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The growing demand for referendum challenges the traditional model of representative democracy. In this paper we study under which conditions voters prefer a system of representative democracy to direct democracy. In direct democr...
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The growing demand for referendum challenges the traditional model of representative democracy. In this paper we study under which conditions voters prefer a system of representative democracy to direct democracy. In direct democracies voters choose a policy among two alternatives, under uncertainty about which policy better fits the realized state of the world; in representative democracies voters select a candidate who, once elected, chooses a policy having observed which is the realized state of the world. Voters and politicians' payoffs depend on a common component which is positive only if the policy fits the state of the world, and on a private ideological bias towards one of the policies. In direct democracies voters are uncertain about the future state of the world, while in representative democracies they are uncertain about the degree of ideological bias of the candidates, even if they know towards which policy each candidate is biased. We show that representative democracy is preferred if (i) the majority of voters are pragmatic (the common component prevails), and (ii) society is ideologically polarized, meaning that the majority of voters are ideological (the private component prevails), but the median voter is pragmatic. Direct democracy is the preferred instrument for collective choices in societies in which the majority of voters and the median voter are ideological, implying that the majority of voters have the same ideological bias, as, for instance, it occurs when the populist rhetoric of people against the elite succeeds.
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Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties' political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opp...
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Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties' political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opposition to their policy preferences. Such a type of behavior, known as 'irrational voting', results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters' own views. To illustrate this, we consider the 28 German parties that took part in the 2013 Bundestag (federal) election and compare their positions on 36 topical issues with the results of public opinion polls. Then we construct the party and coalition indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency in representing a majority). In particular, we find that the 2013 election winner, the conservative union CDU/CSU with their 41.5 % of the votes, was the least representative among the 28 parties considered. The representativeness of the Bundestag is about 50 %, as if the correspondence with the electorate's preference on every policy issue had been decided by tossing a coin, meaning that the Bundestag's policy profile is independent of that of the electorate. The next paper, 'An election method to improve policy representation of a parliament' (Tangian 2016), suggests a possible way to surmount the problems revealed by our analysis. An alternative election procedure is proposed and hypothetically applied to the 2013 Bundestag, producing a considerable gain in its representativeness.
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The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and r...
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The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true preferences of candidates makes strategic delegation impossible. The political economy argument against centralisation of Besley and Coate (J Public Econ 87:2611-2637, 2003) does therefore not apply. Instead, it is shown that the existence of rent extraction by delegates alone suffices to make cooperative centralisation more likely through representative democracy under reasonable assumptions. In the case of non-cooperative centralisation, the more extensive possibilities for institutional design under representative democracy increase the likelihood of centralisation. Direct democracy may thus be interpreted as a federalism-preserving institution.
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Representative democracies govern most locales in the US, making it difficult to compare performance relative to direct democracy. New England states, however, provide an opportunity to test both direct and representative democrac...
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Representative democracies govern most locales in the US, making it difficult to compare performance relative to direct democracy. New England states, however, provide an opportunity to test both direct and representative democracy at the local level. This article uses revealed preference axioms to compare spending patterns in New England towns and cities against median voter hypothesis benchmarks. Contrary to previous evidence, we find no differences between direct and representative democracy. The results suggest that horizontal competition arising from local fragmentation minimize differences between direct and representative local government, providing support for wider applicability of median voter-based empirical models of local government behaviour in the US.
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We propose a normative theory of the number of representatives based on a model of a representative democracy. We derive a formula giving the number of representatives as proportional to the square root of total population. Simple...
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We propose a normative theory of the number of representatives based on a model of a representative democracy. We derive a formula giving the number of representatives as proportional to the square root of total population. Simple tests of the formula on a sample of a 100 countries yield good results. We then discuss the appropriateness of the number of representatives in some countries. It seems that the United States has too few representatives, while France and Italy have too many. The excess number of representatives matters: it is positively correlated with indicators of red tape and barriers to entrepreneurship.
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Several countries have voted reforms in order to reduce the number of national representatives and many others have debated about that possibility. There is, however, no commonly accepted rule for assessing the optimal number of s...
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Several countries have voted reforms in order to reduce the number of national representatives and many others have debated about that possibility. There is, however, no commonly accepted rule for assessing the optimal number of seats in parliament. This article offers a review of the state-of-the-art, presenting the main contributions in political economy and related fields about the question of legislature sizes, their determinants and their impact. Based on a cross-sectional comparison of 139 countries, the review is accompanied with a set of figures and tables that illustrates a set of stylized facts.
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This article examines widely held assumptions among scientific elites positing that there is an increasing discrepancy between those with specialized knowledge and laypersons, that governmental policy is increasingly shaped by sci...
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This article examines widely held assumptions among scientific elites positing that there is an increasing discrepancy between those with specialized knowledge and laypersons, that governmental policy is increasingly shaped by scientific research and its practitioners, and that these trends pose a threat to representative democracy. This article asserts that modern liberal democratic societies are characterized by enabling structural changes that have expanded the forms of and means for citizen action, and simplified civil society’s access to specialized knowledge.
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Recent climate activism has played a key role in denouncing the unsustainability of representative democracy. Previous research has investigated the attitudes of climate activists towards representative institutions along the conc...
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Recent climate activism has played a key role in denouncing the unsustainability of representative democracy. Previous research has investigated the attitudes of climate activists towards representative institutions along the conceptual distinction between 'environmental' and 'ecological' democracy. Yet, little attention has been paid to climate activists' critique of capitalism and how it relates to demands for democratic reform. Our paper addresses this gap by conducting a mixed-method analysis of protest survey data collected in Belgium in 2019. Our findings show that activists display low levels of trust towards representative institutions, but still abide by the ideals of environmental democracy within the boundaries of existing institutions. At the same time, we observe a widespread critique of capitalism, signaling attraction towards the ideals of ecological democracy. Overall, our findings challenge the binary distinction between environmental versus ecological democracy, and raises normative questions about the role of environmental social movements in economic and democratic reform.
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This paper studies the political support for social health insurance when a private alternative exists. Individuals differ only by their risk. For the more realistic distributions of risk, a majority of agents do not want public i...
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This paper studies the political support for social health insurance when a private alternative exists. Individuals differ only by their risk. For the more realistic distributions of risk, a majority of agents do not want public insurance. However, in a representative democracy, or in a direct democracy with altruistic agents, we show that social insurance can be adopted, particularly for treatments which have the best cost-utility output. But if the low risk agents are more politically powerful than the high risk, the low cost treatments will not be refunded by social insurance, even if their utility is high.
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Manipulation of indirect elections by vote pairing occurs when a group of voters in different electoral bodies secures a jointly preferred winner by performing pairwise exchanges of votes. We show that in elections involving a lar...
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Manipulation of indirect elections by vote pairing occurs when a group of voters in different electoral bodies secures a jointly preferred winner by performing pairwise exchanges of votes. We show that in elections involving a large enough number of districts, each with a large enough size, no reasonable constitution is immune to vote-pairing. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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