The flypaper sticks even when aid travels overseas

This paper extends the current literature by considering the existence of the flypaper effect internationally, with donor countries supplying foreign aid to recipient countries. The flypaper effect refers to the empirical anomaly associated with intergovernmental grants stimulating government expenditures more than can be explained by a pure income effect. The results reveal evidence of flypaper behavior such that for recipient countries one dollar of foreign aid raises public spending by $0.21-$0.42, whereas an equal increase in domestic income raises government expenditures by only $0.09-$0.16. Furthermore, we exploit variation in political institutions across countries and find that the flypaper effect is most pronounced in less democratic countries and find no flypaper effect in more democratic countries. This suggests that government officials are more likely to behave as expected by the median voter model when they are held accountable. Furthermore, countries with proportional, rather than majority/plurality, voting mechanisms do not display flypaper behavior.

Voting and Trading in Symbiosis

The notion of political stability of Chapter 2 is applied to the general equilibrium analysis of Chapter 1, highlighting how trading and voting mechanisms help each other’s functioning. On an incomplete financial market, trading reduces the dimensionality of the collective decision-making problem; in the presence of externalities or imperfect competition, trading reduces the polarization of the electorate. In both cases, political stability obtains for lowered rates of super majority. Hence trading facilitates the emergence of a voting-stable decision. It is furthermore argued that stability with respect to the lowest possible rate of super majority is more likely to result in economic efficiency. Hence voting mitigates market failures. However, it takes different governance rules to ensure efficiency of stable decisions: shareholder governance on an incomplete financial market, stakeholder democracy when facing externalities or imperfect competition. And expectations about the outcome of the decision-making process can play a crucial, potentially destabilizing role.

Putting Citizens in Front of the Dilemma Voting VS Health Protection: The Biggest Challenge to Avoid by the Albanian Authority in the 2021 Parliamentary Election

In a relatively new and fragile democracy like Albania, with only 30 years of life in this post-communist period, the COVID-19 Pandemic placed the authorities in the face of even more difficult challenges in holding free and fair elections that are uncontested and legitimate. Finding a balance between elections that meet the criteria of being democratic and protecting the lives of citizens is one of the chief objectives for Albanian authorities. This is likened to be the case of many other countries that had elections during the COVID19 period. Although COVID-19 virus is not selective as to whom it will infect, some specific groups such as the elderly people with underlying health conditions tend to manifest more severe symptoms. Countries are responsible for adapting the voting system to ensure public safety during the pandemic by implementing a diverse range of alternative voting mechanisms. Policymakers in the design process of measures have to take into consideration these vulnerable groups and also the individuals who show symptoms on the voting day due to SARS, CoV-2, or they may be hospitalized or be quarantined on the voting day. This paper focuses on analyzing the measures that Albanian authorities have envisaged to ensure the right to vote for these specific groups. After evaluating the decisions and instructions of the responsible authorities for the organization and administration of elections in Albania, it can be concluded that based on the subject of this research paper, no specific measures was undertaken for any of the groups mentioned above to ensure a safe voting process. The lack of this can probably lead to exclusive and not inclusive elections.

Condorcet Loser in 2016: Apparently Trump; Condorcet Winner: Not Clinton?

Using thermometer score data from the ANES, we show that while there may have been no clear-cut Condorcet winner among the 2016 US presidential candidates, there appears to have been a Condorcet loser: Donald Trump. Thus the surprise is that the electorate preferred not only Hillary Clinton, but also the two “minor” candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, to Trump. Another surprise is that Johnson may have been the Condorcet winner. A minimal normative standard for evaluating voting systems is advanced, privileging those systems that select Condorcet winners if one exists, and critiquing systems that allow the selection of Condorcet losers. A variety of voting mechanisms are evaluated using the 2016 thermometer scores: Condorcet voting, plurality, Borda, (single winner) Hare, Coombs, range voting, and approval voting. We conclude that the essential problem with the existing voting procedure—Electoral College runoff of primary winners of two major parties—is that it (demonstrably) allows the selection of a Condorcet loser.

The Concept of E-Voting Mechanism Based on Law of General Election and Information Security

The development of technology has made transformation in the world; one of them is the implementation of e-voting systems in general elections. This research aims to dig deeper into the utilization of e voting in Indonesia's general election according to the Law on General Election, and research on the e-voting safety aspect in Indonesia's general election with the Law on ITE, government regulation on One Data Indonesia, and the Bill of Personal Data Protection Law. The research method is normative, which is delivered with an analytic-descriptive method. The results show that Indonesia has arranged elections with e-voting mechanisms for multiples of times, for example, in Jembrana Regency. Based on the General Election Law, e voting could be implemented in Indonesia. However, there are still considerations in terms of technology and preparation that should prevent unwanted burden. There needs to be a regulation for voters' data management to prevent violations against human rights. Data management must pay attention to safety aspects guided by the Law on ITE, government regulation on One Data Indonesia, and the Bill of Personal Data Protection Law

Qatar’s legislative election plans carry risks

Significance The emir in November 2019 ordered work to begin on long-delayed legislative polls for the Shura Council, requiring decisions on voting mechanisms and electoral districting. The move seems to have been an effort to burnish the country’s international image during the boycott by Arab neighbours, rather than a response to domestic demand. Impacts An elected Shura Council in Qatar could put pressure on Saudi Arabia, left the sole Gulf state without an elected national legislative body. If political parties were also legalised, ideological blocs might be able to use the legislature to set policymaking agendas. The Shura Council’s power to hold ministers to account might act as a drag on any fiscal reforms reducing subsidies to citizens.

Coalitional Strategic Behaviour in Collective Decision Making

In my PhD project I study the algorithmic aspects of strategic behaviour in collective decision making, with the special focus on voting mechanisms. I investigate two manners of manipulation: (1) strategic selection of candidates from groups of potential representatives and (2) influence on voters located in a social network.

Communication, Distortion, and Randomness in Metric Voting

In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving only this ordinal (comparison) information, must select a candidate approximately minimizing the sum of distances from all voters to the chosen candidate. It is known that while the Copeland rule and related rules guarantee distortion at most 5, the distortion of many other standard voting rules, such as Plurality, Veto, or k-approval, grows unboundedly in the number n of candidates.An advantage of Plurality, Veto, or k-approval with small k is that they require less communication from the voters; all deterministic social choice rules known to achieve constant distortion require voters to transmit their complete rankings of all candidates. This motivates our study of the tradeoff between the distortion and the amount of communication in deterministic social choice rules.We show that any one-round deterministic voting mechanism in which each voter communicates only the candidates she ranks in a given set of k positions must have distortion at least 2n-k/k; we give a mechanism achieving an upper bound of O(n/k), which matches the lower bound up to a constant. For more general communication-bounded voting mechanisms, in which each voter communicates b bits of information about her ranking, we show a slightly weaker lower bound of Ω(n/b) on the distortion.For randomized mechanisms, Random Dictatorship achieves expected distortion strictly smaller than 3, almost matching a lower bound of 3 − 2/n for any randomized mechanism that only receives each voter's top choice. We close this gap, by giving a simple randomized social choice rule which only uses each voter's first choice, and achieves expected distortion 3 − 2/n.