Designing Popular Vote Processes to Enhance Democratic Systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice el-Wakil ◽  
Francis Cheneval
Keyword(s):  
Popular Vote ◽  
Democratic Systems

The referendum as an institution in the Black Sea Region: Does it signal the rise or collapse of democracy?

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Podolak
Keyword(s):  
Black Sea ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Black Sea Region ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
Important State ◽  
Constitutional Changes

Views on the institution of direct democracy have changed during the period of democratic transition. The various advantages and positive effects of direct democracy have been confirmed by the practice of some democratic countries. Its educational and political activation value for society was also noted, without which civil society cannot form. The referendum is especially treated as the purest form of correlation between the views of society and the decisions of its representatives. In a situation where two representative bodies are present – the parliament and the president – a referendum is considered a means of resolving disputes between them in important state affairs. The referendum is nowadays becoming more than just a binding or consultative opinion on a legislative act, especially a constitution. First and foremost, it is important to see the extension of the type and scope of issues that are subject to direct voting. Apart from the traditional, i.e., constitutional changes, polarising issues that raise considerable emotion have become the subject of referenda. Problems of this type include, in particular, moral issues, membership in international organisations, and so-called ‘New Policy’. This article presents the role and importance of the referendum as an institution shaping the democratic systems of the Black Sea Region.

The 2016 Pollyvote Popular Vote Forecast: A Preliminary Analysis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Graefe ◽  
J. Scott Armstrong ◽  
Randall J. Jones ◽  
Alfred G. Cuzan
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Popular Vote

Conditionality & Coercion

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabela Mares ◽  
Lauren E. Young
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Vote Buying ◽  
Private Benefits ◽  
Public Benefits ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
Method Approach

In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the “wrong” way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits? This book uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that clientelistic strategies must be disaggregated based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. The authors document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions, and also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians’ personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy. Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous studies have argued.

scholarly journals Winning, Losing, and the Quality of Democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110261
Author(s):  
Richard Nadeau ◽  
Jean-François Daoust ◽  
Ruth Dassonneville
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Electoral Democracy ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The Comparative Study

Citizens who voted for a party that won the election are more satisfied with democracy than those who did not. This winner–loser gap has recently been found to vary with the quality of electoral democracy: the higher the quality of democracy, the smaller the gap. However, we do not know what drives this relationship. Is it driven by losers, winners, or both? And Why? Linking our work to the literature on motivated reasoning and macro salience and benefiting from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project—covering 163 elections in 51 countries between 1996 and 2018, our results show that the narrower winner–loser gap in well-established electoral democracies is not only a result of losers being more satisfied with democracy, but also of winners being less satisfied with their victory. Our findings carry important implications since a narrow winner–loser gap appears as a key feature of healthy democratic systems.

CORRUPTION IN ADVERSARIAL SYSTEMS: THE CASE OF DEMOCRACY

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 221-241
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Design ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Central Task ◽  
Perverse Incentives ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
Positive Traits ◽  
In Virtue Of

Abstract:In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution’s design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution’s more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan’s interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

scholarly journals Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Procter ◽  
Miguel Arana-Catania ◽  
Felix-Anselm van Lier ◽  
Nataliya Tkachenko ◽  
Yulan He ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
City Council ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The City

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning can improve citizens? experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the ?Decide Madrid? Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposals; (d) assist citizens in aggregating and developing proposals. Evaluation of the results confirms that NLP and machine learning have a role to play in addressing some of the barriers users of platforms such as Consul currently experience.

O potrzebie wprowadzenia ustawy referendalnej do systemu prawnego w Polsce

2021 ◽  
Vol 1(162) ◽  
pp. 127-145
Author(s):  
Piotr Uziębło
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Vote ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Constitutional System

The problems raised in the doctrine of constitutional law related to the implementation of a decision taken in a referendum in matters of particular importance to the state, as well as the generally marginal use of the institution of popular vote in the constitutional prac-tice, give rise to reflection on the introduction of the institution of a referendum law into the Polish constitutional system. In this article the author considers the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution, analyzing at the same time contemporary normative regulations concerning such acts in other countries. The research leads to the conclusion that despite the risks involved, the refer-endum law should appear in the Polish constitutional system in the future, as it would not only give a chance for a more complete reflection of the will of the collective subject of sovereignty without the necessity of its decoding by the parliament, but it could also be an impulse for the development of the referendum practice in the Republic of Poland. However, it is important to introduce proce-dural barriers that will prevent depreciation of this institution.

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