The World Social Forum is an open space-movement that contrasts with the formalist self referred political system of representative democracy and inter-State relations. Its banners, decision-making practices and political culture question the social and political orders of global governance that have traditionally been presented as balanced structures aiming at a predictable and universal mater...

Politics has always attracted the attention of the media, citizens organizations, and the general public. Recent years have also witnessed a global process of “spectacularization” of politics, which among other things has resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of information available about many facets of political life. Politicians, for example, are literally public figures, and much of...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect information. Voting rules that focus on the opposition party sometimes dominate voting rules that focus on the i...

The idea of representation has been used in various fields of study from data analysis to political science. In this paper, we define representativeness and describe a method to isolate data points that can represent the entire data set. Also, we show how the minimum set of representative data points can be generated. We use data from GLOBE (a project to study the effects on Land Change based o...

We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first ...

Representative government in the West was born under an ideology that postulated a basic harmony of interests in society. The political decision process was thus expected to be largely consensual. This ideology obfuscated important con‡icts of values and interests, and it became untenable with the rise of class-based and religious parties. Beginning with Kelsen (1923) and culminating with Schum...