Ready for the design of voting rules?

The design of fair voting rules has been addressed quite often in the literature. Still, the so-called inverse problem is not entirely resolved. We summarize some achievements in this direction and formulate explicit open questions and conjectures.Comment: 10 page

Welfarism and the Assessments of Social Decision Rules

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Why Let the People Decide? Elected Officials on Participatory Budgeting

This report documents findings from interviews with U.S. elected officials regarding their experience with participatory budgeting (PB). It also includes recommendations for policymakers, PB advocates and funders looking to improve and expand PB

Memory-Based Shallow Parsing

We present memory-based learning approaches to shallow parsing and apply these to five tasks: base noun phrase identification, arbitrary base phrase recognition, clause detection, noun phrase parsing and full parsing. We use feature selection techniques and system combination methods for improving the performance of the memory-based learner. Our approach is evaluated on standard data sets and the results are compared with that of other systems. This reveals that our approach works well for base phrase identification while its application towards recognizing embedded structures leaves some room for improvement

The Problem of Low and Unequal Voter Turnout - and What We Can Do About It. IHS Political Science Series No. 54, February 1998

Low voter turnout has become a serious problem in most democracies, not only in the United States but also in many West European countries – and even in a traditionally high-turnout country like Austria where turnout has also been declining in recent years. There are five reasons why we should be concerned about this problem: 1. Low turnout means low participation by less privileged citizens, who are already at a disadvantage in terms of other forms of political participation. 2. Unequal participation means unequal influence. 3. Actual turnout tends to be lower than the official turnout figures suggest. 4. Turnout in elections other than those at the national level tends to be particularly low. 5. Turnout is declining in most countries. The problem of low and unequal turnout can be solved by a number of institutional mechanisms such as proportional representation, concurrent and infrequent elections, weekend instead of weekday voting, and compulsory voting. The last of these – mandatory voting – is especially strong and effective, and also morally justified

Constitutional Reform: A Recipe for Restoring Faith in Our Democracy?

The first coalition since the Second World War is itself an innovation at Westminster. But it also came to power committed to an ambitious programme of constitutional reform – including fixed-term parliaments, directly elected mayors and local police commissioners, and the wider use of referendums. Could any of these changes reverse the long-term decline in public trust in government