Power to youth: Designing democracy for long-term well-being

Hans Gersbach and Tobias Kleinschmidt

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2009, vol. 58, issue 2, 158-172

Abstract: Democratic processes may not take the welfare of future generations sufficiently into account and thus may not achieve sustainability. We introduce rejection/support rewards (RSRs) and show that a dual democratic mechanism-RSRs and elections-can achieve sustainability. RSRs stipulate that incumbents who are not re-elected, but obtain the majority support among young voters, receive a particular monetary or non-monetary reward. Such rejection/support rewards induce politicians to undertake long-term beneficial policies, but may invite excessive reward-seeking. We identify optimal RSRs under different informational circumstances.

Keywords: Democracy; Elections; Incentive; contracts; Sustainability; Rejection/support; rewards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165-4896(09)00044-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:58:y:2009:i:2:p:158-172

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier

More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().