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This paper provides three versions of May's theorem on majority rule, adapted to the one-dimensional model common in formal political modeling applications. The key contribution is that single peakedness of voter preferences allows us to drop May's restrictive positive responsiveness axiom. The simplest statement of the result holds when voter preferences are single peaked and linear (no indifferences), in which case a voting rule satisfies anonymity, neutrality, Pareto, and transitivity of weak social preference if and only if the number of individuals is odd and the rule is majority rule.

This article establishes a folk theorem for a model of repeated elections with adverse selection: when citizens (voters and politicians) are sufficiently patient, arbitrary policy paths through arbitrarily large regions of the policy space can be supported by a refinement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Politicians are policy motivated (so office benefits cannot be used to incentivize policy choices), the policy space is one-dimensional (limiting the dimensionality of the set of utility imputations), and politicians' preferences are private information (so punishments cannot be targeted to a specific type). The equilibrium construction relies critically on differentiability and strict concavity of citizens' utility functions. An extension of the arguments allows policy paths to depend on the office holder's type, subject to incentive compatibility constraints.

An infinite sequence of elections with no term limits is modelled. In each period a challenger with privately known preferences is randomly drawn from the electorate to run against the incumbent, and the winner chooses a policy outcome in a one‐dimensional issue space. One theorem is that there exists an equilibrium in which the median voter is decisive: an incumbent wins re‐election if and only if his most recent policy choice gives the median voter a payoff at least as high as he would expect from a challenger. The equilibrium is symmetric, stationary, and the behavior of voters is consistent with both retrospective and prospective voting. A second theorem is that, in fact, it is the only equilibrium possessing the latter four conditions — decisiveness of the median voter is implied by them.

The purpose of this study is to explore ex-prisoners' perspectives on prison drug treatment in Ireland. Prison drug treatment has increased across Europe over the last 20 years both in availability and modality. However, the delivery of drug treatment services in a prison setting is not without its challenges. The prison population is a multiply disadvantaged group, which experiences a disproportionate level of health inequality and social exclusion. Substance misuse is prevalent for a high proportion of prisoners. This research is based on seven semi-structured qualitative interviews with ex-prisoners who have had experience of prison drug treatment. The perspectives of ex-prisoners add important information to the sparse amount of literature available on prison drug treatment, especially from a user-perspective. The research found that different aspects of prison had a significant impact both on individuals and treatment. These aspects included the following: drugs in prison; prison environment; attitudes; and policies. An interesting feature of the study is the participants' understanding of the many challenges faced by Irish Prison Service. One important finding is the need for more regular and up-to-date review of prison drug treatment. Accountability emerges as the most pressing need for prison drug treatment. While there are structures in place for complaints to be made, these structures are not fulfilling their function due to a lack of confidence in them. This leaves prisoners in a position of even greater vulnerability. In this study, ex-prisoners claim their voice amongst the voices of other actors in the field such as prison staff, medical staff, and politicians.

AbstractWe consider elections with hidden preferences and hidden actions, in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. When politicians are highly office motivated, they respond by choosing high policies to signal that they are above average, and some below-average politicians must randomise between choosing policies near their ideal points and mimicking above-average politicians by choosing high policies. If voter preferences are increasing, then elections deliver positive outcomes; but if voter preferences are single peaked, then politicians overshoot in the first period. Electoral incentives shift to sanctioning, rather than selection, as office motivation becomes large.

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which "outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals" (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.

We propose the solution concept of directional equilibrium for the multidimensional model of voting with general spatial preferences. This concept isolates alternatives that are stable with respect to forces applied by all voters in the directions of their gradients, and it extends a known concept from statistics for Euclidean preferences. We establish connections to the majority core, Pareto optimality, and existence and closed graph, and we provide non-cooperative foundations in terms of a local contest game played by voters.