Five German leading parties and their coalitions are evaluated from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the positions of the parties on over 30 topical issues are compared with the results of polls of public opinion. The outcomes are summarized in the indices of popularity and...

In economics and other social sciences, complex processes are often represented by numerical models of reality which more or less well reflect behavioral relationships and interactions. Such attempts are the subject of a lecture course "Mathematical Theory of Democracy" by the author at the...

Since voters are often swayed more by the personal image of politicians than by party manifestos, they may cast votes that are in opposition to their policy preferences. This results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters' own views. An alternative voting...

This is the first out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections by the methods of the mathematical theory of democracy. This one estimates the policy representation ability of the 39 parties that...

This is the second out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. This paper arranges the contesting parties into a 'spectrum' that reflects the spatial proximity of their policy profiles. The latter are...

The outcomes of the 2013 German Bundestag (federal parliament) election are analyzed from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the party positions on 36 topical issues are compared with the results of public opinion polls, and the party and coalition indices of popularity (the...

The paper explains the use of composite indicators as objective functions in econometric decision models. We consider an example of minimizing the harm from two kinds of pollution at the workplace, which can be reduced by two types of anti-pollution measures restricted to a given budget. At...

The German two-vote election system implements two historical conceptions of political representation coined at the end of the 18th century during the American and French Revolutions. The descriptive conception - the parliament portrays the society in miniature - is implemented in the first vote...

Currently, only China has a parliament larger than the German Bundestag, which continues to grow due to the increasing number of overhang mandates. In 2016, Norbert Lammert, then president of the Bundestag, proposed to restrict it to 630 members by allocating mandates according to quotas for...