Abstract

Julia Maskivker’s The Duty to Vote is a very welcome contribution to the discussion of the theory of citizen participation in politics.1 1 This is an area that has received far too little attention from philosophers and political theorists. It is receiving more attention recently due to the spate of books by mostly libertarian writers, which argue that citizens in a democracy tend to be poorly informed, or at best, excessively belligerent, and that this fact is one that arises from the very nature of citizen participation in a democracy. These writers argue that democracy itself should be scrapped in significant part in favour of rule by experts or massive reduction in the size and scope of government in order to give greater scope to markets in the regulation of the social world we live in.