We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects democratic attitudes in Western democracies. Using individual survey responses, the empirical analysis disentangles age from cohort patterns and other contemporaneous economic and political influences that shape democratic attitudes. The...

We document majority support for policies entailing global redistribution and climate mitigation. Recent surveys on 40,680 respondents in 20 countries covering 72% of global carbon emissions show strong support for an effective and progressive way to combat climate change and poverty: a global...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

The Borda Count (BC) is a positional voting procedure fairly often applied in nonpolitical choice settings. It has a usual mixture of good and bad theoretical properties. It is monotonic and consistent and excludes the election of an eventual Condorcet loser. It, however, does not necessarily...

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU....

Numerous simple proofs of the celebrated Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem (Gibbard, 1977, Satterthwaite, 1975) has been given in the literature. These are based on a number of different intuitions about the most fundamental reason for the result. In this paper we derive the Gibbard-Satterthwaite...

We derive a necessary and a sufficient condition for Nash implementation with a procedurally fair mechanism. Our result has a nice analogue with the path-braking result of Maskin [Nash equilibrium and welfare optimality, Rev. Econ. Stud. 66 (1999) 23-38.], and therefore, it allows us to give a...

Often preferences of agents are such that any sensible goal of the collective must admit a tie between all alternatives. The standard formulation in mechanism design demand that in this case all alternatives are equilibrium outcomes of the social choice mechanism. However, as far as the idea of...