The Electoral Imagination
Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems

An intellectual history and aesthetic theory of democratic elections, this book offers a critical alternative to the 'myth of rigging.'

Kent Puckett (Author)

9781009206655, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 October 2022

380 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.67 kg

What happens when we vote? What are we counting when we count ballots? Who decides what an election should look like and what it should mean? And why do so many people believe that some or all elections are rigged? Moving between intellectual history, literary criticism, and political theory, The Electoral Imagination offers a critical account of the decisions before the decision, of the aesthetic and imaginative choices that inform and, in some cases, determine the nature and course of democratic elections. Drawing on original interpretations of George Eliot and Ralph Ellison, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Arrow, Anthony Trollope and Arthur Koestler, Richard Nixon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot and the Single Transferable Vote, The Electoral Imagination works both to understand the systems we use to move between the one and the many and to offer an alternative to the 'myth of rigging.'

1. Introduction: rigging the system
2. Seeing aspects: considering some kinds of electoral realism
3. Electoral things: realism, representation, and the Victorian ballot
4. Late returns: Lewis Carroll and William Morris
5. The Impossibilists: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Arrow
6. Conclusion: a silent majority.

Subject Areas: Political ideologies [JPF], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary theory [DSA]