From ballots to bullets: an empirical assessment of how national elections influence state uses of political repression

This paper explores the complex relationship between national elections and repression (specifically instances of censorship and political restrictions). I do this while controlling for different contextual effects (various system types), different units of analysis (yearly as well as monthly data), and different types of relationships (lagged as well as immediate). Results indicate that within the yearly aggregated data (N = 1715), elections are only statistically significant in non-democracies, where they effect repressive behavior immediately as well as negatively. Monthly aggregated data (N = 5460), investigating only full democracies, did not reveal any significant relationships between national elections and repression. The degree/level of suffrage restrictions does have an effect however. I conclude with numerous suggestions for future research.     

A multi-winner nested rent-seeking contest

Public Choice - This paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contest in which there may be several winners. We first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then...     

Taking the Law Seriously: On Political Science and the Role of Law in the Process of European Integration

Abstract: The interdisciplinary discourse on European law seems paradoxical. While the editors of this Journal plead for a contextual jurisprudence, political scientists are discovering the importance of law for the integration process. This article explores the merits and problems of both of these shifts¹. On the one hand, it points to implicit assumptions of legal arguments that need to be contrasted with the insights of political sciences into mechanisms of integration processes and the functioning of inter-governmental bargaining - and is thus to be read as an appeal for a 'contextual' jurisprudence. On the other hand, it argues that political science analyses, even when they take the legal dimension of European integration into account, tend to rely upon an instrumentalist view of the legal system which fails to acknowledge the Law's normative logic and discursive power. This theoretically complex argument is exemplified first by an analysis of the tensions between the legal supranationalism of the European Court of Justice and the German Constitutional Court's defence of national constitutionalism, already intensively discussed in this Journal². What the article adds is an extension of the constitutional debate to the economy. It argues that Europe cannot, and should not, be based upon a dichotomous structure of (national) political rights and (European) economic liberties.     

Multidimensional Welfare Aggregation

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition ofArrow's (1951/1963) and Sen's (1970/1979)social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of anindividual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a singlescalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensionalgeneralization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representingindividual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfarefunctions, corresponding to multiple `dimensions' of welfare.I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence ofattractive aggregation procedures depends on certaininformational assumptions, specifically about themeasurability of welfare and its comparability not only acrossindividuals but also across dimensions. I state severalimpossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-typeconditions, insufficient comparability across individualsleads to dictatorship of a single individual, whileinsufficient comparability across dimensions leads todominance of a single dimension. Given sufficientcomparability both across individuals and across dimensions, arange of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantiveimplications of the results.