarious manhood,” and while I found this very interesting, I am not in a position to offer you much in the form of helpful feedback in these parts of your paper.

I can address the fledgling arguments between 14 and 16, but I hope that my comments are not based on a misunderstanding of your project here in its early stages. My main question, which is related to Jason’s, is what precisely this “patriarchal public goods problem” consists in (p. 14). I take it that a public good has the following characteristics: a group (here, society?) and each individual within it benefits from individual contributions to the public good, but the returns to each individual are less than the cost of contribution, and thus we expect public goods to be underproduced (or not produced at all) on a selfish rational actor (SRA) model. But in this case, what is the contribution that is costly to a man but beneficial to men or society in general? Even if gender performance is costly to A, A will on an SRA model perform gender is the benefits to A of such performance outweigh the costs, even if performance has positive externalities that accrue to the benefit of society at large and not specifically to A. I think that gender for performance, for men, might be just this kind of good. To the extent that this is true, the SRA does most of the work, and there is no public goods problem. I imagine that I misunderstand either what you mean by public goods problem here, or that I misunderstand the costs and benefits of gender performance. I suggest, therefore, that you carefully explain how these concepts interact in the patriarchal public goods game.

Erin’s Paper

I found your paper lucid and helpful, particularly for those with little background on various theories of punishment. Criminal punishment systems welcome applications of basically all of the areas of scholarship we discussed this semester, so your topic is a fertile one indeed.

I will focus my comments on the aspect of your paper I am most competent to help you think about: ideology. I think your paper could benefit from sharpening your use of ideology, and in particular explaining why you characterize what might typically be thought of as “moral theories of punishment” instead as “ideologies.” Typical characteristics I tend to think of when I see “ideology” include: framing/lenses/images through which the world is characterized (Fisher on Sambos, for example), self-justificatory force (Geertz on the distinction between science and ideology), justification of an underlying social order (Marx/Gramsci), and resistance to “choice” or “change” (e.g., MacKinnon). Several conclusions seem to follow from this set of characteristics. Pertinent to your paper, I wonder whether one would criticize ideologies (as you suggest “criticisms of the ideology of retribution” on p. 9) for their policy recommendations, as one would perhaps with moral theories. If ideology is a set of frames through which we see the world, it would seem much more natural to criticize how our pictures are thus false or misleading. Similarly, I wonder what it means to say (as you do on p. 12) that “ideological goals are not met”: to the extent that an ideology is successful at becoming an ideology, its goals are met. In other words, at least on some accounts, the “purpose” of an ideology is justification of itself and/or the underlying “base.” Slave ideology had the goal of perpetuating the master/slave division within an otherwise liberal legal tradition—it’s not really a criticism of an ideology per se to say that the liberal tradition cannot be liberal within a system of slavery. Indeed, ideology’s greatest triumph may be in justifying through framing that which seems unjustifiable. Finally, I wonder whether we can meaningfully “choose” an ideological framework, as you suggest we should at p. 15. All of this is to say that I think you should sharpen your use of the term ideology, since it can take many forms, of which we discussed at least a few in seminar.

Nick’s Paper

A fun paper indeed. I can’t think of any legal work that I’ve read incorporating much fun into its analysis, so I take it that your project is a novel one, which is an excellent start. I think I’m going to agree that, given the centrality of “fun” to your paper, you really have to sharpen the meaning you attribute to it. This will have consequences for all of the social science work you put it to.

For example, you say that fun is “a prime intrinsic motivator.” (p. 2) I wonder whether it really is an intrinsic motivator, and whether it is depends largely on what it is. On p. 6, you distinguish fun from “happiness,” but I wonder whether fun is not just part of a utility calculus that we’d expect from a rational actor. In other words, perhaps people seek to maximize utility, which is a package of various goods including money, happiness, fun, and the like. If this is the case, then the selfish rational actor model predicts that people will want to maximize fun. But you seem to suggest that fun is something different, just as Deci and Ryan would say that self-determination is different. I take it that what makes self-determination different is something like incommensurability, i.e., autonomy cannot be valued in absolute dollars or even along a ordinal, ranked scale. But even if fun is distinct from happiness, my intuition is that it is more like happiness than like autonomy in the sense that we would feel comfortable monetizing fun. To explain why I am wrong (as I likely am), you will have to give a robust account of precisely what fun is.