Condorcet: Communication/Science/Democracy

Abstract

Condorcet's arguments concerning the dependence of unhindered scientific development on the presence of democratic conditions still sounds relevant today, because they are based on specific and complex considerations concerning the character of the social enterprise of science that articulates problems that still continue. The implicit dispute between Condorcet and Rousseau is also the first great historical example of the conflict between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which accompanies the history of modernity, as an unresolved and indeed irresolvable opposition that belongs to the prehistory of our own confusions and quandaries concerning the relations between culture, science, politics and society.     

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

ABSTRACT

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid's study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.     

Critical election and a new party system: Italy after the 2015 regional election

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical.     

Selecting the Condorcet Winner: single-stage versus multi-stage voting rules

In this paper, I study elections where voters are strategic. I find that the commonly used voting rules, such as Plurality Rule, Majority Rule, Approval Voting, and Single Transferable Vote, do not always select the Condorcet Winner and suffer from multiple equilibria. Multi-stage voting rules offer a way to get around this problem. I introduce two voting rules—Multi-Stage Runoff and the Nominate-Two Rule—that select the Condorcet Winner as the unique equilibrium outcome under mild conditions. I show that a third class of voting rules—Binary Voting Trees—also select the Condorcet Winner.     

Campaigning in an unprecedented election: issue competition in the French 2017 presidential election

Abstract

The 2017 French presidential elections featured an eventful campaign, produced astonishing results, and presented important signs of party system change. This paper analyses the main lines of divide of the demand and the supply side of electoral competition. It analyses the structure of citizens’ preferences, as well as the candidates’ strategic issue opportunities, relying on issue yield theory. To that end, it combines data from an original individual-level survey with information about the candidates’ Twitter messages. It is found that the traditional model of two-dimensional political space, characterised by an economic (left–right) and socio-cultural (integration–demarcation) dimension is largely challenged. On the supply-side, the analysis offers additional evidence for the central role played by the integration–demarcation divide, while showing that the traditional left–right conflict has not fully disappeared.     

Kenya's election: risk of renewed violence

Kenya is preparing to hold its first set of presidential elections since 2007, when ethnic violence prompted by vote-rigging saw between 1,300 and 1,500 people killed and 300,000–600,000 internally displaced. The country has been relatively stable since the last crisis, but its underlying causes have not been fully addressed. Given Kenya's role as a regional economic, transport and diplomatic hub, fresh violence surrounding the 4 March vote could destabilise a fragile region.     

The effect of passive observation methods on Azerbaijan’s 2008 presidential election and 2009 referendum

Election observation is used by domestic and international groups to assess election quality and deter fraud. However, a limited amount of research has assessed its effectiveness. This article adds to the literature by analyzing how a passive monitoring tool affected the process and outcome of voting in two elections in Azerbaijan. The analysis shows that the placement of webcams in polling stations is consistently associated with lower reported turnout and inconsistently associated with lower regime support.     

Endogenous competence and a limit to the Condorcet Jury Theorem

We describe and compare the experiences of academic exclusion of Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock. While aspects of the circumstances differed, a common element was academic exclusion because of challenges to mainstream views. Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock were in due course recognized for the originality and merit of their contributions, although each incurred personal costs because of the exclusion by the academic elites of their time. Our study takes us into the role of ideologically based prejudice in judgment of the worthiness of economic ideas.     

Cross-national election surveys: A French pre-test

In common with scholars in other leading democracies, election researchers of France and the United States rely heavily on a survey research methodology; but their respective national election surveys do not pose many of the same questions, and the dominant research paradigms in each country offer opposing explanatory models of vote choice. Herein are reported preliminary results from a joint effort of US and French researchers, which seeks to include numerous cross-national items in the French National Election Study (for 1995). The following American National Election Study (ANES)-type items receive attention: candidate feeling thermometers, job approval ratings, economic evaluations, seven-point proximity measures on social issues and party identification. Inclusion of these measures in French surveys may allow an important cross-nation extension of voting models thought to be peculiar to one political culture, such as the US.     

The British general election: Synthetic forecasts

Election forecasting work, in Britain and elsewhere, has been confined mainly to traditional approaches – statistical modeling or poll-watching. We import a new approach, which we call synthetic modeling. These models, developed out of forecasting efforts from the American 2012 presidential election, we are currently testing in a comparative European context. In this exercise, we apply the strategy to forecasting British general elections, in particular the upcoming 2015 contest. These synthetic forecasts come from hybrid models blending structural knowledge with contemporary public opinion. We generate ongoing nowcasts, from six months prior, to one month before, Election Day itself.     

Public choice, technology and industrialization in Tanzania: Some paradoxes resolved

No less than in agriculture, industrialization in Africa is difficult to explain on purely economic grounds. This paper applies public choice theory to some of the most paradoxical aspects of technology and industrialization in one African country, Tanzania. Our analysis turns on two assumptions about bureaucratic behavior in that country: The first is that bureaucrats have preferences defined over projects rather than technologies and the second is that, in their capacity as managers of state-owned enterprises, these agents of the state have sought to initiate as many new projects as possible, mainly on the basis of foreign aid. These propositions are shown to be consistent with evidence regarding the growth of the public sector in Tanzania during the 1970s and 1980s.