Behind the Ballot: Democracy, Chicanery, and Electoral Technique in Modern India

Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that in response to electoral incentives, office holders mix between “taking it easy” and “going for broke” in the first period. Even in t...

Ballot order effects in direct democracy elections

Many political practitioners believe that voters are more likely to approve propositions listed at the top than the bottom of the ballot, potentially distorting democratic decision making, and this belief influences election laws across the United States. Numerous studies have investigated ballot order effects in candidate elections, but there is little evidence for direct democracy elections, ...

Electoral Institutions and Satisfaction With Democracy

Electoral Democracy and Political Representation in the European Union

This paper addresses two particular aspects of the much debated democratic deficit in EU governance – the capacity of parties at the European level to represent the will of the citizens of Europe, and the absence of a system of party government at the European level, whereby parties in the parliament lack the capacity to effectively control the governing bodies of the EU. We first evaluate the ...

the tragedy of modern man in arthur millers world

what miller wants is a theatre of heightened consciousness. he speaks of two passions in a man, the passion to "feel" and the passion "know". he belives that we can have more of the latter. he says: drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more and not merely to spend our feelings. the writing of the crucible shows us that he is trying to give more heightene...