Swiss democracy has its advantages

Middle Age Has Its Advantages

If we’re lucky, we get old. Physical and mental decline are negative hallmark associations of aging. Imagine being born blind and, as you approach middle age, waking up with the ability to see. In this issue of PLOS Genetics, Cornils, Maurya, and colleagues discover such a phenomenon: age-related suppression of ciliogenesis defects [1]. Cilia are microtubule-based organelles that protrude from ...

Experimenting with Fish has some Advantages

As I sat through the morning session of the Implications of Behavioral Economics for Economic Policy I was struck by the interesting presentations as well as the insightful spectator remarks. One particularly astute gentlemen sitting directly at my side made several penetrating comments. One comment related to how one should use experimental methods in economics. He noted that there are distinc...

HG Has No Computational Advantages over OT

The peculiar property of Optimality Theory (OT) is that it uses constraint ranking and thus enforces strict domination, according to which the highest ranked relevant constraint “takes it all”; see Prince & Smolensky (2004). Because of this property, OT looks prima facie like an exotic combinatorial framework. Exotic in the sense that it does not seem to have any close correspondent within core...

Democracy and Its Critics

Homogeneity, Heterogeneity and Direct Democracy: The Case of Swiss Referenda

In his famous dichotomy of consensual versus majoritarian democracies, Lijphart ~1984! claims that “consensual” means are more applicable in heterogeneous societies, while “majoritarian” means are more adequate in homogenous societies. While discussing at length many features of both consensual and majoritarian democracy, Lijphart refrains from reaching a conclusion concerning the desirability ...