Educating Elites in Democratic Societies: A Dialogue

Oligarchic versus Democratic Societies

This paper develops a model to analyze economic performance under different political regimes. An “oligarchic” society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights but also tends to erect significant entry barriers against new entrepreneurs. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on producers, but tends...

Corruption dynamics in democratic societies

This paper investigates the dynamics of corruption at the top (i.e., by politicians). For this purpose a dynamic, politico-economic framework is developed and analyzed. A particular feature of this investigation is an analytical characterization of the dynamic properties of the system. This allows one to interpret these properties in terms of economic and institutional parameters. As an example...

Incentives and prosocial behavior in democratic societies

This paper studies the relationship between monetary incentives to encourage citizens’ contributions to a social good (voting, charity donation, etc.) and the society’s consideration for that good in the presence of social signaling. We establish that, no matter how much citizens value the social good, low incentives (or disincentives) may emerge as the unique majority voting outcome when conce...

The renewal of democratic practices in knowledge societies

Political Parties and Democratic Control in Advanced Industrial Societies

Few, if any, would deny that political parties are integral to representative democracy as we know it. And yet since the 1960s it has become increasingly commonplace to encounter references in academic literature, journalistic comment, and polemical assertion alike to the `decline of party', a contention usually predicated on the view that parties are `failing' in a variety of respects. We have...