Josep Colomer

Georgetown University | GU · School of Foreign Service

This article presents, discusses and tests the hypothesis that it is the number of parties what can explain the choice of electoral systems, rather than the other way round. Already existing political parties tend to choose electoral systems that, rather than generate new party systems by themselves, will crystallize, consolidate or reinforce previ...

The classical analytical category of " empire, " as opposed to " state, " " city, " " federation, " and other political forms, can account for a large number of historical and current experiences, including the past United States of America, the European Union, Russia, and China. An " empire " has been conceived, in contrast to a " state, " as a ve...

As democracy is disrupted by globalization, the solution is to globalize democracy. This book explores the causes of the current crisis of democracy and advocates new ways for more representative, effective, and accountable governance in an interdependent world.

In this book, Josep M. Colomer argues, against much conventional wisdom, that political polarization is embedded in the constitutional design. The book puts forth that sustained conflict and institutional gridlock are not mainly questions of character, personalities, or determined by socioeconomic or cultural inequalities. They are, above all, the...

Trump is open to pragmatic compromise, but his incompetence could lead to complete ridicule, as evidenced by his failure to build the border wall during his first term. Additionally, his erratic behavior, such as changing key staff positions frequently, further undermines his leadership and credibility, making it likely that his presidency will be...

La polarización institucional en Estados Unidos Josep M. Colomer La polarización política en Estados Unidos es fundacional y se remonta a la Constitución de 1787. En este país, son las instituciones las que producen la polarización de los ciudadanos, y no al revés. El sistema de elecciones separadas del Congreso legislativo y la Presidencia ejecut...

We present two texts from Roman Empire times that add two early appearances to the stream of the history of Social Choice Theory. One is from the School of Rhetoric of Quintilian (35–96), a contemporary of Pliny the Younger, who developed an early criticism of Plurality rule and, in search of a better method, sketched a choice by pairwise compariso...

Quién se hace cargo del futuro?" Para contestar esta pregunta me basaré parcialmente en mi libro Democracia y globalización (Ed. Anagrama), publicado hace un par de años, que he intentado adecuar y adaptar para la ocasión. Desarrollaré dos partes: la primera, referente a la crisis de la democracia, y la segunda, más cerca de la pregunta inicial, ac...

Many delegates in the Philadelphia Convention used Montesquieu’s work about the British institutional system as a major reference and inspiration for the design of the new United States Constitution. Yet Montesquieu had misunderstood how the British system actually worked. There was no "mixed regime" or "balance of powers" in Britain, as the pendul...

El mayor problema del mundo actual es que existe más globalización económica y comunicativa que globalización política. En los últimos decenios, ha aumentado la escala territorial de eficiencia de muchos temas, lo cual afecta la gobernanza. Las innovaciones tecnológicas son producto de los avances científicos, por lo que resultan imparables e inevi...

The biggest problem in today's world is that there is more economic and communicative globalization than political globalization.

To make the complexity of the current globalized world governable, the processes of decision-making must be simplified. Each of the multiple levels and sectors of government should deal with specific policy issues. None of them should claim jurisdiction over all policy and collective issues.

The Spanish transition to democracy from authoritarian rule in the 1970s was very successful and was taken as a model for other processes of political change by relatively peaceful means. But the expectation that it could give light to an exemplary democracy based on proportional representation and territorial decentralization has not been fulfille...

We propose a simple yet highly insightful index of Position Prominence (PP) to measure the importance of different political offices. PP allows us to compare offices within and between countries as well as between different levels of government. We conduct a preliminary test of the measure by looking at the movement of people between different offi...

Old troubles with remote origins persist in modern Spain. When did Spain screw up? "The Spanish Frustration" argues that, in the long term, Spain missed the opportunity to become a consolidated modern nation-state because it was entangled in imperial adventures for several centuries when it should have been building a solid domestic basis for furth...

The European Union is too interventionist because it is too weak. Without a strong public financial sector in the EU, Europe's political union will never happen. The current paradox is precisely the fact that European public finances are so scant that the EU has to intervene, control and, eventually, bail out the public finances of its Member State...

El reciente juicio político o “impeachment” al Presidente del Perú ha mostrado, una vez más, los riesgos de conflicto e inestabilidad política de los regímenes presidenciales o de separación de poderes. Ha habido recientemente episodios parecidos de destitución del presidente por el congreso en Guatemala, Paraguay y Brasil. Un sencillo análisis con...

La Constitución española de 1978 fue elaborada a través de negociaciones y acuerdos entre élites políticas y adoptó una serie de reglas institucionales que fueron argumentadas, en parte, para proteger a los precarios partidos políticos que existían en el momento fundacional y favorecer su consistencia. De hecho, han consolidado y protegido una part...

Catalonia Today: Where are you going? How can we explain the Catalan bid for independence from Spain? Could the Spanish State accept the Catalan right to self-determination? Will the European Union ever back the split of one of its member-states? Has the autonomy of Catalonia fatally collapsed? Organized by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese...

A partir de un ambiguo compromiso constitucional por la democratización, la descentralización territorial del Estado español se desarrolló con bajos niveles de ins-titucionalización formal y a través de la competencia, los intercambios y las negocia-ciones entre partidos políticos. Los acontecimientos recientes incluyen, por un lado, intentos de re...

The World Bank's report, The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018, gives estimates of wealth for 141 countries. However, the data are given only by countries in alphabetical order, in contrast to other World Bank’s data, including on per capita income, which are routinely published as sorted by values and are widely used and reproduced as rankings of co...

PROLOGO por Josep M. Colomer Hubo democracia en Cuba. Desde que la isla dejó de ser una colonia española en 1898, los cubanos han vivido bajo una variante de protectorado de los Estados Unidos (1901-1933), otra variante de protectorado de la Unión Soviética (1959-1991), varias dictaduras militares (1934-1940 y 1952-1958) y una larga dictadura comun...

Introducción Este libro trata de política, una actividad que ha sido considerada una profesión noble, una ciencia triste o un arte clásico, según distintas perspectivas a su vez controvertidas. En este libro se aborda el estudio de la política desde dos puntos de partida. En primer lugar entendemos que la política es una actividad humana ñmdamental...

Pot haver-hi una democràcia a nivell global, és a dir, de tot el món? Les institucions globals que existeixen actualment, són útils o necessàries? Són o poden ser democràtiques?

This essay reviews the following works: Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O’Donnell. Edited by Daniel Brinks, Marcelo Leiras, and Scott Mainwaring. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 422. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9781421414607 Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies: Essays in Honor of Alfred S...

A long tradition of empirical studies has focused on the consequences of electoral systems on party systems. A number of contributions have turned this relationship upside down by postulating that it is the parties that choose electoral systems and manipulate the rules of elections. The most remote shaping of innovative electoral rules, the choice...

Following an ambiguous constitutional compromise for democratization, the territorial decentralization of the Spanish state developed by means of political party competition, exchanges, and bargaining. Hence, the so-called state of autonomies was characterized as " non-institutional federalism " [Colomer, Josep M. 1998. " The Spanish 'State of Auto...

Logical models and statistical techniques have been used for measuring political and institutional variables, quantifying and explaining the relationships between them, testing theories, and evaluating institutional and policy alternatives. A number of cumulative and complementary findings refer to major institutional features of a political proces...

The electoral college is a medieval relic. Only the U.S. still has one. By Josep M. Colomer The U.S. electoral college is a medieval relic. For several centuries, many political communities in Europe and the Americas used electors chosen from different territorial and political units to select a main magistrate. The United States is the only countr...

The salience and relevance of the currently existing global institutions raise the question of their compatibility with some reasonable notion of democracy. I hold that democracy, as a form of government based on social consent, can be operationalized with different institutional formulas, mostly depending on the territorial scale and the degree of...

Book summary The European Union will remain united, but incomplete, asymmetrical and with undefined borders. The EU, which is much more than a common market, but less than a super-state, can be conceived as an " empire ". With this approach, this essay addresses the current Europe's dilemmas: the vanishing of the states' sovereignty, the core role...

Democratization has been associated with relatively short "transitions" from autocratic regimes. Yet 40 out of 89 currently existing democracies have not been established by means of a direct or short transition from an autocratic regime, but by a process of opening from a long-lasting intermediate or "hybrid" regime, also called "anocracy" or "par...

“In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, Josep Colomer demonstrates that effective institutions of global governance exist. A single world government is neither possible nor desirable. But it is also unnecessary. Instead, a number of effective institutions already carry out essential functions of world governance. Moreover, in spite of worri...

Josep Colomer answers questions about independent movements in Spain Interview by Lluis Amiguet.

I identify some basic institutional features that can make a world Assembly viable in terms of size and degree of complexity. The most potentially satisfactory model is a bicameral assembly formed by: a lower chamber with about 2,000 seats (of which about one fourth would be elected in single-member districts and about three fourths in multimember...

Global governance may not develop efficiently with a single body or regime, such as a “world government”, but it rather requires different institutions and rules to deal with different issues. In this article the variety of institutional formulas used by international organizations is put in relation with the different types of global collective go...

Had the International Monetary Fund (IMG) and the World Bank (WB) been organized as the United Nations agencies they officially are, international monetary instability would probably be higher than it is and there would be more poverty in the current world. monetary, financial, and economic issues require specific types of institutional decision-ma...

The politicians’ dilemma of governance in the current world was accurately formulated by the President of the European Commission, at that time President of the Euro-zone and Prime minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker. Facing international organizations’ advice to implement further economic reforms in Europe, he said: “We all know what to do,...

If all world problems were like the setting of a calendar, the adoption of measurement standards, or the coordination of the post, air travel, or the internet, global government would be simple and effective successful global providers of this type of services have included such disparate fellows as the roman papacy, the French revolutionaries, the...

Besides territorial rotation reviewed in the previous chapter, the other basic alternative to the principle of equal vote for every country is weighted vote. As we have seen, in certain global institutions the rotation of countries is applied within territorial regions that are given weights or quotas of seats. alternatively, more determinant weigh...

The enormous powers that the rulers of the world have accumulated by means of effective global institutions can raise fears of abuses and sheer domination. the basic democratic mechanism that exists at state and local levels for the selection, control, and evaluation of rulers— elections—is widely considered not viable at the global level. This is...

A frequent claim from political pundits, activists, and domestic politicians is that global institutions suffer a “democratic deficit.” One might imagine that such a claim would be based on a comparative democratic surplus or at least a right democratic balance of state-based institutions. However, it is also widely believed that state democracy ex...

Almost everybody in the world could obtain some benefit from free global exchanges of goods, services, and intellectual creations. But trade is not always a harmonious activity, as different groups in different countries are specialized in different products and each can expect to gain competitive commercial advantage regarding other producers. Act...

The principle of equal representation, which might give equal vote to every citizen or equal vote to every state, tends to be troubling at the global level. in many global institutions, the principle of equal representation has been successfully replaced with indirect representation of citizens by means of rotation of countries in global councils a...

The United Nations Organization (UNO), as it currently works, is a global directorate originally shaped as long ago as the mid-twentieth century by the victors of the Second World War. Still now, when the “Big Five”—the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, and France (in order of appearance on stage)—agree on an issue, they can cooperate an...

In the beginning was the idea. politicians, high officials, and other poliCy-makers in both state and global institutions sometimes think that they are designing innovative policy alternatives and finding solutions from scratch. However, as it was pointed out by John Maynard Keynes, many policy ideas that are proudly waved by practitioners have bee...

The Group of Eight (G-8), which includes the eight supposed greatest democracies of the world, has been derided as “the world’s self-appointed steering committee.” in fact, it is much more than an agenda-setting committee, as it involves a “G-8 system” that includes a couple of dozen countries and most international organizations for which the core...

Some historians wonder whether had the united states president woodrow wilson not suffered a stroke at a critical moment, the second world war might have been avoided. actually, the failure of the league of nations—which was wilson’s cherished, unaccomplished creation—in preventing a new global war did not have much to do with the president’s healt...

A favorable condition for good governance is that elected presidents obtain the support of both the median voter and the median legislator. Several electoral rules are evaluated for their results in 111 presidential and 137 congressional elections in 18 Latin American countries during the current democratic periods. The frequency of median voter’s...

Durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas. A quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions, each involves some trade-off between the size of the country, the territorial structure of government and the electoral system. Specifically, the larger the co...

The leaders of the independence in the Americas chose their institutions in a context of high territorial tensions, which moved them to create a potential anchor in the figure of a powerful central executive. Presidential regimes were endogenously shaped as elected monarchies by rulers who were army chiefs. The military-presidential nexus is not ac...

This article discusses, models and quantifies the relationship between the number of parties in government and the degree of policy change or instability. Single-party governments, such as those formed in the United Kingdom for several decades, tend to produce very high levels of policy changes and reversals, whereas multiparty coalition government...

Ramon Llull (Majorca c. 1232–1316) is one of the earliest founding fathers of voting theory and social choice theory. The present article places Llull’s contributions and discussion in the historical context of elections in the medieval Church and the emergence of majority rule as a new general principle for making enforceable collective decisions...

The processes of building the United States of America (US) during the nineteenth century and the European Union (EU) since the mid-twentieth century are among the major claims for the possibility of a vast, ‘imperial’-size political unit based on democratic principles. Although the American Union was designed by the late eighteenth century, the cr...

This paper tries to sketch an informal, but hopefully fruitful dialogue between people in economics and in political science on both substance and analytical tools. The substantial topic is here the likelihood of social conflict or its opposite. By social conflict I understand we are referring, even implicitly, to rebellions, coups, revolutions, an...

Ramon Llull (Majorca c.1232–1316) is one of the earliest founding fathers of voting theory and social choice theory. The present article places Llull’s contributions and discussion in the historical context of elections in the medieval Church and the emergence of majority rule as a new general principle for making enforceable collective decisions i...

"I don't think that anyone has tried to write something like this before. If one wants to give an overview of political science, then this is about the only book there is!"--James A. Robinson, Harvard University "At long last, a text that puts science back into political science; at the same time, it is not an 'American government and politics' tex...

The processes of building the United States of America (USA) during the nineteenth century and the European Union (EU) since mid-twentieth century are among the major claims for the possibility of a vast, ‘imperial’-size political unit based on democratic principles. The crucial period for the consolidation of the USA was between the Civil War and...

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal, alternative to the status-quo. P...

I propose that the classical analytical category of ‘empire’, as opposed to ‘state’ and other political forms, can account for a large number of historical and current experiences, including the United States of America, the European Union, Russia and China. An ‘empire’ can be conceived, in contrast to a ‘state’, as a very large size polity with a...

APSA - CP - Symposium: Concepts that Hinder Understanding... and What to Do About The

This article studies comparative constitutions. It begins with a look at the origins and evolution of constitutional models. The next section concentrates on the constitutional regime typologies. The last section of the article is about constitutional consequences.

The concept of 'State' Hinders Understanding of Comparative Politics

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal, alternative to the status-quo. P...

Aquesta Llei té com a objecte regular les eleccions al Parlament de Catalunya. L’adequada regulació de les eleccions és fonamental per assolir la participació dels ciutadans en les decisions col—lectives, llur representació democràtica i l’efectivitat de l’autogovern. L’Estatut d’Autonomia de Catalunya de 2006 estableix que el Parlament ha de ser e...

This is a clear, comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the institutional regimes of countries in Western Europe written by an outstanding group of political scientists. Completely revised and updated throughout, Comparative European Politics 3rd edition: - Provides a complete coverage of individual countries or group of countries, as well...

Spain has become one of the most decentralised states in Europe. The so-called 'state of autonomies' provides a salient element of political and institutional pluralism in the framework of a rather simple, restrictive democratic regime. Yet, state decentralisation has not derived from an explicit constitutional mandate, but rather from party strate...

The diffusion of power can be both a criterion for good governance and a prudent choice by power-seeking actors. In the current world, the number of small, relatively homogeneous communities increases; the number of democracies also increases; institutional choices tend to favor the division of powers rather than concentration into a single body or...

We take institutions seriously as both a rational response to dilemmas in which agents found themselves and a frame to which later rational agents adapted their behaviour in turn. Medieval corporate bodies knew that they needed choice procedures. Although the social choice advances of ancient Greece and Rome were not rediscovered until the high mid...

El Govern de la Generalitat, amb el vistiplau dels grups parlamentaris, va aprovar la creació d’una Comissió d'experts per a realitzar els treballs previs a la redacció de la Llei Electoral de Catalunya. L’Acord de Govern de 27 de març de 2007 diu que “El Govern ha considerat necessari crear aquesta Comissió abans de la ponència conjunta en el Parl...

In order to have references for discussing mathematical menus in political science, I review the most common types of mathematical formulae used in physics and chemistry, as well as some mathematical advances in economics. Several issues appear relevant: variables should be well defined and measurable; the relationships between variables may be non...