The 2000 election showed that the mechanics of voting such as ballot design, can make a critical difference in the accuracy and fairness of our elections. But as Dennis F. Thompson shows, even more fundamental issues must be addressed to insure that our electoral system is just.
Thompson argues that three central democratic principles-equal respect, free choice, and popular sovereignty-underlie our electoral institutions, and should inform any assessment of the justice of elections. Although we may all endorse these principles in theory, Thompson shows that in practice we disagree about...

Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. Thompson suggests that we stop thinking about public ethics in terms of individual vices (such as selfishness or sexual misconduct) and start thinking about it in terms of institutional vices (such as abuse of power and lack of accountability).

This 1970 study examines the implications of empirical studies in the social sciences with reference to various strands of American and British democratic theory. In presenting his case Professor Thompson provides an extremely valuable critical synthesis of a very large body of theoretical and empirical literature in this field. He weaves together in an original way the works of more than a dozen twentieth-century political theorists and several hundred empirical studies by political scientists, sociologists and social psychologists.