The foresight and scenario building methods can be an interesting reference for social sciences, especially in terms of innovative methods for labour process analysis. A scenario – as a central concept for the prospective analysis – can be considered as a rich and detailed portrait of a...

Some programs and research networks are dealing with topics associated to the automtive sector and they observe one of the most significative sectores of modern economies. Because of that is so interesting to forecast some possible changes in an horizon of 10 to 20 years. But this exercse must...

We suggest a dynamic game theoretic model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy. Stationary Markov perfect equilibria of this game with four players – Politician, Oligarch, Autocrat and Public (voters) – are analyzed. Choosing a rate of resource rent tax,...

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...

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,...

No new issues are discussed but we try to improve on the didactics of some well-known elementary features of multiple seats elections that rely on a single vote such as common elections for Parliament or the U.S. Congress. The didactics concentrate on proportionality versus districts. Since some...

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...

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...

In our previous papers (Polterovich V., Popov V., 2007; Polterovich V., Popov V., Tonis A., 2006) it was shown that democratization (increase in the political rights index of the Freedom house in 1970-2000) can negatively affect economic growth, if the quality of institutions at the beginning of the...

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,...