Trust, --but Verify!, a well known political dictum was enunciated by the late Ronald Reagan (United States President, 1980-88) in his attempts to break down barriers and integrate the communist (political, economic and nuclear) systems into a capitalist world. Nowhere is this dictum more appropriate than in the context of attempts to enable information integration and service composition for c...

1 The Economic Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 Representative Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.1 Policy Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2 Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.3 Campaigning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.4 Entr...

The paper provides a justification for the proportional representative (PR) election system for politically diversified societies. We employ the Shapley value concept to measure the political power of parties in a parliament. We prove that for the PR system if parties’ sizes are uniformly distributed on the simplex, the expected ratio of a party size to its political power increases to 1, and t...

In an interval society, voters are represented by intervals on the real line, corresponding to their approval sets on a linear political spectrum. I imagine the society to be a representative democracy, and ask how to choose members of the society as representatives. Following work in mathematical psychology by Coombs and others, I develop a measure of the compatibility (political similarity) o...

We construct a time-series model of investment in Israel that incorporates both traditional economic factors derived from a theoretical model of a profit-maximising representative firm and indicators of political instability and unrest. This is used to estimate the extent to which the Intifada has depressed Israeli investment and the size of the corresponding "peace dividend". JEL Classificatio...

This paper discusses the relation between eParticipation and civil society in Germany using a theoretical framework based on three arenas of political communication: the traditional political system, the mass-media system, and the civil society public space. Currently in Germany the traditional political system prevails and funds research about representative oriented eParticipation activities....

We compare six definitions of the concept of “representative user,” including interpretations based in statistics, grounded theory, political theory and design practice. Each approach has strengths; none is perfect. We hope to engage our colleagues in thinking about when and how we (all) might choose each approach.

The low turnout at the 2001 general election heightened concerns about the state of representative democracy and political participation in the UK. Increasingly, the Internet and other Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been seen as offering a possible means of reinvigorating political organisations and institutions in the UK. Enthusiasts have suggested that such technologies ca...

Structures of tree topology are frequently encountered in nature and in a range of scientific domains. In this paper, a multi-step framework is presented to classify tree topologies introducing the idea of elastic matching of their sequence encodings. Initially, representative sequences of the branching topologies are obtained using node labeling and tree traversal schemes. The similarity betwe...

This article shows that for a single-vote electoral system for a representative body to treat all voters and all parties equally, it must produce results essentially identical to list proportional representation (PR). Democratic theory has often been agnostic concerning representative institutions. Different institutions have been compared in terms of behavioral outcomes rather than axiomatic p...