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Re: SEA Topic: ASEAN as the Agent of Action



On Wed, 18 Jun 1997 tjewell@unm.edu wrote:

> Tuna, et. al.,
> 
> I would like to see a non-US agency on the ballot, but forcing the issue
> by offering no alternatives begs the question about what the community
> would prefer.
> 
> Tom Jewell
> 
I agree that the community should somehow decide what it thinks about
non-US agents, and that the community's decision should be given weight.  

However, that said, I have reservations about including just one or two
topics with a non-US agent on the ballot.  Voters who may prefer the
substantive issues of one topic may be forced into unwanted agent choices.
A similar sort of ambivalence troubled at least this voter in last year's
voting.

Even if the topic committee included, say six topics, with three sets of
substantive issues, but with different agents for the various pairs,
(E.G., ASEAN aid and US aid, ASEAN trade policy and US Trade policy, and
US democracy promo and UN democracy promo), the possible outcome
distortions would be maintained.  Lets assume that perhaps all the voters
who want trade policy prefer the US as actor, but the democracy promo
supporters are fairly equally divided between those who prefer the two
different agents.  In that circumstance, and assuming that roughly the
same number of voters support trade and democracy promo, the trade policy
topic will get twice as many votes as the democracy topic.

This leads me to favor a bifurcated decision making process, whereby the
community decides first whether it wants to debate non-US agents, and then
decides what to debate about.  To that end, I urge the advocates of non-US
agents, and the opponents as well, to continue their dialog, but to
perhaps generalize their arguments a bit beyond the SEA topic.  I would
also urge that the topic committee be very cautious about creating a
situation where a proposed topic wins primarily because of the voters'
preferences regarding the agent, rather than their preferences about the
substance of the topic.

dp
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