Employing a political-economics approach, this paper compares small states and unions when the former fail to internalize cross-border externalities of publicly provided goods. It discusses two types of unions: federations with more than one level of government and unitary states. While unitary...

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters’ interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher beneficial public...

We develop a utilitarian framework to assess different decision rules for the European Council of Ministers. The proposals to be decided on are conceptualized as utility vectors and a probability distribution is assumed over the utilities. We first show what decision rules yield the highest...

A major role of (repeated) elections is to create incentives for politicians to act in the interests of voters. This paper considers the disciplining role of elections in countries with either one or two levels of government. Simple retrospective voting strategies which are based on cut-off...

Voters determine their preferences over alternatives based on cases (or arguments) that are raised in the public debate. Each voter is characterized by a matrix, measuring how much support each case lends to each alternative, and her ranking is additive in cases. We show that the majority vote...

Voters' preferences depend on the available information. Following Case-Based Decision Theory, we assume that this information is processed additively. We prove that the collective preferences deduced from the individual ones through majority vote cannot be arbitrary, as soon as a winning quota...

The voting situations at which the Borda rule or the Copeland method can be manipulated by a single voter or a coalition of voters in three-alternative elections are characterized. From these characterizations, we derive (when possible) some analytical representations measuring the vulnerability...

In an election without a Condorcet winner, Dodgson's Method is designed to find the candidate that is "closest" to being a Condorcet winner. In this paper, we show that the winner from Dodgson's Method can occur at any position in the ranking obtained from the Borda Count, the plurality method,...