Search results for "General Studies. Ideologies."
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Elections ordinaires et aménagements constitutionnels
2001
It is widely held that voting in the course of ordinary elections has no significant influence on the constitutional regime or order of a country. At least three powerful arguments are provided in support of that view. First, to claim that, at the same time as they play, players can change the rules is, to say the least, logically puzzling. A second argument refers to the motivations and possibilities of voters : voters, this argument says, are not really interested in constitutional issues and, even if they were, are particularly ill-equiped to understand their implications. The third argument rests on the observation of what obtains in practice : as a matter of fact, constitutional issues…
Vertical competition in a unitary state
2000
The paper is concerned with what Albert Breton, in his theory of competitive federalism has called vertical competition, that is, competition between governments situated at different levels. However its setting is government systems that are unitary rather than federal and structured around three or four levels of government rather than the two often implicitly assumed. The paper tries to show that these characteristics may offer a partial solution to what is perhaps the major problem raised by vertical competition, that is, how winners in a vertical contest get protected against retaliation by the losers when the latter can change the rules (which are not constitutionally entrenched). In …
From equilibrium to chaos and back : methodological evaluation of research of the majority rule
2000
According to the canonical model situated at the heart of the " economic " - or, as the political scientists prefer to call it, rational-choice - theory of (democratic) politics, whenever the matter to be decided raises, or consists of, at least two distinct issues, it is generally impossible to reach a determinate decision by using the majority rule. This problem, referred to as that of disequilibrium, equilibrium instability, or even"chaos", was first underplayed and then deemed ominous to the point of seriously undermining the development prospects of the whole theory. However, more recently, the concern it was the source o f until the 1980s has given way to a state of renewed confidence…