Pivato and Soh [Pivato, M., Soh, A., 2020. Weighted representative democracy. Journal of Mathematical Economics 88 (2020) 52--63] proposed a new system of democratic representation whereby any individual can choose any legislator as her representative and different legislators can represent...

We analyze voter preferences for eight General Elections for the Danish parliament by using survey data to investigate the possible presence of five types of social choice paradoxes that may occur in list systems of proportional representation. Two serious paradoxes fail to manifest themselves,...

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody's lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

Currently, only China has a parliament larger than the German Bundestag, which continues to grow due to the increasing number of overhang mandates. In 2016, Norbert Lammert, then president of the Bundestag, proposed to restrict it to 630 members by allocating mandates according to quotas for...

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...

Geographic representation is an important consideration in candidate nominations, even under closed-list proportional representation (PR), and may even matter for distributive policy outcomes. However, since nominations are determined strategically, the causal effects of local representation are...

The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...

I investigate the impact of proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian rule (MR) on voter turnout and minority representation using theory and experiments. Numerous empirical studies have compared turnout across PR and MR. However, the empirical evidence is mixed. I show theoretically and...

The essay explains how ranked-choice voting leads to election outcomes that better represent what voters want compared with first-past-the-post, the traditional American voting system. It also shows that there is an even better system: majority-rule

The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...