Analyzing Indonesia’s Populist Electorate

Strategic approval voting in a large electorate

The paper considers approval voting for a large population of voters. It is proven that, based on statistical information about candidate scores, rational voters vote sincerly and according to a simple behavioral rule. It is also proven that if a Condorcet-winner exists, this candidate is elected. ∗Thanks to Steve Brams, Nicolas Gravel, François Maniquet, Remzi Sanver and Karine Van der Straete...

The Future of Populist Parallelism

Variation of the Electorate: Veto and Purge

In the paradigm social choice problem, there is a fixed set of alternatives and a fixed set of voters. This paper considers variations of the electorate, when some subset of voters has a special voice on some subset of alternatives. Such a situation is formalized by means of the veto function. We focus on stable veto functions, and exhibit a liberal social choice function and a promotion mechan...

Eforming the Electorate: Patterns of Technology Use

This paper discusses research-in-progress on a longitudinal study of technology usage by incumbent members of the U.S. Congress on their official Congressional homepages to “routinely” communicate with the public and with their constituencies as well as technology usage on campaign homepages for the purpose of political campaigning. By examining the types of information technologies embedded on...

Why Populist Democracy Promotes Market Liberalization

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens’ support for the market by guaranteeing compensating justice to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to inhabitants of open borders between formerly integrated countries, where people face the same level of marke...