Suppose that the costs of obtaining and using political information fall dramatically, in large part because of new technologies such as the Internet. What effects might this have on political accountability and social welfare? This response to a paper by Jane Schacter offers some skeptical...

In the administrative state, how should expert opinions be aggregated and used? If a panel of experts is unanimous on a question of fact, causation, or prediction, can an administrative agency rationally disagree, and on what grounds? If experts are split into a majority view and a minority...

What is collective wisdom, and how can institutions be designed to generate and exploit it? This essay argues for a reductionist conception of collective wisdom as collective epistemic accuracy, and cashes out that conception at the level of institutional design. Assuming that the social goal is...

I examine the executive's power as Commander-in-Chief (or "CINC") of the armed forces, and the resulting problems for constitutional design and interpretation. Drawing upon Machiavelli's analysis, I attempt to state an economy of glory: an account of the benefits and costs of executive...

Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were...

We use an agency model to analyze the impact of judicial review on democratic performance. We find that judicial review may increase democratic failure by rescuing elected officials from the consequences of ill-advised policies, but may also decrease democratic failure by alerting voters to...

Endemic corruption in developing countries often seems intractable. Yet most countries that currently have relatively high public integrity were, at an earlier point in their history, afflicted with similarly pervasive corruption. Studying the history of these countries may therefore make a...