A full understanding of public affairs requires the ability to distinguish between the policies that voters would like the government to adopt, and the influence that different voters or groups of voters actually exert in the democratic process. We consider the properties of a computable...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

The usual Condorcet Criterion says that if an alternative is ranked ahead of all other alternatives by an absolute majority of voters, it should be declared the winner. The following partial extension of this criterion to other ranks is proposed: If an alternative is consistently ranked ahead of...

In a seminal contribution, Hansson (1976) demonstrates that the collection of decisive coalitions associated with an Arrovian social welfare function forms an ultrafilter. He goes on to show that if transitivity is weakened to quasi-transitivity as the coherence property imposed on a social...

A common real-life problem is to fairly allocate a number of indivisible objects and a fixed amount of money among a group of agents. Fairness requires that each agent weakly prefers his consumption bundle to any other agent’s bundle. Under fairness, efficiency is equivalent to budget-balance...