Search

This Essay explains the errors in the theory advanced by John Eastman in a memorandum presented to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence which claimed that Pence had the unilateral authority to reject electoral votes when Congress convened on January 6, 2021. That Unilateral Rejection Power theory is fatally flawed in four respects. First, it rests on a misreading of the critical phrase in the Twelfth Amendment that does not follow from its text. If anything, the text indicates the Unilateral Rejection Power is incorrect. Second, it draws on an erroneous history of the Vice President’s role in the electoral counts of the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections. Third, it ignores the dispositive drafting history of the Twelfth Amendment, which definitively demonstrates that both chambers of Congress understood Article II, section 1, clause 3 to assign to Congress rather than the President of the Senate the power to count votes and decide disputes relating to that count. Congress drafted the Twelfth Amendment using precisely the same words regarding the process of counting electoral votes, thus incorporating that settled understanding. Finally, it defies reason that the Founding generation, who had just fought the Revolutionary War to overthrow a monarch to establish a representative democracy, would create a constitution that vested a single official with the legal authority to retain power for a lifetime. This Essay offers these legal arguments in full view of the more fundamental point: that the Unilateral Rejection Power theory is a dangerous view that undercuts the basic principles of American democracy. It may seem that nothing more than that needs to be said—and that even engaging in rigorous legal argument with such a radically antidemocratic interpretation of the Constitution legitimizes a view that should simply be shunned. The tragic reality, however, is that radically antidemocratic legal views like the Unilateral Rejection Power theory have perilous influence with a powerful faction in the American political system and thus present an immense danger if not decisively rebutted. For that reason, I believe it is critical to expose that the Unilateral Rejection Power theory is not only gravely morally wrong—it is, beyond any doubt, legally wrong as well.

Voter demand for less redistribution in the face of mass migration maps into actual outcomes insofar as politicians supplying these policies respond to it. We study whether establishing new asylum-seeker centers influences redistributive outcomes in Finnish local elections --a country where municipalities have a significant control over fiscal policies. The sudden and unprecedentedly large inflow of asylum-seekers in the fall 2015 and the resulting establishment of asylum centers allows for a difference-in-differences design. We examine simultaneously supply and demand for redistribution by focusing both on candidates' policy positions and also voters' preferences. On the supply side, we find that, on average, candidates do not respond to the presence of refugees by adopting anti-redistributive positions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even fairly small effects. In contrast, on the demand side, there is evidence of various voter responses against redistribution (and in favor of the anti-immigration party), on average suggesting that representative democracy filters the mapping of voter preferences on policy outcomes. But this political disequilibrium comes at the price of a \textit{populist backlash}: we find decreased support for insider elite candidates. We probe the mechanism behind the backlash: in the localities more intensely exposed to refugee migration, we observe also a supply-side response (candidates oppose redistribution) while a demand response is less heterogeneous. In the municipalities where the gap between demand and supply is wider also the backlash is larger.

This essay aims to analyse and debunk several technology-related concepts commonly discussed in papers, reports and speeches by academics, consultancies, politicians and governmental bodies. Each reflects a presumption about how technology, the internet in particular, and technology-enabled social and political processes might affect the practice of governing. The discussion characterizes the concepts as “socio-technical imaginaries”, a term for ideas that link the socio-political environment with technology. Socio-technical imaginaries start as a description of potentially attainable futures, turn into a prescription of futures that ought to be attained, then become received wisdom about the present day. They are speculation that takes root through reuse and endorsement by authoritative figures, becoming an asserted present reality on the basis of little or no evidence. Once imaginaries become widely accepted and used, they may shape trajectories of research and innovation, steering technological progress as well as public and private expenditure. The imaginaries addressed are: Public Sector Innovation, Digital Transformation of Government, Co-creation & Co-production of Public Services, Crowd-sourcing, Wisdom of Crowds, Collaborative Governance, Customer/Citizen Centricity, Once-only Principle, Personalisation, Big Data, Nudge (Behavioral Insights), Platform Government/GaaP, and Online Participation. Four questions are posed to critique each imaginary: What is the received wisdom? What does that really mean? What is the problem/what has gone wrong? What to do better/what should it be? As a whole package, these imaginaries represent a nightmare for liberal, representative democracy. Some may enable the “panoptic” state, others may undermine existing institutions to open a void for it to step into. Many have the likelihood of creating or reinforcing inequality of opportunity, outcome or influence. But their grip is hard to loosen. The notions that they are inevitable or that issues will be resolved in due course by technology itself need to be challenged by surfacing the human, social and political dimensions and actively addressing them.

The word ‘crisis’ has two different shades of meaning. It can refer to an unstable situation in political or social affairs that persists and intensifies over the relatively long term. Closer to the original Greek meaning of krisis, a crisis also refers to a traumatic episode or condition whose resolution remains unclear and replete with danger. The crisis of democratic leadership is a crisis of the first sort – a slow burn tending towards meltdown. The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of the second sort – a traumatic event spiralling into an uncertain and perilous future. The paper argues that the crisis of the first sort is currently feeding into and feeding off the crisis of the second sort. COVID-19 has had an extraordinary effect on the political landscape. Its challenge democratic leadership and to the paradigm of representative democracy more generally may be framed according to a number of key features. First, the pandemic may be considered as a premonitory event. Secondly, it poses various acute problems of collective action, both within and beyond the polity. Thirdly, it highlights the dense interconnectedness of the issues that form our political agenda. And fourthly, it suspends many aspects of social and political life, both pausing our capacity to act and interrupting the flow of the world we act upon. Each of these features has double-edged implications for our capacity to steer our democracies. Each threatens to reinforce democratic impotence, but at the margins each also offers some hope of democratic renewal.

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “freedom . . . of the press,” making an explicit textual recognition of what the founding generation, informed by their immediate historical experience, frequently hailed as the most important political liberty—the “bulwark” upon which all other freedoms relied. From this fertile intellectual and legal soil, cultivated by generous subsidies, a thriving and vibrant institutional press emerged as an undeniable asset to American civil society. Today, that press is dying. Industry revenues have declined by more than 70% in the last two decades, leaving tens of thousands of journalists without jobs and millions of Americans without meaningful access to quality journalism. The reason for this media apocalypse is simple: America has assigned to the free market the task of producing an adequate supply of a public good, with most of its value lying in externalities, that cannot be made profitable to the same extent that it is desirable. As a result, American journalism is in a market-induced death spiral. This Article argues that, given the Framers’ correct understanding that a sustainable, powerful institutional press is a precondition to representative government, the market-driven collapse of the press is a constitutional crisis.

This paper argues that new primary legislation is required to clarify the role of referendums in the UK. My argument falls into three parts. The first outlines what the law is concerning the use of referendums in the UK. The second explains what changes are necessary, and why those changes should be made in law. I will argue that there are three types of guidance that the law should offer about referendums: guidance about their outcomes, procedural guidance about how referendums should be conducted, and content guidance about what sorts of questions should be put to a referendum in the first place. The third part of the paper concedes that new legislation will not address all of the problems with the uses of referendums in the UK. Nevertheless, changes in the law are necessary given the capacity of referendums to undermine representative democracy.

Populisms come in different forms, but all involve a political rhetoric that invokes the will of a unitary people to combat perceived constraints, whether economic, legal, or technocratic. In this chapter, our focus is democratic backsliding aided by populist rhetoric. Some have suggested deliberative democracy as a means to combat this form of populism. Deliberative democracy encourages and facilitates both consultation and contestation, emphasizing plurality of voices, the legitimacy of disagreement, and the imperative of reasoned persuasion. Its participatory and inclusive character has the potential to undermine the credibility of populists’ claims to speak for a unitary people. Ireland has been widely referenced in constitutionalism’s deliberative turn, given its recent integration of deliberative mini-publics into the constitutional amendment process. Reviewing the Irish experience, we suggest that deliberative mini-publics are unlikely to reverse democratic backsliding. Populist rhetoric is fueled by the very measures intended to combat democratic backsliding: enhanced constitutional constraints merely illustrate how the will of the people is being thwarted. The virtues of Ireland’s experiment in deliberative democracy — citizen participation, integration with representative democracy, deliberation, balanced information, expertise — have all been criticized in ways that are at least consistent with populist narratives. The failure of such narratives to take hold in Ireland, we suggest, may be due to a political system that is already resistant to populist rhetoric, as well as a tradition of participatory constitutionalism. The experiment with deliberative mini-publics may have strengthened Ireland’s constitutional culture by reinforcing anti-populist features. But it cannot be assumed that this experience would be replicated in larger countries polarized along political, ethnic, or religious lines.

The tenth amendment is both a legal and political toolkit for proponents on opposite sides of the national government vis-a-vis state rights divide. These binary, indeed, multi-visionary visions pervaded the U.S. Constitution making process, thus, the Founding Fathers debated these and other ideas intensely before drafting the Constitution. As a measure of this polarization, some of the ideas and rights that did not make it to the Constitution were subsequently reflected in amendments. This was how the tenth amendment found its way into the Bill of Rights and is today considered part of the Constitution. In this essay, I unpack the history of the tenth amendment and how the Founding Fathers argued for its inclusion in the Constitution. I identified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton as the two outstanding Fathers who championed the fight. This essay will demonstrate that the tenth amendment will always be at the intersection of how the executive and the legislative branches interpret their powers, and how either of the branches will use it to justify or undermine the very concept of representative government. As the tenth amendment envisaged that powers not delegated to the federal government or prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states and the people, it must be jealously guided ultimately by the people, since democracy is envisioned as a system of government of, by, and for the people. I argue that the people must remain vigilant, as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Asian emerging economies are faced with reconciling the requirements of economic reform, meaning the long-term structural transformation of their economies, with effective political governance. They are embarking on essential economic change as growth prospects of the world economy are clouded by shifting global demand and disruptive technology. This has contributed to a crisis of faith in political governance in general, and in particular a loss of confidence in democracy as a governance system for delivering continued economic progress. A key challenge to political governance, and representative democracy in particular, is to provide policy stability, anchored in societal consensus, for essential economic reforms. This is of special relevance to Asian emerging economies that have been experiencing stalled growth, increasing inequality, and middle-income trap; coupled with political uncertainty. Thailand provides an example of the nature of the issue, as well as suggestions for practical if modest steps toward addressing the challenge.

Pivato and Soh [Pivato, M., Soh, A., 2020. Weighted representative democracy. Journal of Mathematical Economics 88 (2020) 52--63] proposed a new system of democratic representation whereby any individual can choose any legislator as her representative and different legislators can represent different numbers of individuals, concomitantly determining their weights in the legislature. For such legislatures, we consider other voting rules, namely, the weighted approval voting rule' and weighted majority judgement rule. We show that if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions made by the legislature will be the same as the decisions that would have been reached by a direct democracy, as decided by the corresponding simple (unweighted) voting rules.

The international tax system developed as a form of technocratic governance, aimed at facilitating international investment, neglecting provisions for cooperation between national governments for tax enforcement. Its endogenous flaws resulted in its politicization in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, leading to an increasingly technicized form of global governance. The great financial crisis was even more disruptive and accelerated a shift towards increasingly volatile interactions between the spheres of technocracy and politics. Complex global problems requiring long time-horizons are dealt with by increasingly narrowly focused technical specialists, dominated by corporatized bureaucracies operating in public-private symbiosis; while in the sphere of politics, a wider public seeks simple solutions and mistrusts experts, with good reason given the experience of regulatory failures, often due to the capture of regulation by private interests. Instant communication favours opinion-formers claiming authority, while representative democracy has shifted to ‘audience representation’, opening the way for demagogue leaders, as well as clientelism and corruption. This destabilizes technical fields, opening up possibilities for a paradigm shift, illustrated by the dramatic changes of the last decade in international tax governance.

This paper defines citizen ownership of the state (COS) as a combination of an acceptable election and implementation of the election promises. It introduces a two-tier measurement of the COS. Tier 1 by using election results determines whether the COS existed or not during a past period of time and Tier 2 using election promise implementation status determines how much the COS existed. Then, a combination of Tier 1 and Tier 2 scores results in an overall COS. At Tier 2, the paper argues, the level of implementation of election promises is a measurement of the COS. The paper models the authority of a representative government to a power of attorney. The citizen as principal awards a power of attorney to the winning individual, party or alliance as an agent in their election. In the election, the set of election promises of the agent becomes the only written part of the power of attorney. The 2009-2012 tenure of USA President Barack Obama is used to test how the methodological approach works with empirical data. The test finds Tier 2 COS at 70.7 percent and party intrusion into the COS at 29.3 percent in the tenure. After averaging Tier 1 and Tier 2 COS scores, the overall COS stands at 85.35 percent on a 0-100 scale.

Technocratic forms of international governance have spurred the rise of populist nationalists in Europe and around the globe. Joachim Blatter argues that we should tackle these intertwined challenges to representative democracy by transnationalising national democracies. In his kick-off text for the GLOBALCIT forum, he illustrates the underlining general problematique with the example of the Euro crisis, describes concrete steps towards a system of overlapping and transnationalised national democracies and outlines the potential benefits that would arise from a horizontal expansion of national demoi, elections and representation for democratic parties, parliaments and peoples. Blatter proposes that democracies should sign “joint declarations of interdependence” in which they express their commitment to the democratisation of their joint forms of governance and reciprocally offer their citizens the status of “consociated citizens.” These consociated citizens enjoy the right to elect a limited number of “consociated representatives” in the parliaments of the consociated states. The elected and thereby directly authorised consociated representatives bring the perspectives and interests of the consociated citizens into the collective will-formation and decision-making process of the consociated states. According to Blatter, politicians and political parties would benefit since the current trade-off between being responsive and responsible would become weaker. National parliaments would regain their core place in the democratic process by serving as the central spaces for the necessary reconnect between international rule making and nationally embedded will-formation. Democratic nations would provide each other a legitimate pathway for getting involved in their domestic will-formation and decision-making processes. Citizens receive additional and constructive means for political participation and contestation. GLOBALCIT has invited eleven scholars to engage with Blatter’s proposal. Most see it as stimulating and constructive but raise further questions and some concerns. Is it focussing too much on institutional reform of democratic processes instead of tackling issues of socio-economic inequality that propel the rise of populism? Is the model grounded in a coherent theory of democracy? Do the envisioned multiple and overlapping demoi undermine the necessary clarity of membership boundaries of political communities? Do consociated citizenship and limited powers of consociated representatives undermine a core democratic norm of political equality? The proposal assumes that reciprocity would be a helpful stimulus for the proposed expansion of the electorate, but what about the motivations of individual actors? Politicians might not want to give up current opportunities to mobilise domestic voters by blaming the external others. Furthermore, many commentators point to alternative ways of democratising relations of interdependence between states, which they perceive as more feasible or desirable, such as the strengthening of the European Parliament, transnational citizen assemblies or transnational referenda. In his response, Blatter points to theoretical foundations of his proposal, emphasizes its conceptual innovations in imagining fuzzy boundaries and proportional equality, and argues that the proposed pathway towards a system of horizontally overlapping representative democracies offers many advantages compared to its alternatives.

Does public cheap talk by a biased expert benefit voters? The answer depends on the nature of democratic institutions and the extent of communication possibilities. Expert endorsements induce office-seeking parties to serve the expert's interests, hurting voters. Expert advocacy makes policies respond to information, helping voters. Together, policy advocacy and partisan endorsements are often better than either alone. Their interaction creates a delegation benefit of indirect democracy. Voters may prefer this institution to one where policymaking is geared to serving the public interest. Direct expert capture of one party is another form of delegation and the best institution for voters.

For four decades, diversity has functioned as the dominant rationale for affirmative action. During this time, scholars have debated whether diversity should have this hegemonic hold on the policy. Central to the debate is Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Bakke, an opinion that no other justice joined. What motivated him to turn to the diversity rationale to begin with, and what conception of diversity did he have in mind? The conventional answer is that Justice Powell articulated the “robust exchange of ideas” formulation of diversity as a compromise that would keep affirmative action alive on a Supreme Court increasingly divided over civil rights. Powell deployed diversity as a lifeline and in the process ostensibly signaled his own commitment to a more racially inclusive society. This Article challenges that conventional story by offering a new interpretation of the Bakke decision. Drawing on a variety of archival materials, the Article contends that Powell’s opinion was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to deradicalize college campuses. Beginning in the mid-1960s, in the midst of the Cold War, and against the backdrop of a spate of intense campus protests erupting throughout the nation, Powell became consumed by a suspicion that white and black leftist radicals had banded together to plot a communist revolution that would overthrow representative democracy and the capitalist system. Importantly, he believed that radicals aimed to establish college campuses as “their principal base of revolution.” From his perspective, institutions of higher learning were increasingly becoming sites of political corruption, radicalizing impressionable college students “from our finest homes.” More precisely, Powell worried that if the future leaders of America — specifically, white male college students — internalized the leftist political line circulating on college campuses that the United States was irredeemably racist, repressive, and imperialistic, communists would more easily be able to “undermine or destroy our democracy and replace it with the tyranny of a Castro or a Mao Tse- tung.” Increased exposure to “a robust exchange of ideas,” Powell believed, would weaken the influence radicals had on forming students’ worldviews. Yet, to demonstrate that Powell was influenced by his concerns about left-oriented radicalism does not necessarily disrupt the widespread belief that his Bakke opinion was primarily motivated by a desire to promote racial equality. Thus, in addition to highlighting Powell’s views on campus radicalism, the Article contests what I call The Tale of Two Powells. Underwriting this tale are the figures of the pre-Court Lewis Powell, who was effectively a racial segregationist, and the Supreme Court Justice Powell, who is often heralded as an integrationist. The Article challenges this dichotomy, revealing profound continuities between Powell’s normative commitments before and after his appointment to the Court as well as the strategies he employed to advance those commitments. Powell’s sole-authored opinion was hugely influential not only vis-a-vis affirmative action in American universities, but it also helped to remake the goal of racial integration more generally. The diversity rationale has become the primary justification for efforts to create more inclusive organizations — from classrooms to corporations. As it turns out, the turn to diversity likely stemmed more from a deradicalizing than a racial justice imperative.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the links between lack of trust in ruling politicians and the functioning of a representative democracy. Within a standard principal-agent model of democracy, we show how lack of trust by citizens as reflected by passive beliefs updating may lead to the malfunctioning of representative democracy. We highlight how de facto accountability crucially depends on out-of-equilibrium beliefs, and that this is indeed descriptive of a substantive feature of public opinion that affects the functioning of democracy. Specifically, we show that effective accountability needs more than simple retrospective voting, as it requires voters to believe in the existence of good politicians that always choose according to voters' interests, so that a deviation from bad policies can happen only because the leader is congruent. In this case, the unique equilibrium is an efficient one that maximizes voters' welfare. However, if, on the other hand, the citizens share an overall lack of trust in ruling elites, then there is another inefficient equilibrium, where even the congruent politician behaves badly because of the adverse but rational voters' behavior. This inefficient equilibrium does not depend on fake news or on distorted beliefs or, again, on voters' heterogenous preferences, since the voters' perfectly observe the quality of the policy implemented by the government, are fully rational and share the same interests. This result might contribute to explain the increasing negative perceptions on the working of democracy as due to a self-fulfilling equilibrium.

Greek Abstract: Eλληνικά: Αυτή η eργασία πραγματeύeται την αντιπροσωπeυτική δημοκρατία στα πλαίσια της E.E. English Abstract: This paper is about the representative democracy in the E.U.

Central European states are posing a considerable challenge to transnational constitutionalism as they are gradually evolving into rival autocracies. What is peculiar about these states is that they are transforming the institutions of representative democracy and jurisdiction in order to serve the interests of the raw power of the majority. Furthermore, it might prove to be extremely complicated to articulate the lack of legitimation by means of public institutions since these states have undermined the principle of the separation of powers. These competitive autocracies (Hungary and Poland) are related to European and international institutions in a particular way therefore the raw power of the majority is counterbalanced by these European and international institutions. However, neither their legitimation is strong enough, nor do these institutions have the necessary legal means to safeguard the basic rights of suppressed minorities in these nation states and to act as a counterbalance to the majority. Consequently, it might be an appropriate response to this major challenge if international institutions begin to redefine their scope of action. In my talk I would like to discuss selected decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights in cases such as Baka v. Hungary and Karacsony and Others v. Hungary. In this context I will argue that in cases related to judicial independency or the rights and grievances of the Hungarian opposition MPs the Court of Human Rights tried to respond to serious violations of the separation of powers by speaking out for a wide concept of the freedom of expression. What are the arguments for and against such judicial practices? Can judicial activism be a response to the democratic challenges of nation states?

We propose a new system of democratic representation. Any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. We show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote.

It is not uncommon for supporters of a president threatened with impeachment to denounce the proceedings as a kind of coup. There are obvious differences between an impeachment conducted in accord with the terms of a constitution and a lawless military coup, and yet such rhetoric might raise a real claim that the congressional impeachment power, at least relative to an elected president, has fallen into a kind of obsolescence and can no longer be legitimately used. Presidential impeachments might have fallen into the same status of formal availability but practical illegitimacy as other such constitutional features of indirect democracy as the power of presidential electors to choose a president. Moreover, there might well be some particular circumstances in which critics are justified in charging that Congress is attempting to overturn the election results through the abuse of the impeachment power. But consideration of the distinctive features of the constitutional impeachment power should reassure us that in most circumstances the use of the constitutional power to remove a president by congressional action would not be comparable to a coup.

Although the U.S. Constitution was ordained to “ourselves and our Posterity,” the type of representative democracy currently practiced under that document invites disregard of, and discrimination against, the interests of future generations, who have no present political representation. Legislative failure to adequately address the current climate crisis has prompted renewed interest in the potential of existing constitutional language to shield later generations from irreversible harm to critical natural resources. Some scholars are naturally skeptical that protections from modern environmental problems may fairly be derived from language that pre-dates the modern technology responsible for those problems. However, a close examination of the American founders’ intergenerational philosophy and their unique approach to the concept of “unalienable rights” reveals that 1) the founders were deeply concerned with intergenerational justice; 2) they framed their discussions of these principles in terms of natural resource stewardship values; and 3) these concerns were deeply, historically intertwined with the due process language that has served as the traditional source for judicial recognition of unenumerated constitutional rights.

Representative democracy in North Carolina has been under assault in myriad ways. These include the legislature’s on-going attempts to restrict access to the ballot and to rig elections by racial and political gerrymanders among others. Gerrymandering, drawing electoral districts entrench the party in power (Republican, in this case) left North Carolina with one of the most gerrymandered legislatures in the nation. The effect has been to undermine popular sovereignty and competitive elections. This article attempts to survey judicial responses to some of the most recent attacks on democratic government in North Carolina. The assault has multiple prongs, but the objective of partisan entrenchment unites them. So this article looks at a some of these assaults as a way of thinking about how they work synergistically. This survey is useful in evaluating recent iterations of the assaults including ones not covered here.

Although the original text of the Indian Constitution did not mention political parties, parties are one of the most crucial institutions for the actual functioning of our constitutional structures. I go back to the founding to inquire how the framers understood the relationship between party dynamics and constitutional design. The founding debates aptly demonstrate a two-way relationship between parties and constitutional law. These debates not only help us move towards a realist account of how our constitution works, but also demonstrate various modes and functions of constitutionalization of political parties. Constitutionalization of parties may not only restrain the distortion of division of State power, but also improve the health of party competition. Moving beyond founding, I will discuss the causes of the anti-defection amendment (the only provision in the Constitution that mentions ‘political party’) and the way it has fundamentally transformed the constitutional characterization of our democracy – from the old candidate-based representative democracy to a party-based one. This constitutional transformation causes an inconsistency in the Indian law of democracy: while the anti-defection jurisprudence recognizes parties as the fundamental unit of representation, general election law continues with the old conception of candidates as the primary representative unit – a point crucial to debates on a wide array of issues ranging from political finance to party liability.

Most observed institutional arrangements, observed in governments, firms, and other organizations, acknowledge the effectiveness of imposing sanctioning institutions and monitoring policies to achieve particular goals. Nevertheless, less attention has been paid to the influences of the delegation mechanism of sanctioning power, particularly, the legitimacy of the authority/institution, in centralized institutional arrangements. We report laboratory-experimental results that compare the performance of exogenous delegation versus the endogenous delegation of sanctioning power. The endogenous power distribution, defined as Democracy, weakly dominates the exogenous arrangement, the Leviathan, in terms of contribution levels and economic efficiency. However, the observed differences are not statistically significant, regardless of the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed. Democratic schemes are weakly preferred in centralized power environments, and existing evidence contradicts the belief of a robust causal relationship between indirect democratic institutions, collective action, and economic outcomes.

The interface between legislative oversight and implementation processes under structural-devolution reforms is rarely studied. Drawing on qualitative data from county governance in Kenya, this study establishes collective action problems to legislative oversight characterized by shaky alliances between legislatures and administrative executives in budget-maximization, poor role-conception of legislative activities, little electoral connectivity and parochial rather than institutional interpretations of political-representation. Similarly, priorities for political profitability of oversight and patronizing structures of political parties override political-administrative controls in local governance. It is thus concluded that democratic reforms through structural-devolution tend to sophisticate legislative oversight by aggravating institutional inconsistencies and political-administrative trade-offs at both levels of government.

We study the optimal delegation problem which arises between the median voter (writer of the constitution) and the (future) incumbent politician when not only the state of the world and but also the politician’s type (preferred policy) are the policy-maker’s private information. We show that it is optimal to tie the hands of the politician by imposing him/her both a policy floor and a policy cap and delegating him/her the policy choice only in between. The delegation interval is shown to be the smaller the greater is the uncertainty about the politician’s type. These results apply outside the specific problem to which our model is applied here.

Histories of the nineteenth-century United States often describe a stark divide between law and politics, with law as the agent of the propertied few and politics as the weapon of the masses. As representatives of America’s growing electorate fought to reapportion wealth, these accounts go, lawyers and judges waged a counteroffensive through the courts, using the rule of law to strike down statutes and stave off redistributive change. This dissertation challenges that narrative by examining the legislative logic of Congress during the first century of its existence: a logic, it argues, that increasingly relied on notions that we typically associate with private law, such as precedent, principle, and doctrines of vested rights. Members of Congress turned to these concepts not for the reasons that modern-day political scientists attribute to legislative actors, such as electoral considerations and political pressure (or at least, not only for such reasons), but rather out of a deeply-rooted anxiety about the exercise of their own power and an uncertainty as to what, in America’s decades-old experiment in representative democracy made legislation legitimate. Focusing on two case studies – one examining Congress’s response to the Great New York Fire of 1835 and the other investigating the legislative theory of the radical Republican senator Charles Sumner – this dissertation uses techniques and sources typically identified with the law side of the law/politics divide to make a novel claim: that Congress’s increasing reliance on the ideas and practices of ‘private’ law led its members gradually to limit their own discretion, constricting their ability to legislate for the public good in the process.

I divide this introduction to my book in progress, Reconstructing Adam Smith's Politics, into three parts. In Part 1, I give an overview of Smith's politics and how it fits together. This analysis shows that Smith anticipated many of the central questions that animate modern political science; notably, why are some countries rich and developed while others not? How do we explain different regime types across countries, including dictatorship and representative democracy? What accounts for different patterns of trade policies? And how do we account for the different behavior of empires; in particular, why were the British Colonies so rich? As I show, Smith's approach to politics and the answers he provides are surprisingly modern. I intend Part 2 to be the heart of the analysis with a systematic, in-depth discussion of a dozen or more political-economic topics covered by Smith. As the book remains in early stages, I concentrate in this draft on four of Smith's separate discussions that, in toto, provide a powerful explanation of the centuries-long lack of development of feudal Europe. In part 3, I discuss several general theses that emerge from Smith's politics; namely: the role of liberty as the foundation of an economy; the importance of violence in his political-economics; the central role of concepts of credible commitment and political exchange; why some countries are rich while most are poor; and methodological issues, such as the use of equilibrium and comparative statics as well as dynamics.

This paper analyzes the transformation of the nowadays democracy from the view of political and legal scientific reasoning. The theme is that the indirect democracy in many cases is in a disharmony with the concepts of the political view of citizens. Thence, in this work showed the importance that has the technology to the democracy.

There is a deep paradox at the heart of representative democracy — it is a form of rule by the people that distances itself from the people. The central justification for representative government is popular sovereignty. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims, ‘[t]he will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government’. Yet as a representative, not direct, democracy, there is structured distance between ‘the people’ and those who exercise governmental power. The aspiration of representative democracy is that this distance is bridged by strong mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness, as well as an ethos based on the public interest, all of which seek to ensure that government officials rule ‘for the people’. The obvious risk is that this distance becomes a gulf and that public officials govern for a few rather than ‘for the people’ — that an oligarchy operates rather than a democracy. It is a startling fact that many Australians believe — and increasingly so — that government functions as an oligarchy. Survey evidence shows that perceptions that ‘[p]eople in government look after themselves’ and ‘[g]overnment is run for a few big interests’ have increased significantly since the 2000s, so much so that in 2017, more than 70 per cent of respondents agreed with the first statement and more than half with the second. And since 2016, there has been a nine per cent increase in perceptions that federal members of parliament are corrupt (85 per cent saying ‘some’ are corrupt, 18 per cent responding that ‘most/all’ are corrupt).

Labor immobility (high adjustment cost) has been regarded as a major obstacle to trade liberalization, and it has been argued that higher labor mobility promotes trade liberalization. However, this is not the case when we take into account conflicts of interests between politicians and voters that are inevitable in representative democracy. We construct a simple two periods model including both election and sectoral adjustment, and show that the non-monotonic relationship between labor mobility and trade liberalization exists due to the principal-agent relationship. Higher labor mobility prevents trade liberalization in some cases.

It is known that being involved in democratic decision-making of a policy affects people’s level of cooperation in dilemma situations, even if selection bias is controlled for. Past experimental work used direct democracy as the form of the decision-making process. But is there such a democracy effect when people democratically select representatives that take some action on behalf of them in the future? We let subjects play a real-effort task in a group and then one representative distributed group total payoffs among their members. The representatives were selected either by subjects’ votes or by the computer randomly in each group. Our data indicates that there is no (or at most negative) impact of representative democracy on subjects’ behavior. This may mean that the democracy effect seen in the past experiments is driven by direct democracy.

Representative democracy consists of a chain of delegation from voters to the executive and a corresponding chain of accountability, with some questions (particularly constitutional questions) reserved for popular vote. This structure reflects the high transaction costs of coordinating preferences among a large and diverse population, which has in part been determined by technological limitations. A new technology, blockchain, significantly reduces transaction costs. This technology turns out to have significant implications for democratic governance. In a crypto-democracy, voters have contractual relationships that allow them to unbundle, delegate, re-rebundle and reserve their voting power. Rather than planning our democratic structure and thus restricting opportunities for political exchange, the use of blockchain in a crypto-democracy allows us to ‘grow’ a democracy in a Hayekian framework.

In structuring its constitution, the United States ("US") put tremendous weight into the idea of giving future generations a government whose form and function can meet societal challenges. Thomas Jefferson, in one of his famous letters concerning the longevity of governance structures, said, "each generation" should be granted the "solemn opportunity" to update government with "periodic repairs, from generation to generation, until the end of time." For much of US history, this has meant creating voter protections, improving access to polls, and keeping an eye on gerrymandering. However, generations of political passivity has caused democracy in the United States to stagnate. Currently, countries around the world, in all stages of development, are experimenting with ways to update their democratic institutions to provide deliberative structures that actualize their citizens' contributions by taking advantage of cutting-edge information and communications technology ("ICT"). Updating governance structures to meet modern challenges is accomplished by re-imagining citizens' relationship with their government from one based on dominance and subservience to one that enshrines impartiality, accountability, transparency, and deliberation--the four basic functions of democracy. This paper lays out the theoretical and philosophical argument for updating US democracy to take advantage of ICT and lays out practical steps that can be taken, with limitations and power dynamics in mind.

In representative democracy, voters elect candidates who strategically propose policies. In a common value environment with imperfectly informed voters and candidates, we establish that intermediation by candidates can render information aggregation unfeasible even when a large electorate presented with exogenous options would almost always select the correct policy. In fact, the possibility of information aggregation encourages candidates' conformism and stifles the competition among ideas. Neither liberalizing access to candidacy nor introducing additional frictions in voters information guarantees feasible information aggregation. Thus, the political failure we uncover is due to the intermediation by candidates---that is, the nature of representative democracy.

This paper presents following arguments: 1) Corruption in its various forms is a serious social ill. 2) Democracy is not a safe cure against corruption. 3) Increased gender equality seems to be one important factor behind getting corruption under control. 4) Impartiality in the exercise of public power, not least when it “translates” into meritocratic recruitment and promotion in the public administration, has a powerful effect for lowering corruption. 5) While some aspects of impartiality are central for gender equality, research results are mixed. Some show that impartial principles promote gender equality, others show that gender bias exists also in many processes designed to be impartial. Going from these results to policy recommendations is thus fraught with many difficulties. One is how to handle problems of legitimacy in the implementation process for various forms of preferential treatment of discriminated groups. Since these problems are impossible to handle, we may be in for a “Churchillian” argument. Like representative democracy, meritocracy may be a far from ideal solution for lowering corruption and thereby promoting human well-being, but it may be the least bad of existing alternatives.

This paper examines whether an institution has a differing impact on cooperation if it is introduced by a representative of the affected parties rather than exogenously imposed. The experimental design is able to control for selection effects arising from the democratic policy choice. I find evidence of a large democracy premium in the sense that endogenously implemented institutions lead to more cooperation than iden- tical exogenous institutions. Especially the subjects who initially did not prefer the policy comply if it was brought about by an elected representative. The results have implications for the analysis of decision-making processes and policy recommendations in general.

I study the effects of direct democracy on economic policy in a novel setting. In Spain, national law determines that municipalities follow either direct or representative democracy, depending on their population size. Using a fixed-effect regression discontinuity design, I find that direct democracy leads to a smaller government, reducing public spending by around 8 percent. Revenues decrease by a similar amount and, therefore, there is no effect on budget deficits. These findings can be explained by a model in which direct democracy allows voters to enforce lower special-interest spending. I provide several additional results and discuss alternative mechanisms.

Might the theory and practice of liberal representative democracy need to be rethought in and for the ‘Anthropocene’? What resources are available when trying to orientate oneself in radical political space today? In this paper, the authors draw on varieties of anarchism and Marxism to develop a new, ecocentric political sensibility and practice, which they call ‘wild democracy’. Calling for a ‘biodiversity of resistance and renewal’, this signifies an eco-egalitarian politics that privileges grassroots participation over parliamentary representation, with the aim of transcending capitalism and initiating a degrowth process of planned economic contraction. Focusing attention beyond the ballot box, this analysis attempts to rethink the meaning of political participation in an age of ecological crisis and deepen the understanding of what it means to be an ecological citizen today.

In the modern world, access-limiting fortification walls are not typically regarded as promoting democracy. But in Greek antiquity, increased investment in fortifications was correlated with the prevalence and stability of democracy. This paper sketches the background conditions of the Greek city-state ecology, analyzes a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, and assesses the choices of Hellenistic kings, Greek citizens, and urban elites, as modeled in a simple game. The paper explains how city walls promoted democracy and helps to explain several other puzzles: why Hellenistic kings taxed Greek cities at lower than expected rates; why elites in Greek cities supported democracy; and why elites were not more heavily taxed by democratic majorities. The relationship between walls, democracy, and taxes promoted continued economic growth into the late classical and Hellenistic period (4th-2nd centuries BCE), and ultimately contributed to the survival of Greek culture into the Roman era, and thus modernity. We conclude with a consideration of whether the walls-democracy relationship holds in modernity.

This study explores tariff cooperation under a representative democracy, comparing national welfare realized in three trading regimes: most favored nation (MFN), customs union (CU), and free trade agreement (FTA). Two points are addressed: Why have FTAs increased in recent decades when theoretical studies predict that CUs increase the level of national welfare? Second, why are most CUs formed between countries located near each other while FTAs can be formed between countries located far away? We build a model that examines the effect of trade costs and how tariff policy is determined in a representative democracy. We find that when the countries' income distribution is largely skewed, an FTA is more beneficial due to trade costs. However, when member countries are located near each other, a CU realizes the higher welfare.

Our aim in this paper is to address the big questions of today’s European Union, more specifically, the Union’s deep legitimacy deficit that touches upon all aspects of input, throughout and output. We make three main points. (1) That the current crisis of European integration is to be understood as a manifestation of a broader question that concerns the conditions under which liberal democracy and a market economy may be made compatible. (2) That the long-term dynamics of European integration is driven by the inherent tension in democratic systems between representative and effective governance. (3) That the most urgent task facing European integration research is the normative imperative to rethink effective and legitimate democratic practices – who is involved, at what level, in what capacity, together with whom – and to redesign the boundaries of democratic governance between the EU and the member states.

John Stuart Mill was a British 19th century philosopher, who’s work in the area of liberty is well known. His work on democracy, on the other hand is not. This thesis reviews Mill’s work through the lens of procedural and epistemic democracy, asking what elements of Mill’s philosophy could be considered having attributes of each. The aim of this thesis is to better understand Mill’s view on democracy and his values. He had a clear belief in liberty and equality, but the extent of these beliefs has not yet been examined. Procedural and epistemic democracy allow for these attributes of his work to be analysed. Chapter one is devoted to introducing the concepts of procedural and epistemic democracy. Procedural democracy favours processes rather than outcomes. Epistemic democracy, on the other hand, is more concerned with outcomes. Epistemic democrats see democracy as a search for public opinion and an underlying ‘truth’ amongst the body politic. Through methods such as broad participation in democracy and discussion this can be found. Chapter two considers the procedural elements of Mill’s democratic theory. Mill, who favoured liberty, representative government, and participation, demonstrates some of these elements. His ideas on weighted voting, amongst others points, mean however that he could not be considered purely as a procedural democrat. Chapter three considers the epistemic elements of Mill’s democratic theory. It is argued that two areas of Mill’s work, his belief in free speech and public participation, are inherently epistemic. A third area, Mill’s belief in representative government may not be. This thesis argues, however, that representative government could be considered epistemic. This thesis ultimately shows that Mill’s thought contains elements of both theories as well as contradictory elements.

This paper presents an overview of Slovakia’s democratic development from 1918 to 2012, based on data from key indices and their constituent indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. It analyzes the historical development of the five Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) principles of democracy – electoral, liberal, egalitarian, deliberative and participatory – and provides an overview of the female rights index. The most apparent pattern is the U-shaped trajectory of democracy in the country. Two periods of relatively high achievement on democratic indices (during the first Czechoslovak Republic until 1938 and after the end of communism in 1989) bracket an era of autocratic rule (first within the fascist Slovak State and during the communist era). This overarching pattern can be seen not only in the high-level principles of democracy indices, but also in many – albeit not all – of their component indicators.

Italian Abstract: L’articolo si propone di approfondire alcuni specifici aspetti di governance delle cooperative di lavoro, con particolare riferimento alla partecipazione del socio lavoratore alla gestione dell’impresa. A tal fine si valuteranno i diversi sistemi di amministrazione e controllo di una cooperativa alla luce dell’esigenza di rendere effettiva la partecipazione del socio. L’analisi terra conto della distinzione tra cooperative di maggiori e di minori dimensioni, sia dal punto di vista dei possibili modelli di governance e dell’alternativa tra democrazia diretta ed indiretta, sia in prospettiva de iure condendo.English Abstract: The article aims to examine some specific governance aspects of worker cooperatives, with particular reference to the participation of worker members in the management of the enterprise. To this end, the different systems of administration and control of a cooperative will be evaluated in the light of the need to make member participation effective. The analysis will take into consideration the distinction between bigger and smaller worker cooperatives, both from the point of view of the possible governance models, and the alternative between direct and indirect democracy, and in a de iure condendo perspective.

The research question is how technologies characterized by ubiquitous Web 2.0 interactivity may contribute to democracy. Following a case study design, two applications were evaluated: the Belgian CitizenLab, a mobile, social and local private application to support public decision making in cities, and the Dutch governmental website Internetconsultatie. Available data suggest that the Dutch consultation platform is mainly visited by the ‘usual suspects’ and lacks participatory functionalities. In contrast, CitizenLab explicitly aims at policy co-creation through broad participation. Its novelty, however, prevents making sound empirical statements. A comprehensive conceptualization precedes the case studies. To avoid instrumentalist reduction, the social setting of the technologies is reconstructed. Since its constituents, embedding and expectations - initially represented as the nation state and representative democracy - are increasingly challenged, their transformations are consequently discussed. The new embedding emerges as a governance constellation; new expectations concern the participatory dimension of politics. Future assessments of technologies may benefit from this conceptualization. You can view the book proposal here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2461488.

We outline a new voting procedure for representative democracies. This procedure should be used for important decisions only and consists of two voting rounds: a randomly-selected subset of the citizens is awarded a one-time voting right. The parliament also votes, and the two decisions are weighted according to a pre-defined key. The final decision is implemented. As this procedure gives the society – represented by the randomly-chosen subset – a better say for important decisions, the citizens might be more willing to accept the consequences of these decisions.

This research report highlights the historical background of democracy since Athenian time, its journey from Aristotle to 20th and 21st era. In this report, focus is paid on historical background of Pakistan. Issues of bad democratic governance are highlighted. Causes behind and reasons of it failures are focused. Other aspects include the democratic and non-democratic dimension of Pakistan. Whether it can be called truly democratic and finally, Conclude if democracy in the best way forward for Pakistan.Role of political parties is highlighted; democracy can succeed only if politician’s leaders have strong commitment to democracy in both theory and practice.

Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or ``manifestos,'' which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter's single choice of party or candidate. We address this problem through a conjoint experiment based on the actual party manifestos in Japan's 2014 House of Representatives election. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects of specific positions on the overall assessment of manifestos, heterogeneity in preferences among subgroups of respondents, and the popularity ranking of manifestos. Our analysis uncovers important discrepancies between voter preferences and the portrayal of the election by politicians and the media as providing a policy mandate to the governing Liberal Democratic Party, underscoring the potential danger of inferring public opinion from election outcomes alone.

While extensive research focused on citizens’ disaffection and tools to cure the ‘democratic malaise’, very few studies paid attention to the connection between citizens’ preferences for democratic alternatives and their desire to get involved in new participatory procedures. To fill this gap and to advance the understanding of such a linkage, our paper aims to investigate how preferences of German citizens for types of democracy influence their retrospective as well as prospective involvement in political will formation and decision‐making. This paper discusses the conceptions of democracy and assesses the effects of these preferences on several types of political participation (voting, protests, referendums, deliberative procedures). Our study draws on data from a survey conducted in autumn 2014 on a probability representative sample at national level in Germany. Findings illustrate that citizens favoring representative democracy are less inclined to take part in participatory devices, whereas citizens favoring a citizen‐oriented concept of democracy are more willing to get involved in them. Those citizens who favor a more expert oriented democracy, show mixed participation intentions.