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  1. Political Inequality and the 'Super-Rich': Their Money or (some of) Their Political Rights.Dean J. Machin - 2013 - Res Publica 19 (2):121-139.
    The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...)
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  2. The irrelevance of democracy to the public justification of political authority.Dean J. Machin - 2009 - Res Publica 15 (2):103-120.
    Democracy can be a means to independently valuable ends and/or it can be intrinsically (or non-instrumentally) valuable. One powerful non-instrumental defence of democracy is based on the idea that only it can publicly justify political authority. I contend that this is an argument about the reasonable acceptability of political authority and about the requirements of publicity and that satisfying these requirements has nothing to do with whether a society is democratic or not. Democracy, then, plays no role in publicly justifying (...)
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    Political Legitimacy, the Egalitarian Challenge, and Democracy.Dean J. Machin - 2012 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (2):101-117.
    This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and (...)
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