The “deliberative development” approach to policy reform has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles without a clear understanding of the requirements for its success. Based on a reading of the deliberative democracy literature, we detail those requirements, finding them to be...

The deliberative-development approach to policy-making has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the requirements necessary for deliberation to have beneficial effects on policy, some of which are detailed in this article, in...

Using public approval for the President of the European Commission as an example, we investigate whether there are economic effects on public support for political authority: (1) when democratic accountability is absent; and (2) when public information about authorities is low. We find that...

This article explores whether Europeans distrust the European Central Bank (ECB) because they dislike its policies or think they cannot control the institution. Distrust of the ECB is a function of individuals believing the bank cannot be counted on to fulfill the duties that Europeans have...

The act/omission distinction is likely to lead to biases and be used as a moral heuristic. However, it is frequently difficult to determine whether this act-omission distinction is responsible for a judgment outside the lab. Furthermore, more encompassing theories of omission bias are needed to...

Prior research on autobiographical memory revealed that students typically report more memories from semester boundaries than from other times. Explanations for these calendar effects were examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, temporal cues were eliminated from the memory cueing task,...

Notes that stimulus repetition usually benefits performance. A notable exception is repetition blindness (RB), in which subjects (Ss) fail to report a repeated stimulus in a rapid serial visual presentation. Theories differ in attributing RB to either perceptual encoding or memory retrieval and...

Several independent lines of research bear on the question of why individuals avoid decisions by postponing them, failing to act, or accepting the status quo. This review relates findings across several different disciplines and uncovers 4 decision avoidance effects that offer insight into this...