Introduction: Defending “democratic populism”?

Journal of New Democratic Methods: An Introduction

This paper describes a new breed of academic journals that use statistical machine learning techniques to make them more democratic. In particular, not only can anyone submit an article, but anyone can also become a reviewer. Machine learning is used to decide which reviewers accurately represent the views of the journal's readers and thus deserve to have their opinions carry more weight. The p...

Introduction: Democratic Outcomes and Associational Life

Across the third world, the discourse on civil society has remained a key feature of democracy promotion initiatives. Scholars evaluating the potential for democracy in these developing states and activists seeking to effect democratic reforms have focused much of their attention on civic associations. They argue that civil societies help to hold states account­ able, represent citizen interest...

Rise of populism

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...

A Political Theory of Populism

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...