Cristian Rivera
I am a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Cambridge.
My research is mainly focused on the interpretation and criticism of fundamental concepts in political science, theory, and philosophy, including political representation, interests, judgment, agency, deliberation, and aggregation.
I am particularly interested in how we might draw from tools from theoretical philosophy to help clarify long-running disputes surrounding central concepts in the history of political thought, and aid our efforts at institutional design specifically and normative theorizing generally.
I also have interests in debates about how to reinterpret political concepts in the age of AI, political philosophy and political science methodology, and political economy.
Publications
Forthcoming in
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
“Majoritarian Democracy without the Discursive Dilemma”
Abstract
The discursive dilemma maintains that incoherent collective judgments can result from the aggregation of coherent individual judgments on logically connected propositions. For democratic theory, the implication is that if democratic institutions such as assemblies are to be coherent, they must forgo responsiveness to the individual attitudes of constituents and have “minds of their own.” To achieve this, proponents of the dilemma argue that democratic institutions should adopt particular procedures, such as deliberation and public reason, and institutional models, such as the republican state. This paper, however, argues that this is a false choice. There are alternative ways out of the dilemma that don’t force us to choose between responsiveness and coherence. This paper presents one such approach developed in the computer science literature and argues that adopting it brings us closer to satisfying important democratic imperatives. It also suggests that the approach bolsters majoritarian approaches over republican alternatives.
“The Nature of Interests in Politics”
Abstract
The concept of interest features centrally in most arguments and explanations across political science, political theory, and ordinary language. Despite its ubiquity, however, there are deep and enduring disagreements surrounding the concept. The purpose of this thesis is to examine three major disputes at the heart of the study of politics – what interests are, how they might be represented, and how they might be aggregated – and argue that what drives these disagreements is an inadequate metaphysical and ontological understanding of the phenomena the concept is meant to capture. To arrive at a better basis for understanding interest, this thesis draws from a range of subfields within or overlapping with the philosophy of mind, including action theory, interpretation theory, and social ontology. The argument is that resting our understanding of interests on a better account of mind ameliorates many of these disagreements and offers better foundations on which to understand politics.
Education
Prior to my PhD, I completed an MPhil at the University of Cambridge and a BA at the University of Southern California. Please get in touch for the most recent version of my CV.
