Wie kaum eine andere technologische Entwicklung trägt das Internet zur Diskussion des gesellschaftlichen Wandels und des Aufbruchs in die Informationsgesellschaft bei. Die letzten Jahrzehnte sind geprägt durch einen starken Medienwandel, der sich als folgenreich für Gesellschaft und Politik...

Not only the public services are able to ensure the effective and efficient use of e-democracy tools. This contribution points out how a party must be structured to function as a neutral service provider for the citizen to set the results of electronic decision-making processes generally...

During the same period in which political decisions became increasingly indistinguishable from decisions about science and technology, science and technology became increasingly incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Maintaining a healthy participatory democracy under such conditions...

This paper analyzes whether political outcomes in local democracies are determinedby the preferences of the median -typically poor- agents or whether they reflect thewishes of the wealthy elites. A model shows that when politicians belonging to differentgroups can form coalitions, the wealthy...

The aim of the paper is to study the relation between the demand for human rights and foreconomic prosperity. It analyzes the demand not, as it is often done in the literature, from the“voice” perspective (political activity), but rather looks at the “exit” perspective...

Beyond its explanatory ambitions as positive science, economics has always had its normativeor applied branch that aims at providing advice about how man’s socio-economic conditionmight be improved. Under the name welfare economics the discipline’s normative branch hasbeen formalized, in the...

All rulers face political competition, both from rivals within their state, andfrom other states to which their subjects may exit. In a simple model, both kinds of competitionare substitutes. Internal competition (democracy) benefits citizens by allowingthem to replace rent-seeking rulers. But...

This paper tests whether education levels di¤er between leadersselected in autocracies and democracies. We use a unique data seton over 1300 world leaders between 1848 and 2004 and exploit withincountry variation from transitions to and from democracy to show thatdemocracies pick more highly...

This paper explores these issues further by reconsidering the link between democracy and health using panel data from a cross-section of countries. The data show a strong (conditional) correlation between life expectancy and democracy. This relationship is strongest for the decades of the 1960s...

The theme of this year's WDR is how to structure institutions to bring about an effectively functioning market economy. There is no question that political institutions play a key role here. In most countries political institutions determine the rules of access to considerable discretionary...