This thesis addresses the mechanisms by which groups of agents can track the truth, particularly in political situations. I argue that the mechanisms which allow groups of agents to track the truth operate in two stages: firstly, there are search procedures; and secondly, there are aggregation procedures. Search procedures and aggregation procedures work in concert. The search procedures allow agents to extract information from the environment. At the conclusion of a search procedure the information will be dispersed among different agents in the group. Aggregation procedures, such as majority rule, expert dictatorship and negative reliability unanimity rule, then pool these pieces of information into a social choice. The institutional features of both search procedures and aggregation procedures account for the ability of groups to track the truth and amount to social epistemic mechanisms. Large numbers of agents are crucial for the epistemic capacities of both search procedures and aggregation procedures. This thesis makes two main contributions to the literature on social epistemology and epistemic democracy. Firstly, most current accounts focus on the Condorcet Jury Theorem and its extensions as the relevant epistemic mechanism that can operate in groups of political agents. The introduction of search procedures to epistemic democracy is (mostly) new. Secondly...

This thesis advances our understanding of the effects of foreign aid programmes in the Spanish economy during the 1950s. It does so by concentrating on three aspects. First, it considers the contribution to economic growth of aid-financed goods by relieving input bottlenecks. Results from an input-output analysis downplay the alleged importance of aid in increasing Spanish output by providing raw materials and other inputs. Second, it discusses the extent to which foreign donors influenced Spanish economic policy-making. Based on original archival sources from both recipient and donors, it is argued here that the United States was particularly ineffective at imposing its economic policy agenda. Surprisingly, the best way to increase the likelihood of the adoption of economic policy reform was not to exercise outright leverage but to provide further unconditional aid disbursements. The analysis of the involvement of the International Monetary Fund and Organisation for European Economic Co-operation to underwrite the 1959 Spanish Stabilisation Plan suggests that the multilateral organisations were acutely aware of the overriding importance of a true commitment to the reforms by the local policy-makers. Rather than relying on formal conditionality...

This thesis contributes to the study of the role of information in elections and public policy formation. Its main focus is on information acquisition and voting behaviour. Chapter 1 discusses the motivation of this research and presents a survey of related literature. Chapter 2 focuses on electoral turnout, Chapter 3 on public policy, and Chapter 4 on mass media. Chapter 2 studies the impact of information on electoral turnout. Since incentives to be informed are correlated with other incentives to participate in public life, a model of information acquisition and turnout is introduced to isolate potential instrumental variables and try to establish a causal relation. Results are tested on the 1997 General Election in Britain. It is shown that information, as well as ideology, matters for turnout. It also contributes to explain the systematic correlation of turnout with variables like education and income. Voters' knowledge of candidates and of other political issues is also substantially influenced by mass media. Chapter 3 presents a model that links the distribution of political knowledge with redistributive policies. It argues that voters can have private incentives to be informed about politics and that such incentives are correlated with income. Therefore redistribution will be systematically lower than what the median voter theorem predicts. Moreover...

This thesis consists of five chapters: 1.The Mechanical View, 2.Social Machines, 3.The FCC Auction Machine, 4.Self-Interested Knaves, and 5.Self-Interested but Sympathetic. In the first three chapters, I advance a methodological account of current design and engineering in economics and political science, which I call methodological mechanicism. It is not ontological or literal; it relies on a technological metaphor by describing market and state institutions as machines, and the human mind as consisting of a number of mechanisms. I introduce the Mechanical view on scientific theories as distinct from the Syntactic and the Semantic views. The electromagnetic theories from the nineteenth century are used to illustrate this view as well as the use of minimal and maximal analogies in model-building in normal and revolutionary science. The Mechanical view is extended to the social sciences, particularly to mechanism design theory and institutional design, using the International Monetary Fund, the NHS internal markets and the FCC auction as examples. Their blueprints are evaluated using criteria such as shielding and power for calculating joint effects as well as libertarian, dirigiste, egalitarian and inegalitarian properties; and the holistic and piecemeal engineering they adopt. Experimental parameter variation is introduced as a method complementing design. Any design assumes a particular moral psychology...