Quintessential Elements of Meaningful Constitutions in Post-Conflict States

This examination compares several successful constitutions formulated to govern countries just formed from the conclusion of armed conflicts (including the U.S.). Some of the most important elements gleaned from these successful constitutions include an independent court before which one may appeal to the new constitution because such a constitution adequately secures the integrity of the court itself

Oil and Democracy in Russia

Russia is often considered a perfect example of the so-called “resource curse”—the argument that natural resource wealth tends to undermine democracy. Given high oil prices, some observers see the country as virtually condemned to authoritarian government for the foreseeable future. Reexamining various data, I show that such fears are exaggerated. Evidence from around the world suggests that for countries like Russia with an established oil industry, even large increases in the scale of mineral incomes have only a minor effect on the political regime. In addition, Russia—a country with an industrialized economy, a highly educated, urbanized population, and an oil sector that remains majority private-owned—is unlikely to be susceptible to most of the hypothesized pernicious effects of resource dependence.

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress

Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) denotes the problem of jointly localizing a moving platform and mapping the environment. This work studies the SLAM problem using a combination of inertial sensors, measuring the platform's accelerations and angular velocities, and a monocular camera observing the environment. We formulate the SLAM problem on a nonlinear least squares (NLS) batch form, whose solution provides a smoothed estimate of the motion and map. The NLS problem is highly nonconvex in practice, so a good initial estimate is required. We propose a multi-stage iterative procedure, that utilises the fact that the SLAM problem is linear if the platform's rotations are known. The map is initialised with camera feature detections only, by utilising feature tracking and clustering of  feature tracks. In this way, loop closures are automatically detected. The initialization method and subsequent NLS refinement is demonstrated on both simulated and real data

A Little Birdie Said: How Twitter is Disrupting Shareholder Activism

Shareholders are organizing and mobilizing on new social media platforms like Twitter. This changes the dynamics of shareholder proxy contests in ways that favor shareholders over management. Disruptive technology may bring about a shareholder revolution, which may not be in shareholders’ best interests, at least from the perspective of shareholder wealth maximization, and it also has powerful implications for the future of corporate social responsibility

Democracy Promotion: Done Right, A Progressive Cause

By the beginning of the Obama Administration, democracy promotion had become a rather tarnished idea, and understandably so. Like Islam or Christianity, much blood has been shed beneath its banner. It may be true that democracies don’t go to war with one another, but they certainly go to war, and their wars kill people just as dead as the wars undertaken by illiberal regimes. Anyone on the political left can tell the story: During the Cold War, the United States fought endless proxy wars and engaged in a great deal of overt and covert mischief, all in the name of democracy. During the Bush Administration, the idea of democracy promotion became tightly and inexorably bound up with regime change and the carnage of the Iraq War. Because it came to us in a package that included bloodshed, occupation, torture, and indefinite detentions, Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” left a bitter taste in the mouth

Science and Ideology in Economic, Political, and Social Thought

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, then by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences. The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing

Public Choice with Unequally Rational Individuals

As governments lack the rationality-promoting selective pressures of market competition, the standard (unbounded) rationality assumption is less legitimate in Public Choice than in analysis of markets. This paper argues that many Public Choice problems require recognizing that human rationality has bounds, that these differ across individuals, and that rationality must therefore be treated as a special scarce resource, tied to individuals and used for deciding on its own uses. This complicates resource-allocation in society, which has to rely on institutionally shaped selection processes. But this also appears to be the only way to produce the long-missing analytical support to the first head of J.S. Mill's criticism of government, of which Public Choice has so far supported only the second. --unequally bounded rationality,institutions,voting,politics-as-selection,government policies

Review of Krista Wiegand's <i>Enduring Territorial Disputes</i>

No abstract available

War and endogenous democracy

Many episodes of extension of franchise in the 19th and especially in the 20th century occurred during or in the aftermath of major wars. Motivated by this fact, we offer a theory of political transitions which focuses on the impact of international conflicts on domestic political institutions. We argue that mass-armies, which appeared in Europe after the French Revolution, are an effective military organization only if the conscripted citizens are willing to put effort in fighting wars, which in turn depends on the economic incentives that are provided to them. The need to provide such incentives implies that an oligarchy adopting a mass-army may voluntarily decide to promise some amount of income redistribution to its citizens, conditionally on satisfactory performance as soldiers. When the elite cannot credibly commit to provide an incentive-compatible redistribution, they may cope with the moral hazard problem of the citizens-soldiers only by relinquishing political power to them through the extension of franchise. This is because democracy always implements a highly redistributive fiscal policy, which makes fighting hard incentive-compatible for the citizens-soldiers. We show that a transition to democracy is more likely to occur when the external threat faced by an incumbent oligarchy is in some sense intermediate. A very high external threat allows the elite to make credible commitments of future income redistribution in favor of the citizens, while a limited external threat makes optimal for the elite not making any (economic or political) concession to the masses. Some historical evidence consistent with our theory is also provided

The logic of post-communist capitalist collective inaction

The relationship between politics and business is obviously a key feature of policy-making in capitalist democracies, and business associations are an important element of that relationship. A consensus has now emerged that organised business is remarkably weak in East-Central Europe. This article proposes a theoretical synthesis with which to explain that weakness. It shows how the strength of trade unions, varieties of capitalism and interest diversity are specifications of Olson’s logic of collective action, specifications without which the logic itself is too general to explain concrete outcomes. Detailed evidence in favour of the theory is provided from the Polish case. It is argued that the analysis should also apply to other post-communist countries