We discuss a Pareto macro-economy (a) in a closed system with fixed total wealth and (b) in an open system with average mean wealth and compare our results to a similar analysis in a super-open system (c) with unbounded wealth [1]. Wealth condensation takes place in the social phase for closed and open economies, while it occurs in the liberal phase for superopen economies. In the first two cases, the condensation is related to a mechanism known from the balls-in-boxes model, while in the last case to the non-integrable tails of the Pareto distribution. For a closed macro-economy in the social phase, we point to the emergence of a "corruption" phenomenon: a sizeable fraction of the total wealth is always amassed by a single individual.
The electoral law and voter preferences are modeled as a partition-function form game that represents payoffs of electoral coalitions in a multi-party system. Three empirical hypotheses are formulated under the assumption that seat-maximizing parties modify coalitional structures to extract gains from coalescing. The hypotheses say that party systems under stable voter preferences and electoral law tend to stability with respect to splits and coalescing. The partition function is estimated for various coalitional structures for the Polish party system with simulation based on district-level election results and survey data. The estimates show that the Polish party system is split stable. While the opportunities for gains from coalitions on the Right were exhausted between the years of 1993 and 1997, some opportunities for such gains emerged on the Left.
Electoral reforms had profound political consequences for post-communist Poland. The majoritarian system helped to accelerate the fall of communism, while later changes to the electoral law helped the former communists reclaim power. Despite the high stakes and top priority given to electoral design by political players, their efforts at manipulation were hardly rewarded. Although the political parties were ex ante seat-maximizers, they supported the electoral law that ex post would have given them the most seats about as frequently as they supported its closest competitor. The reasons for their miscalculations included a lack of methodological expertise, unexpected shifts in voter preferences, transition-speci®c poll biases and new entrants and coalitions that emerged in the period between the introduction of the new electoral law and elections. No signi®cant differences among the various kinds of parties were found. The results do show that the effectiveness of manipulation increased strongly over time.
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