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"Colomer, Josep Maria"
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How global institutions rule the world
\"Does world government actually exist? Are the current global institutions efficient in making decisions? Can they be compatible with basic democratic principles? This book holds that, indeed, world government does exist. Rulers of the World shows how the world is actually ruled by a few dozen global bureaus, organizations, funds, banks, courts and self-appointed directorates. They use different representation, voting and organizational formulas, yet the variety of arrangements of the global institutions is not an indicator of weak capacity of decision-making or of policy enforcement, but it reflects the extensive scope of their activities and the complexity of the global agenda of issues. With the appropriate institutional design, global government needs to be made compatible with a notion of accountable democratic rule\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Political Institutions
The more complex the political institutions, the more stable and socially efficient the outcomes will be. This book develops an extensive analysis of this relationship. The discussion is theoretical, historical, and comparative. Concepts, questions, and insights are based on social choice theory, while an empirical focus is cast on about 40 countries and a few international organizations from late medieval times to the present. Political institutions are conceived here as the formal rules of the game, especially with respect to the following issues: who can vote, how votes are counted, and what is voted for. Complexity signifies that multiple winners exist, as in plural electorates created by broad voting rights, in multi‐party systems based upon electoral systems of proportional representation, and in frameworks of division of powers between the executive and the legislative or between the central government and noncentral units. The efficiency of outcomes is evaluated for its social utility, which is to say, the aggregation of individuals’ utility that is obtained with the satisfaction of their preferences. This is a book that emphasizes the advantages of median voter's cabinets and presidents, divided government, and federalism. Pluralistic democratic institutions are judged to be better than alternative formulas for their higher capacity of producing socially satisfactory results.
eBook
Ramon Llull: from 'Ars electionis' to social choice theory
Ramon Llull (Majorca c. 1232—1316) is one of the earliest founding fathers of voting theory and social choice theory. The present article places Llull's contributions and discussion in the historical context of elections in the medieval Church and the emergence of majority rule as a new general principle for making enforceable collective decisions in replacement of traditional unanimous requirements. To make the majority principle operational, Llull initially proposed a system of exhaustive binary comparisons that is more efficacious in producing a winner than the Condorcet system, in anticipation to the so called Copeland procedure. In contrast to some previous tentative suggestions, careful reading of Llull's papers demonstrates that he did not propose a rank-order count system, such as those proposed later on by Cusanus and Borda. A new hypothesis is presented to explain Llull's later proposal of an eliminatory system of partial binary comparisons. Some performance of Llull's voting systems is estimated by innovative analysis of results in certain modern sports tournaments.
Journal Article
Equilibrium institutions: the federal-proportional trade-off
Durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas. A quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions, each involves some trade-off between the size of the country, the territorial structure of government and the electoral system. Specifically, the larger the country, the more important is federalism in comparison to proportional representation electoral rules for the durability of democratic institutions. The explanatory power of the model is positively tested on all current durable democratic countries. It is also illustrated with a few both fitting and deviant cases. A relevant implication is that the room for manipulation of the choice of institutions is large, but not unlimited, as the choices for a durable democracy are constrained by bounded trade-offs between the values of major institutional variables.
Journal Article
Is democracy compatible with global institutions?
The salience and relevance of the currently existing global institutions raise the question of their compatibility with some reasonable notion of democracy. I hold that democracy, as a form of government based on social consent, can be operationalized with different institutional formulas, mostly depending on the territorial scale and the degree of conflict of interests of the issues submitted to collective decision-making. Democratic institutional formulas include the people’s assembly in small cities, party elections of representatives in large states, and expert accountable rulers at the global level. Analogously to how democracy was scaled up from the city level to the state level in early modern times, it needs to be scaled up to the global level by the design and adoption of appropriate institutional formulas.
Journal Article
Policy Making in Divided Government: A Pivotal Actors Model with Party Discipline
This article presents a formal model of policy decision-making in an institutional framework of separation of powers in which the main actors are pivotal political parties with voting discipline. The basic model previously developed from pivotal politics theory for the analysis of the United States lawmaking is here modified to account for policy outcomes and institutional performances in other presidential regimes, especially in Latin America. Legislators' party indiscipline at voting and multi-partism appear as favorable conditions to reduce the size of the equilibrium set containing collectively inefficient outcomes, while a two-party system with strong party discipline is most prone to produce 'gridlock', that is, stability of socially inefficient policies. The article provides a framework for analysis which can induce significant revisions of empirical data, especially regarding the effects of situations of (newly defined) unified and divided government, different decision rules, the number of parties and their discipline. These implications should be testable and may inspire future analytical and empirical work.
Journal Article
Exit, Voice, and Hostility in Cuba
Albert Hirschman's categories of 'exit,' 'voice,' and 'loyalty,' which were previously applied to the analysis of emigration and protests in East Germany, are discussed and applied to the case of Cuba. Incentives for different types of action which may be derived from policy decisions regarding migration, as well as information and repression, are placed in the context of the strategic interaction between the United States and Cuban governments. A game-theoretic model of the typical Cold War conflict between the two former German regimes is compared with the US-Cuba interaction regarding migration policy. In spite of some coincidence between the two governments to prefer 'exit,' successive waves of emigration of people from Castro's Cuba to the United States in the period 1959-1995 have induced an increasing degree of cooperation between the two governments over time to close off borders.
Journal Article
