Demokratische Entscheidungsprozesse werden zurzeit vielfach angegriffen. Insbesondere in der Digitalisierung sehen viele eine Gefahr für die Demokratie. Der Autor sieht hingegen Chancen für die Demokratie und plädiert dafür, digitale Instrumente auszuprobieren. Digitale Instrumente wie...

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote....

We propose a two-stage process called minority voting to allocate public projects in a polity. In the first period, a society decides by a simple majority decision whether to provide the public project. If the proposal in the first period is rejected, the process ends. Otherwise the process...

We explore democratic currency issuance with flexible majority rules. With flexible majority rules, the vote-share needed to approve a particular currency issuance growth is increasing with this growth rate. By choosing suitable flexible majority rules, socially optimal growth rates can be...

In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks...

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty...

We examine a model of campaigns in which contributors support candidates who choose political platforms and engage in costly campaigning. Interest groups decide to whom and how much to contribute. We show that donors may financially support one candidate in order to moderate his opponent's...

We consider a model with a politician facing a multi-task problem while in office. The reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others. We show that a hierarchy of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate...

As the performance of long-term projects is not observable in the short run politicians may pander to public opinion. To solve this problem, we propose a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is...

We examine how democracies choose their amount of checks and balances (C&B). For this purpose, we consider a simple model of political competition with costly policy reforms. The cost of a marginal reform is determined endogenously at the constitutional phase—i.e. before policies are...