In this year’s election, the system of majority voting didn’t allow voters to express their opinions adequately. If they had, the choice would have been between Kasich and Sanders.
Two mathematicians explain why majority voting often fails to elect the candidate preferred by the majority and propose an alternative, ‘majority judgment.’
Notions of the ‘right to know’ forced Hillary Clinton to defend her use of a private email account as secretary of state - a far cry from the days when citizens didn’t even know how their representatives voted.
EPA/Andrew Gombert
The idea of the right to know as the ‘lifeblood of democracy’ is a surprisingly modern development. And in an age when transparency is prized, privacy and secrecy can still be justified in many cases.
A paradoxical situation seems to confront today’s political scene and the choices it generates. On the one hand, the market and its particular logic have come to dominate more and more human affairs. Even…