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...

This paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first econometric investigation into the role of television in the formation of political consensus in Italy. Based on probit and instrumental variables estimates, we find trust in television to be the most significant predictor of...

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...

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...

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 critically examines the fears of India's cultural nationalists that globalisation will undermine ancient and cherished ways of life, by distinguishing between modernisation and Westernisation. It argues that accepting the material beliefs of the West, which is essential for...

This paper discusses libertarian (or soft) paternalism, as proposed among others by Thaler and Sunstein (2008). It is argued that libertarian paternalism should not be understood as an efficiency-enhancing, but as a redistributive concept. The relationship between libertarian paternalism and...

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...

Evidence from a novel measure of democracy (SVMDI) based on Support Vector Machines highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies can be traced back to the neglect of the information in the equation in levels and...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...