Capitalism is richer,democracy is safer

His recently published Acceptable Risk? Making Decisions in a Toxic Environmentinvestigates the organizational determinants of technological risks. He is presently conducting research on the Valdez oil spill disaster.     

Health insurance in a democracy: Why is it public and why are premiums income related?

Many democracies have public health insurance systems which combine redistribution from the rich to the poor and from the healthy to the sick. This paper shows that such systems can be in the interest of the poor and the rich from a constitutional perspective. Necessary conditions are that insurance markets are incomplete and that income inequality is neither too low nor too high. Then even the rich can prefer a public health insurance system financed by income-dependent contributions compared to a system financed by a flat fee or a private health insurance system.     

Why Muslims like democracy yet have so little of it

This paper explains the observed combination of relatively low levels of democracy and positive attitudes towards it in the Muslim world. It argues that this democracy paradox is understandable from the perspective of the principle of diminishing marginal utility: people value highly that of which they have little. This reasoning implies, however, that surveys like the World Values Surveys (WVS) elicit circumstance-driven marginal preferences rather than culturally determined attitudinal traits. Empirical evidence showing that individuals living in undemocratic societies have much more favorable inclinations towards democracy supports our argument.     

Mathias Kifmann on “health insurance in a democracy: Why is it public and why are premiums income related?”

Many democracies have public health insurance systems that are tax-financed or in which contributions are linked to income. In a recent issue of this journal, Mathias Kifmann provides a model designed to explain this intriguing observation. This comment argues that the suggested explanation is not really convincing.     

民主

以多数人的意志为政权的基础。承认全体公民自由、平等的统治形式和国家形态。 英文民主democracy一词出自古希腊文demokratia，由demos（意为“人民”和“地区”）和kratos（意为“权力”和“统治”）合成，其基本含义就是“人民的权力”、“人民的政权”或“人民进行统治、治理”。     

Carbon democracy

Abstract

States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states. Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced, distributed and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial circulation and political power, the article traces ways in which the concentration and control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down; how connections were engineered in the post-war period between the flow of oil and the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy and violence were transformed in the 1967–74 oil–dollar Middle East crises.     

Why Assessing Estimative Accuracy is Feasible and Desirable

The US Intelligence Community (IC) has been heavily criticized for making inaccurate estimates. Many scholars and officials believe that these criticisms reflect inappropriate generalizations from a handful of cases, thus producing undue cynicism about the IC's capabilities. Yet there is currently no way to evaluate this claim, because the IC does not systematically assess the accuracy of its estimates. Many scholars and practitioners justify this state of affairs by claiming that assessing estimative accuracy would be impossible, unwise, or both. This article shows how those arguments are generally unfounded. Assessing estimative accuracy is feasible and desirable. This would not require altering existing tradecraft and it would address several political and institutional problems that the IC faces today.     

政治民主、经济民主及其相互关系分析

人类历史演进的过程表现为自身权利的无限扩展和实现的过程.经济民主和政治民主正是人类实现其自身权利的重要途径.因此在厘清两者基本概念的基础上,对其交互关系进行分析是十分必要的.     

Negotiation democracy versus consensus democracy: Parallel conclusions and recommendations

Abstract. In spite of a large number of disagreements concerning methodological and classificatory questions between Klaus Armingeon and myself, our substantive conclusions are very similar. Armingeon concludes that all three aspects of his negotiation democracy (consociationalism, corporatism, and counter-majoritarian institutions) result in superior government performance in selected areas – a finding that I interpret as supportive of my similar claims for the executives-parties dimension of consensus democracy (which consists of consociationalism plus corporatism) as well as for the federal-unitary dimension (which is the same as Armingeon's counter-majoritarian institutions). We are therefore also in broad agreement on the advice we can give to democratic constitutional engineers.     

社会主义与民主

民主是社会主义的价值取向之一.本文按照社会主义历史发展的线索,把20世纪社会主义内部关于民主问题的分歧和争论归纳为三个核心问题,即无产阶级专政与民主的关系是什么?如何看待资本主义民主与社会主义民主的关系?民主与社会主义的关系是什么?     

Sustainable local democracy

To identify what is needed to sustain local democracy we need a model of democratic government and an idea of the kind of social and economic context that is supportive of democracy. Local democracy requires a combination of a liberal democratic model of local government and the prerequisites of democratic stability: economic development, equality, political culture and the development of civil society. However, a number of factors, non-local as well as local, may undermine local government and local democracy, especially centralization, economic decisions, external conflicts, dependency on civil servants, the dilution of elected representation, formalistic participation, skewed representation, class conflict and official attitudes. However, democratic local government can contribute to economic development, the reduction of inequality, a democratic political culture and the development of civil society, thereby strengthening local democracy.     

Dangers to democracy

He was a leading critic of the Communist regime in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s. Forced to leave his country, he is now the Western representative of the Polish Independent Committees for Culture, Science, and Education.