Thesis supervisor: Balázs Sziklai
Location of studies (in Hungarian): CUB Abbreviation of location of studies: CUB
Description of the research topic:
Designing resistant democratic institutions Democracies are vulnerable to populism. A populist candidate or party can seize control of the government and adopt anti-democratic policies or push the country toward an autocratic system. Can we design democratic institutions that are safe from such an attack? This research focuses on the design of election mechanisms and on the voting power of the representatives. Research methodology involves laboratory experiments, computer simulations as well as theroretical investigations. One example for this type of research is the analysis of voting mechanisms in relation to candidate selection. Under simple majority voting (which is the scheme that most democratic countries adopted) it is much more probable that a Condorcet losing candidate gets elected, than for approval voting or Borda count (Granić, 2017). Although this finding seems intuitive, it is only supported by elections simulated by 7 participants. A large scale laboratory experiment is needed to validate the results.