We describe Aristotle's mathematical model of weighted voting to explain and implement decision-making in democracies, oligarchies and the mixed states that combine elements of both systems. This model, originally presented in textual form, extends the known history of social choice theory back...

Over the past years, governments have made substantial progress in tobacco control through higher taxes, advertising bans, and public smoking restrictions. Yet, in many advanced economies, smoking rates have stopped falling despite these strong measures. This stagnation suggests that traditional...

We quantify the economic costs in the UK since the Brexit referendum and discern them from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The simultaneous effects of COVID-19 and Brexit are disentangled by evaluating pandemic-related indices relative to economic losses. These losses are measured with a...

This is the first of four articles on the 2025 German federal elections, continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. We begin with the 2023/24 electoral reform, which aimed to curb the uncontrolled growth of the Bundestag caused by political developments not envisaged in...

This is the second out of four papers on the 2025 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 Bundestag elections. We estimate the policy representation ability of the 29 parties that participated in the 2025 elections and of the 2025 Bundestag. For this...

This is the third out four papers on the 2025 German Bundestag elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. In particular, this paper contributes to the discussion of the imperfection of the German 2023/24 Electoral reform in [Tangian 2025a]. We show that policy...

This is the last out of four papers on the 2025 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 Bundestag elections. First, we apply the model from [Tangian 2022b] to construct the 2025 German political spectrum understood as a contiguous party ordering, i.e.,...

In many professional activities humans are getting better generation by generation. This is supposed to be the case, for instance, in sports and in science. Is it true in the arts? In this paper, we consider violinists from the time period in which audio and video recordings became possible....

We study the aggregation of partial orders into a complete ordering, and prove both possibility and impossibility results in this context. First, we show that the standard independence of irrelevant alternatives condition is stronger here since even dictatorial aggregation rules may fail to...

We reappraise the Arrow problem by studying the aggregation of choice functions. We do so in the general framework of judgment aggregation, in which choice functions are naturally representable by specifying, for each menu A and each alternative x in A, whether x is choosable from A, or not. Our...