In this paper we examine the potential of democratic constitutions for the provision of divisible public goods in a large economy. Our main insights are as follows: When aggregate shocks are absent, the combination of the following rules yields first-best allocations: a supermajority rule, equal...

In this paper we examine how individuals should be treated with respect to taxes, subsidies and agenda setting in constitutions in order to obtain efficient allocations of public goods and to limit tax distortions. We show that if public goods are socially desirable, the simple majority rule as...

When politicians have lower discount factors than voters, democratic elections cannot sufficiently motivate politicians to undertake long-term socially beneficial projects. When politicians can offer incentive contracts which become effective upon reelection, the hierarchy of contracts and...

We introduce democratic mechanisms where individual utilities are not observable by other people at the legislative stage. We show that the combination of three rules can yield e±cient provision of public projects: first, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the majority depends...

Politicians may pander to public opinion and may renounce undertaking beneficial long-term projects. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is used to...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

We develop a model that combines competitive exchange of private commodities across endogenously formed groups with public good provision and global collective decisions. There is a tension between local and global collective decisions. In particular, we show that group formation and collective...

We examine democratic public-good provision with heterogeneous legislators. Decisions are taken by majority rule and an agenda-setter proposes a level of the public good, taxes, and subsidies. Members are heterogeneous with respect to their benefits from the public good. We find that, depending...

When a counter-proposal is made to an initiative to change the Swiss constitution, the citizenry makes three binary majority choices: the initiative versus the status quo, the initiative versus the counter-proposal, and the status quo versus the counterproposal as a tie-breaker. If there is a...