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An Economic Theory Of Democracy
''An Economic Theory of Democracy'' is a treatise of economics written by Anthony Downs, published in 1957. The book set forth a model with precise conditions under which economic theory could be applied to non- market political decision-making. It also suggested areas of empirical research that could be tested to confirm the validity of his conclusions in the model. Much of this offshoot research eventually became integrated into public choice theory. Downs' theory abstains from making normative statements about public policy choices and instead focuses on what is rational, given the relevant incentives, for government to do. Contents In chapter eight of the book Downs explains how the concept of ideology is central to his theory. Depending on the ideological distribution of voters in a given political community, electoral outcomes can be stable and peaceful or wildly varied and even result in violent revolution. The likely number of political parties can also be identifi ...
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Economics
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of Agent (economics), economic agents and how economy, economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economy, economies, including individual agents and market (economics), markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and Expenditure, investment expenditure interact; and the factors of production affecting them, such as: Labour (human activity), labour, Capital (economics), capital, Land (economics), land, and Entrepreneurship, enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that impact gloss ...
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Voter
Voting is the process of choosing officials or policies by casting a ballot, a document used by people to formally express their preferences. Republics and representative democracies are governments where the population chooses representatives by voting. The procedure for identifying the winners based on votes varies depending on both the country and the political office. Political scientists call these procedures electoral systems, while mathematicians and economists call them social choice rules. The study of these rules and what makes them good or bad is the subject of a branch of welfare economics known as social choice theory. In smaller organizations, voting can occur in many different ways: formally via ballot to elect others for example within a workplace, to elect members of political associations, or to choose roles for others; or informally with a spoken agreement or a gesture like a raised hand. In larger organizations, like countries, voting is generally confin ...
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1957 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – The Saarland joins West Germany. * January 3 – Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch. * January 5 – South African player Russell Endean becomes the first batsman to be Dismissal (cricket), dismissed for having handled the ball, in Test cricket. * January 9 – British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigns. * January 10 – Harold Macmillan becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. * January 11 – The African Convention is founded in Dakar. * January 14 – Kripalu Maharaj is named fifth Jagadguru (world teacher), after giving seven days of speeches before 500 Hindu scholars. * January 15 – The film ''Throne of Blood'', Akira Kurosawa's reworking of ''Macbeth'', is released in Japan. * January 20 ** Israel withdraws from the Sinai Peninsula (captured from Egypt on October 29, 1956). * January 26 – The Ibirapuera Planetarium (the first in the Southern Hemisphere) is inaugurated in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. F ...
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Mancur Olson
Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr. (; January 22, 1932 – February 19, 1998) was an American economist and political scientist who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most influential contributions were to new institutional economics, and focused on the role played by private property, taxation, public goods, collective action, and contract rights in economic development. Early life and education Olson was born on January 22, 1932, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to a family of Norwegian immigrants. He grew up on a farm near Buxton, North Dakota, next to the state border with Climax, Minnesota. Olson claimed that his given name, Mancur, was common throughout Scandinavian-immigrant communities in North America and was a variation of the Arabic name Mansoor. Olson graduated from North Dakota State University in 1954, and was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford from 1954 to 1956, before earning a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1963. He also served in the ...
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics in the mid-1970s. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas Jr. Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. He introduced a theory w ...
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Equilibrium (systems)
Equilibrium may refer to: Film and television * ''Equilibrium'' (film), a 2002 science fiction film * '' The Story of Three Loves'', also known as ''Equilibrium'', a 1953 romantic anthology film * "Equilibrium" (''seaQuest 2032'') * ''Equilibrium'', short film by Steven Soderbergh, a segment of ''Eros'' * "Equilibrium" (''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine''), Star Trek DS9 Episode 4, Season 3 Music * Equilibrium (band), a folk metal band from Germany * ''Equilibrium'' (Crowbar album), 2000 * ''Equilibrium'' (Erik Mongrain album), 2008 * ''Equilibrium'' (God Forbid album), 2012 * ''Equilibrium'' (Whitecross album), 1995 * ''Equilibrium'' (Matthew Shipp album), 2003 * ''IX Equilibrium'', a 1999 album by Emperor * ''Equilibrium'', an album by Fergie Frederiksen Natural sciences * Chemical equilibrium * Equilibrium chemistry * Equilibrium point of differential equations * Mechanical equilibrium * Thermodynamic equilibrium Social sciences * Cognitive equilibration in psycho ...
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Legislator
A legislator, or lawmaker, is a person who writes and passes laws, especially someone who is a member of a legislature. Legislators are often elected by the people, but they can be appointed, or hereditary. Legislatures may be supra-national (for example, the European Parliament), national, such as the Japanese Diet, sub-national as in provinces, or local. Overview The political theory of the separation of powers requires legislators to be independent individuals from the members of the executive and the judiciary. Certain political systems adhere to this principle, others do not. In the United Kingdom and other countries using the Westminster system, for example, the executive is formed almost exclusively from legislators (members of the parliament), and the executive Cabinet itself has delegated legislative power. In continental European jurisprudence and legal discussion, "the legislator" (') is the abstract entity that has produced the laws. When there is ro ...
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Consensus Decision-making
Consensus decision-making is a group decision-making process in which participants work together to develop proposals for actions that achieve a broad acceptance. #Origin and meaning of term, Consensus is reached when everyone in the group ''assents'' to a decision (or almost everyone; see ''stand aside'') even if some do not fully agree to or support all aspects of it. It differs from simple unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision. Consensus decision-making in a democracy is consensus democracy. Origin and meaning of term The word ''consensus'' is Latin meaning "agreement, accord", derived from ''consentire'' meaning "feel together". A noun, ''consensus'' can represent a generally accepted opinion – "general agreement or concord; harmony", "a majority of opinion" – or the outcome of a consensus decision-making process. This article refers to the process ''and'' the outcome (e.g. "to decide ''by'' consensus" and "''a'' consensus was reache ...
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Representative Democracy
Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy or electoral democracy, is a type of democracy where elected delegates represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy: for example, the United Kingdom (a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy), Germany (a federal parliamentary republic), France (a unitary semi-presidential republic), and the United States (a federal presidential republic). Unlike liberal democracy, a representative democracy may have ''de facto'' multiparty and free and fair elections, but may not have a fully developed rule of law and additional individual and minority rights beyond the electoral sphere. Representative democracy places power in the hands of representatives who are elected by the people. Political parties often become central to this form of democracy if electoral systems require or encourage voters to vote for p ...
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Median
The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “middle" value. The basic feature of the median in describing data compared to the Arithmetic mean, mean (often simply described as the "average") is that it is not Skewness, skewed by a small proportion of extremely large or small values, and therefore provides a better representation of the center. Median income, for example, may be a better way to describe the center of the income distribution because increases in the largest incomes alone have no effect on the median. For this reason, the median is of central importance in robust statistics. Median is a 2-quantile; it is the value that partitions a set into two equal parts. Finite set of numbers The median of a finite list of numbers is the "middle" number, when those numbers are liste ...
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Graphics
Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, and in educational and recreational software. Images that are generated by a computer are called computer graphics. Examples are photographs, drawings, line art, mathematical graphs, line graphs, charts, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images. Graphics often combine text, illustration, and color. Graphic design may consist of the deliberate selection, creation, or arrangement of typography alone, as in a brochure, flyer, poster, web site, or book without any other element. The objective can be clarity or effective communication, association with other cultural elements, or merely the creation of a distinctive style. Graphic ...
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Political Party
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular area's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific political ideology, ideological or policy goals. Political parties have become a major part of the politics of almost every country, as modern party organizations developed and spread around the world over the last few centuries. Although List of countries without political parties, some countries have no political parties, this is extremely rare. Most countries have Multi-party system, several parties while others One-party state, only have one. Parties are important in the politics of autocracies as well as democracies, though usually Democracy, democracies have more political parties than autocracies. Autocracies often have a single party that Government, governs the country, and some political scientists consider competition between two or more parties to ...
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