Search results for "public choice"
showing 4 items of 14 documents
Funding and Propaganda
2018
International audience
Checks and balances and international openness
1991
In the course of a long digression within his famous inspection of Plato’s political philosophy, Karl Popper (1945: 121) argues that “the problem of politics” is the following: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” Popper’s answer is: “the theory of checks and balances”, which he defines as the striving to establish “institutional control of the rulers by balancing their powers against other powers” (122). From that general approach to “the problem of politics”, it follows that democracy is definitely not the rule of the majority, or the sovereignty of the people (a conception that entails various paradoxe…
Public Choices and Decision-making Processes: A Case Study on Sustainable Mobility
2017
The definition of a decision process, which implies the capacity to implement and realize an action involving all the actors interested, is crucial not only for taking adequate political decisions but even mainly for getting a democratic control of the decisions themselves. From a strategic planning point of view, decision process on public issues should be essentially considered as a process of participation, which involves political decision-makers as well as all the administrative organizations which have to realize the decisions taken and citizens and more generally all the stakeholders who will be impacted in a positive or negative way by such decisions. If this is the case, important …
Unpopular policies and the theory of representative democracy
1993
Their platforms reflect concern with enhancing the probability of being elected, but some candidates often, or all candidates occasionally, voluntarily adept stances that reduce that probability. Governments care about their popularity, but sometimes they choose, even before an election, to announce or implement policies that are unpopular. For most people, the phenomenon is no news and is not altogether a unhappy one. Deprecating words such as demagogy or "mob rule" and praising ones such as leadership or statesmanship express a deeply-rooted, widelyshared concern about the possibility that democratic politicians could be too subservient to public opinion.(...)