Economic inequality is rapidly increasing in the majority of countries. The wealth of the world is divided in two: almost half going to the richest one percent; the other half to the remaining 99 percent. The World Economic Forum has identified this as a major risk to human progress. Extreme...

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality,...

Economic theory needs a stronger defence against unwise application of mathematics. Mathematicians are trained for abstract thought and not for empirical science. Their contribution can wreak havoc, for example in education with real life pupils and students, in finance by neglecting real world...

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in social choice finds different interpretations. Bordes-Tideman (1991) and Tideman (2006) suggest that collective rationality would be an illusion and that practical voting procedures do not tend to require completeness or transitivity. Colignatus (1990 and 2011)...

Various scientists under the label of “Scientists for a democratic Europe” (SDE) sent a joint “Letter to the governments of the EU member states” (2007) advising the use of the Penrose Square Root Weights (PSRW) for the EU Council of Ministers. When we compare the SDE letter with...

There will be many researchers who discover voting theory afresh and who will want to understand it and its interesting paradoxes. Arrow's theorem (1951, 1963) is the most celebrated result in social choice theory. It has been criticized a lot but Howard DeLong (1991), "A refutation of Arrow’s...

Democratic nations are advised to have parliaments select the chief executive by the Borda Fixed Point method. The current practice of having direct popular elections using systems that have originated in history is inoptimal and actually quite undemocratic since winners are selected who don’t...

We analyze data on sustainability of democratic regimes in resource rich countries and suggest a two-period model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy in some countries, but does not create any difficulties for democratic system in other ones. Our central idea...

There are two innovations in the paper as compared to the previous literature on democracy and growth. First, we consider not only the level of democracy, but also changes in this level in the 1970s-1990s as measured by increments of Freedom House political rights indices. Second, the...

There are two innovations as compared to the previous literature on democratization and growth. First, not only the level of democracy is taken into account, but also changes in this level in the 1970s-1990s as measured by the political rights indices of the Freedom House. Second, the...