Erica Yu

In a representative deliberative democracy, a subset of the population—a committee—is selected to enter into deliberations as well as to make decisions on its behalf. In order to make a system of proportional representation fair to individual voters, the deliberations and decisions of the committee should be as close to deliberations and decisions in the ideal direct democracy where all are able to participate. The Chamberlin-Courant system claims to achieve this with its committee selection rule and voting weight distribution among committee members. After offering a novel streamlined presentation of the Chamberlin-Courant system, I argue that it in fact does not guarantee fairness to the individual voter because it does not take sufficient account of the fact that the satisfactoriness of a representative for an individual may vary per issue. I then propose an alternative—the multidimensional system—that is able to do exactly this. I then connect formal political theory with statistics on the use of voting guides to further motivate the proposed system and show that it is feasible to implement.

Despite studies finding a link between political dynasty prevalence and poverty, empirical evidence in the Philippines shows that the relationship between dynastic concentration and underdevelopment is not the same across regions. We argue that an independent economic elite and high levels of economic activity, typically found in Luzon, affect the poverty and development impact of political dynasties. Local socioeconomic contexts shape the opportunities for predatory behavior among politicians and their relationships with economic elites. Using novel survey data on business-government linkages as well as an extensive dataset on local government leadership in the Philippines spanning 2004 to 2016, we find that political dynasties exacerbate poverty in the resource-rich non-Luzon provinces but not in Luzon where there is a competitive business environment.