The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (84 page)

Equal access to the procedure under which some office or benefit not available to all is allocated, with stipulations about the fairness of the procedure in view of its purposes. For example, nineteenth-century reforms of the civil service in the United Kingdom introduced the allocation of positions by competitive examination, to replace patronage or family connection as determinants of success. In this conception, equal opportunity is necessarily associated with rationing. ‘Equal opportunity’ is, however, sometimes misused to support an increase in the supply of some good, for example in the claim that equal opportunity requires that higher education be made available to all who want it. This is better characterized as a demand for
equality
in distribution.
‘Equal opportunity’ is an elastic notion because of the problems of deciding at what point in a process it is appropriate to measure it. For example, a competitive examination may provide equal opportunity for candidates to be tested, but that does not mean they have had an equal opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills required for success, and hence may not be a true guide to talent. The ‘equal access’ mentioned may then be applied to the circumstances in which individuals receive their education, it being argued that equal opportunity in the test requires equal opportunity to acquire the skills to be tested. This may lead to a demand for equal conditions in the period before the rationing, or a demand that, because those conditions have not in fact been equal, the procedure take account of the previous relative lack of resources or opportunities of some competitors by discriminating in their favour. See also
affirmative action
;
positive discrimination
.
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The
Fourteenth Amendment
guarantees to Americans ‘the equal protection of the laws’. State and federal law-makers are prohibited from arbitrarily discriminating against particular groups such as blacks, women, and the disabled. This is not to say that discrimination is never constitutionally permissible. Legislation that taxes people according to their ability to pay is regarded as reasonable. But state laws requiring or permitting segregation in public schools according to race were, in 1954, deemed to contravene the constitutional principle of ‘equal protection’ (
Brown v. The Board of Education at Topeka, Kansas
(1954)).
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A factual and/or normative assertion of the equal capacity or equal standing of persons, generating claims about
distributive justice
. The quasiempirical equality of individuals may refer to apparently physical characteristics—as in Hobbes's view of man's equal natural insecurity—or to mental characteristics like rationality or the capacity for morality. Claims about the capacity for rationality or morality may be made as transcendental arguments. The normative claim involves four main ‘applications’ which are not wholly separable:

(1) 
Equal consideration within a scheme of (moral) decision-making
. In this sense, the claim to equal treatment is the claim to be taken equally into account, as in the
utilitarian
concern that each count for one in the aggregation procedure. This is a fundamental but weak conception of equality: the purpose of the decision may be to differentiate, and it may aim at unequal distribution. (For example, a good may be distributed by competitive examination—equality 1 would require only that everyone be allowed to enter.)
(2) 
Even-handed treatment
. Here the claim to equal treatment is the claim that like cases be treated alike. This only contingently leads to equal outcomes ( see also
equity
).
(3) 
Equality in distribution
. The claim that equal treatment requires that each person receive an equal amount of a good. Such claims seem most plausible when there is a lack of information about the circumstances of the persons involved.
(4) 
Equality in outcome
. The claim that equal treatment requires that persons should end up in the same conditions, taking account of their situation before distribution and adjusting the amount to be distributed to each accordingly. This may be compared with
equal opportunity
, which requires that persons should be equally placed with respect to opportunities to compete for a good. See also
egalitarianism
.

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Balance; more particularly, any state of affairs which no actor has an individual incentive to disturb. The study of political equilibria derives from two traditions: the tradition of
balance of power
in international relations; and the tradition of
game theory
.
In a balance of power, aggression is deterred because it would overall do more harm than good to the aggressor. Analogously, a game is in equilibrium if no actor would benefit from shifting his strategy to another of those available to him or her. Some equilibria are defective: a notorious case is simple
prisoners' dilemma
, in which each player would be better off if both moved from the equilibrium in which both defect, but neither has an incentive to do so.

 
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(1) Even-handed treatment. Equity requires that relevantly similar cases be treated in similar ways. For example, two persons doing the same job in the same way with similar results for the same employer would expect the same pay. Again, it would be inequitable if two individuals committed the same crime in similar circumstances, but received quite different sentences. Equity is therefore closely connected to
equality
, and to the rule of law. Controversy arises from the delineation of relevant similarity: the notions of equity and precedent both raise this problem.
(2) An older meaning of equity referred to the need to modify the consequences of a strict application of the law to avoid unfair or unconscionable outcomes. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, some English courts were specifically designated as ‘equity’ courts in contrast to those dealing with statute and
common law
; since 1873 all English courts are supposed to follow the legal rules of equity.

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