Co-voting democracy

We outline a new voting procedure for representative democracies. This procedure should be used for important decisions only and consists of two voting rounds: a randomly-selected subset of the citizens is awarded a one-time voting right. The parliament also votes, and the two decisions are weighted according to a pre-defined key. The final decision is implemented. As this procedure gives the society—represented by the randomly-chosen subset—a better say for important decisions, the citizens might be more willing to accept the consequences of these decisions.     

6点共识和9条规律

改革开放三十年以来,企业文化理论传人中国二十多年以来,我们形成了一些基本的观点共识,探索出了一些基本的运作规律,跟大家做一个探讨,以求得更好地指导今后企业文化建设的实践.     

纳税意识与民主意识

很多论者仅把纳税意识概括为纳税的自觉遵从与诚信意识，但完整的现代纳税意识包括了纳税义务与权利的对等意识，本文通过历史与逻辑分析，阐述了纳税意识与民主意识的内在联系，据此剖析了自觉诚信纳税意识的由来和当前我国“纳税意识淡薄”的深层原因，并引出树立现代纳税意识对培养公民的现代民主意识和中国社会主义民主政治建设的重要意义。     

Co-operative democracy and employee involvement

In this article the author assesses the difficulties facing democracy in the British Retail Co-operative Movement, with special reference to the role of employees on boards of directors.     

Weighted representative democracy

We propose a new system of democratic representation. Any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. We show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote.     

Statehood,democracy and preindustrial development

This paper proposes a growth model linking state history to economic development. It considers three state systems: non-statehood, authoritarian statehood, and democratic statehood. These differ in the way a public good is provided, which in turn determines growth rates. Under certain assumptions, democratic states grow faster than authoritarian ones, which in turn grow faster than non-states. All societies start with non-statehood and transition into authoritarian statehood at some point, but the timing is random. When later given the opportunity, only those societies that transitioned relatively recently to authoritarian statehood transition to democracy. When they do, they begin to grow faster, eventually overtaking older and still authoritarian states. This generates an inversely U-shaped cross-sectional relationship between development and state history consistent with modern cross-country data.     

城市规划民主与公众参与

在民主政治的基础上,公众参与既是民主政治的通俗化表达、一种权力制度,又是一种具体的社会民主形式.具体到城市规划领域,公众参与既作为一种权力制度,以一种抽象的规划权力运行机制存在,又作为具象的城市规划民主的实现形式而出现;在此意义上,城市规划民主与公众参与是一致的.公众参与只有在城市规划民主的基础上才具有实质意义.     

小排量车的困惑

最近,国际原油价格连续攀升,国内成品油价格也进行了调整。油价越来越高,购买小排量汽车仿佛已经成了购买家庭用车的最佳选择。不过,记     

Trade union democracy and individualisation: the cases of Denmark and Sweden

Combining central concepts of individualisation and trade union democracy with empirical results from Swedish and mainly Danish surveys, this article analyses how the tendencies towards individualisation in the membership affects union democracy. The analysis indicates that the individualisation affects union democracy negatively. However individualisation is a relative concept.     

Federalism,distributive politics and representative democracy

We analyze federal systems of government in which local public policies are financed by general taxation. In a decentralized political system there is, in each region, a vote to elect a local representative while in a centralized political system a single representative is elected by a federal vote. It is shown that under decentralization, voters strategically elect liberal representatives so as to nullify any element of cooperation between representatives in the decision-making stage. Thus, there is a trade-off between the budgetary externality and a "policy closer to the people", but the democratic choice is biased towards decentralization.     

The economic evolution of democracy

Using a variant of the Ramsey growth model, we explore the relationships between economic growth and the emergence of democracy. We argue that democracy acts as a commitment device to economic reforms favored by an elite under the threat of rebellion. Consistent with British economic history we model liberalizing reforms of the labor market as the mechanism by which the elite redistribute resources to the poor. We find that if democracy emerges it is preceded by a period of growth, however the emergence of democracy will only encourage further growth if the redistributions it entails do not significantly hamper capital accumulation.      

Epistemic democracy with correlated voters

We develop a general theory of epistemic democracy in large societies, which subsumes the classical Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Wisdom of Crowds, and other similar results. We show that a suitably chosen voting rule will converge to the correct answer in the large-population limit, even if there is significant correlation amongst voters, as long as the average covariance between voters becomes small as the population becomes large. Finally, we show that these hypotheses are consistent with models where voters are correlated via a social network, or through the DeGroot model of deliberation.     

Workplace democracy in the lab

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial effects, empirical evidence of such effects is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real‐effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented, worker characteristics such as ability and gender, and possible sorting.