Shared social responsibility (SSR) reqiures the definition of a unified methodology of multi-stakeholder governance making effective the idea of ‘sharing’ responsibilities. At minimum in fact, shared social responsibility is a matter of allocating responsibility among a number of public,...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

Das Papier befasst sich modelltheoretisch mit dem empirischen Phänomen des „Demokratischen Friedens“, der Beobachtung also, dass Demokratien ihre Konflikte in der Regel nicht kriegerisch lösen. Die Grundlage meiner Analyse bildet das Modell von Fearon (1995), ein Verhandlungsspiel mit 2...

The present paper explicitly models the principal-agent relationship between a democratic population and its elected representative within a standard war bargaining setup. I find that the specific structure of this relationship and the problems resulting from it help overcome information...

Nach einem kurzen Rückblick auf das Downs-Modell diskutieren wir anhand empirischer Daten aus Deutschland dessen heutige Relevanz unter Berücksichtigung der aus der Fairness-Literatur bekannten Ungleichheitsaversion (UA). Dabei wird der Begriff der sozialen Präferenzen um das neue Konzept der...

While people in democracies can vote their government out when they are discontent with its policies, those in dictatorships cannot do so. They can only attempt to expel the dictator via mass protests or revolutions. Based on a general cause-and-effect mechanism, the author analyzes whether such...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

We analyze the economic consequences of strategic delegation of the right to decide between public or private provision of governmental service and/or the authority to negotiate and renegotiate with the chosen service provider. Our model encompass both bureaucratic delegation from a government...

In this paper we examine the potential of democratic constitutions for the provision of divisible public goods in a large economy. Our main insights are as follows: When aggregate shocks are absent, the combination of the following rules yields first-best allocations: a supermajority rule, equal...