Judicial venality, i.e., the sales of public positions in the judicial sector, was used extensively in France and in Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Offices were bought because judges received trial fees from litigants. Kings sold them because they needed money, at the cost of losing...

In this paper I show that in a parliamentary democracy, contrary to common wisdom, under a proportional electoral rule governments do not necessarily represent voters' preferences better than under plurality rule. While voters affect the composition of Parliament, decisions are taken by a subset...

This study compares the representativeness of voters in the proportional electoral system with the situation under plurality rule. Representativeness is commonly measured by comparing parties' received votes with their shares of seats in the Parliament; this implies that proportional rule should...

"Rationality" is understood in the empirical sense of cognitive abilities of human brains for solving economic problems, and consequently recognized bounded in individually unequal ways. This is shown to require treating it as a unique scarce resource, used for deciding on its own uses. This...

In 2017, India enacted a new taxation law called the Goods and Services Tax (GST). This law created a GST Council with representatives of the Union government and the Provincial governments. The decision making procedure in the GST Council is specified to be by weighted voting. This work...

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) law (2017) of India, created a GST Council with representatives of the Union government and the Provincial governments. The decision making procedure in this Council is specified to be by weighted voting. We perform a detailed study of such a mechanism using the...

This paper gives an overview of the topic "economic governance". This term is used in economics and neighboring social sciences as a generic term under which usually all activities are subsumed that are conducted by economic policymakers to 'steer' or 'control' the economic system, individual...

This paper gives a theoretical proof for a question of constitutional law namely the principle of the separation of powers (SP). By defining a democratic process to be permissive (P) and separable (S) it proves that SP is a democratic, S & P, outcome.

Suppose paying attention during jury trials is costly, but that jurors do not pool information (as in contemporary Brazil, or ancient Athens). If inattentive jurors are as likely to be wrong as right, I find that small jury panels work better as long as identical jurors behave symmetrically. If...