Portugal holds the dubious distinction of being among the so-called PIGS countries, the sub-set of Euro zone nations bedeviled by large public sector debt and deficits. In this paper, we try to explain why Portugal has fallen into its current predicament using concepts from the Austrian...

With few exceptions, representative party democracy is dysfunctional due to structural deficiencies like “the impossibility of representation in groups”, “the asymmetry of information”, “the state capture by political parties”, and the “uncoordinated administrative polycentrism”....

Is the United States sufficiently democratic? And does it provide sufficient protection for the thriving markets that have sustained American prosperity? The answers are not obvious because these two values conflict. Many democratic theorists argue that the Constitution is not democratic because...

The paper quantifies the amount of information aggregated by large elections under qualified majority rules. It shows show that, even when the Condorcet Jury Theorem does not hold, there still can be meaningful information aggregation. In particular, we study the case of information aggregation...

In a game-theoretical approach of probabilistic voting, we introduce biased beliefs among voters and retrospective voting. In order to micro-found biased beliefs we introduce the psychological concept of mental models. We put into perspective the claim that biased beliefs lead to bad policy...

In "The Myth of the Rational Voter" Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address...

The Internet has significantly expanded worldwide, changing our relationship with the world, and the way we communicate, educate, and inform ourselves. Africa, despite having a very low number of fixed-broadband subscriptions for 100 inhabitants, has not escaped the Internet phenomenon, as the...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with...

Most democratic constitutions fail. The estimated half-life of a democratic constitution adopted between 1789 and 2005 is just sixteen years. This paper explores the conditions that foster constitutional and democratic survival. For democracy to survive, it must be self-enforcing in the sense...

The resource curse is a topic studied intensively in both economics and political science. Much of the focus is now on whether oil affects democratic institutions. We further the debate through the use of additional measures of democracy and multiple time-series estimation strategies. We find no...