The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (91 page)

Opinion poll conducted at the exit from the polling station, when people have already voted. The advantages of an exit poll over a conventional opinion poll of voting intentions are:

(1) People seem less likely to be mistaken, or to dissemble, about what they have already done than in their statements of what they intend to do.
(2) Relatedly, an exit poll interviews only people who have voted and therefore avoids the errors inevitably associated with guessing how many of those who say they will vote, or abstain, will actually do what they say.
(3) It is easier to interview the correct proportions of people of different socio-economic groups in an exit poll than in a conventional quota sample ( see
survey research
).

In recent general elections in Britain and elsewhere, exit polls have produced predictions closer to the actual result than any preceding poll. It would be very disappointing if they did not. However, in the British general election of 1992, even the exit polls overestimated the Labour vote relative to the Conservatives', although not by as much as the pre-election polls.
Exit polls will certainly continue to be used by media predictors of election results, who can bring powerful processing and computing resources to bear on the data in order to get a prediction of the national result before the votes have been counted. However, the limitations they share with all other quota samples make academic analysts cautious about using them.

 
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(1) Taking advantage of a resource, for example good weather.
(2) Taking unfair advantage of persons, their characteristics, or their situations.

The difficulties are in specifying the nature of the unfairness of the advantage, and the ways in which the opportunity to take advantage arises in the first place, and/or is seized on a particular occasion. For these reasons, the analysis of exploitation is linked inextricably to understandings of
power
and (in)justice. What is distinctive about exploitation as a particular form of injustice has been controversial; so, too, have been the ways in which (if any) exploitation is a form of power, rather than a possible consequence of it. A particular problem is the identification of exploitative transactions within consensual exchanges, which for some theorists disguise the presence of a power relation, but for others guarantee its absence. ( See also
Marx
.) It may well be that the underlying complaint is that persons who are exploited are treated merely as things, linking the two senses above, but there is no agreement on how this is to be elaborated.
AR 

 
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Costs and benefits which accrue to people who are not party to the economic decisions which bring them into being. They can arise out of decisions to produce or decisions to consume. A typical example of production with high external costs would be a glue factory: three groups (workers, owners, and purchasers) might all consider themselves to be better off as a result of the transactions involved in producing glue, but their decisions take no account of the smell on neighbours. An external cost of consumption might be incurred by my neighbour as a result of my playing the radio loudly.
Externalities show that markets are not necessarily maximizers of collective well-being. Of course, there are many arguments which support this suggestion, but the argument about external costs is the most demonstrable and unavoidable for orthodox economists. One alternative solution is a ‘full privatization’ model in which everything that incurs a cost on anyone is paid for: thus I would have to rent my right to play my radio from my neighbours. Most economists reject this in favour of state modification of prices through taxation.
Many of the most important externalities are public, either in the sense of accruing to an indefinite number of people or of affecting public goods—things like clean air which can be consumed without being reduced. A recommendation to deal with these costs, formally accepted by a number of governments and international organizations since the 1970s, is the ‘polluter pays principle’ which requires producers to meet the full social cost of their production by the imposition of taxes and levies.
There are both moderate and radical applications of this argument to policy. David Pearce's
Blueprint for a Green Economy
treats it in a fairly modest way, recommending carbon and packaging taxes. But E. J. Mishan , in such works as
The Costs of Economic Growth
, sees the gap between incurred costs and hidden social costs as a massive distortion of our perception of well-being, suggesting that if we really understood the costs involved we would price aeroplanes out of the sky and cars off the road.
LA 

 
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The Fabian Society, which was established in London in 1884, took its name from Fabius Cunctator , the Roman General who applied carefully conceived tactics of preparation, attrition, and judicious timing of attack in defeating Hannibal . The small group of members of the original London Society were all middle-class intellectuals and professionals, committed to radicalism, who believed similarly in calm reflection and rational planning as opposed to directly confrontational methods as the ideal approach to political action. Fabianism refers especially to a particular position within British socialism, originally espoused by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb
and George Bernard Shaw , three of the most prominent early Fabians. The early Fabians concentrated on the research of social issues, the results of which were forwarded in arguments for reform to intellectuals and leaders within both the Independent Labour Party and the Liberal Party. After the First World War the Fabian Society affiliated to the Labour Party, becoming a less high-profile group after the 1930s, but providing a basis for a more diverse set of socialist intellectuals to conduct debate on any issue of interest to the Labour Party. The Fabian Society has always embraced a range of socialist viewpoints but the broad disposition of its members has often been characterized as democratic socialist within the ‘moderate left’ of the Labour Party.
The Webbs and Shaw believed in a Ricardian theory of rent, which determined that one part of rent should be apportioned to society, or, in practice, the state acting on behalf of society. This was the justification for progressive taxation to fund state expenditure directed at correcting social inequalities. State policies at both national and local levels were to aim at creating a ‘national minimum’ of social welfare which would liberate all individuals to fulfil their talents and act as good citizens. Thus, political democracy enshrined in the right to vote could be extended to a social democracy in which the values and injustices of unfettered capitalism could be eroded.
At the same time, the Fabians advocated that the state should be staffed by trained experts in public administration, capable of rational consideration of public policy, dedicated to public service for the general good, and, thus, successful in delivering social democracy. The emphasis on the role of trained intelligence in good government derived from contempt for ‘amateur’ administrators, who by default had facilitated unfettered capitalism.
The Fabian approach to political action by way of calm intellectual reflection and considered rational planning, and advocacy that social democracy be engineered by a meritocratic state élite, have appealed to successive generations of senior parliamentary Labour Party figures and to socialists overseas, especially in India ( see also
Nehru
).
Fabianism has been charged with being based on inherently élitist assumptions, born of its adherents' generally relatively comfortable upbringings and university education, and with ignoring the role of markets, in which benevolent administrators have a smaller role than in planned societies.
JBr 

 
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