We provide several characterizations of unanimity decision rules, in a public choice model where preferences are constrained by attributes possessed by the alternatives (Nehring and Puppe, 2007a,b). Solidarity conditions require that when some parameters of the economy change, the agents whose parameters are kept fixed either all weakly lose or they all weakly win. Population-monotonicity (Thom...

This article discusses, from an historical-neo-institutionalist and relational-strategic perspective, the postmodern thesis of the end of the state due to the increasing processes of world globalization. The main hypothesis is that the arguments which predict the structural crisis or the disappearance of the State in the age of neo-liberal globalization have their roots in a theoretically and h...

TECHNOLOGY—the societal process for the pro duction and operation of artifacts, both tangible and intangible—impacts virtually every other so­ cietal structure and process and is, in turn, influenced by them. From its inception at the early emergence of humans as a distinct species, technology was the in­ strument that extended our biological capabilities, eventually making possible increasingl...

Spurred on by donors, a number of developing countries are in the midst of fundamental health and population sector reform. Focused on the performance-oriented norms of efficiency and effectiveness, reformers have paid insufficient attention to the process-oriented norms of sovereignty and democracy. As a result, citizens of sovereign states have been largely excluded from the deliberative proc...

The study had the objective of analyzing the notion of vulnerability that is used by bioethics to debate research involving human beings today, from reflections on biopolitics in contemporary culture. For this, the starting point was Giorgio Agamben's reading of Foucault's model of power (Sovereignty and Biopolitics), with the aim of subsequently analyzing the notion of bare life: "life without...

Why do groups want to secede and where is demand for self-determination most likely to arise? We argue self-determination demand is moderated by the projected economic costs of policy autonomy. The trade-off between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to demand more autonomy. This trade-off suggests that relative regional income is a key...

In this note, we reconsider the notion of ‘economic sovereignty.’ We argue that a small country may need to invest in assets of the sort of a port even when the common scale-economy argument indicates that using a port of a neighbouring country will be more cost effective. The reason for such an investment would be purely strategic, as the sovereignty of the parties involved prevent them from w...