Political advertising ethics has long been dominated by an adherence to the norms of democratic idealism or the highly situational ethics of act utilitarianism. This article proposes an alternative system of political advertising ethics grounded in Brandt’s ideal moral code theory, a form of...

Social media platforms are often credited with empowering grassroots movements in the pursuit of political freedoms. In this paper, we show how social media can also be exploited by political elites to undermine democratic institutions, using the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection as a case...

We present the first systematic analysis of how countries cover each other in the news, using a newly constructed dataset of 55,240 media sources from 176 countries between 2015 and 2022, drawing upon a corpus of 1.4 billion online news articles. We document a pattern of global media bias:...

Air pollution is a major externality whose consequences extend beyond health and productivity. This paper shows that short-run pollution shocks also reduce democratic participation. We combine official, municipality-level election results from 32 national, European, regional, and municipal...

Five years after the bloody military coup and amid a civil war, elections have taken place in Myanmar. They were neither free nor fair, nor was any attempt made to keep up an appearance of even minimum democratic standards. From the outset, the main purpose of the elections was not political...

We provide a rationale for Co-Voting, a decision-making procedure that blends elements of direct and representative democracy to mitigate their main inefficiencies. A randomly selected group of citizens receives voting rights on specific issues, with their collective decision aggregated with...

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...

In an important and much cited study, Pettersson-Lidbom (2008) identifies significant left-wing majority coalition effects on economic outcomes for Swedish local governments, 1974-1994. We first replicate the original study and then extend the original research by applying Pettersson-Lidbom's...

This study examines the dynamics of economic freedom in nine advanced democracies in comparison to China over the 1970-2022 period. Using data from the Fraser Institute and the Manifesto Project Database, we apply a Bayesian time-series methodology to identify three key patterns. First, economic...

Declining civic engagement increasingly strains welfare state institutions. This paper asks whether civic values can be shaped through early educational investments. I study Tax and School, a large-scale program implemented in Italian primary and secondary schools to promote fiscal and civic...

The influence of political stability on financial crime remains a subject of ongoing debate. While stability is often associated with policy continuity, regulatory credibility, and more effective enforcement, an alternative view suggests that unstable democracies may outperform stable...

The European Union operates largely in accordance with the principles of consensus democracy - that is, it seeks to integrate as many parties spanning the political spec­trum of its member states as possible. Amid the recent growth of far-right parties at both the national and European level,...

An intriguing question regarding the relationship between international financial institutions (IFIs) and their Latin American borrowers concerns how and why regime type influences the degree to which the parties are prepared to sign loan agreements. Some scholars highlight a 'democratic...

Regional economic conditions affect livelihoods and the geography of political resentment. Yet, individuals do not equally partake in their region’s economic fortunes, and their perceptions of relative deprivation need not be the same. Grievances are likely to be shaped not only by income...

Nepal is, according to its constitution, among the world's most decentralized countries, with a long and complex tradition of local-level public participation. This paper traces the evolution of Nepal's modern participatory institutions, examining the extent to which they are "induced" by...

The relation between income and democracy remains debated, empirically and theoretically. We propose a broader perspective that goes beyond a uni-directional and monocausal interpretation of the income-democracy nexus by focusing on the neglected role of the transition from economic stagnation...

We investigate how exposure to conflict events shapes individuals' democratic preferences, focusing on support for democracy in general and perceptions of governance within one's own country. We examine how ethnic affiliation - whether an individual belongs to an ethnic group with access to...

Personal relationships have historically been a significant influence in Thai culture, extending into national politics. Ties between members of the Senate and the House of Representatives through various networks are good examples of this observation. Academic research has suggested that such...

This handbook was created within the framework of the Ibero-American Network for Democracy and Artificial Intelligence (REDemocracIA), promoted by the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Democracy at the Florence School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute.The...