title: Democracy, Crises, and Misconceptions creator: Beilharz, Hans-Jörg subject: ddc-330 subject: 330 Economics description: We consider misconceptions about the functioning of the economy as one possible explanation for the emergence of crises in democracies. Furthermore, we study a political process which may lead to successful reform. First of all, we show that voters can make inefficient decisions concerning policy measures because of their insufficient recognition of indirect policy effects. Repeated voting on the basis of such incomplete economic views eventually leads to an economic crisis. Accordingly, the adoption of a correct view may trigger the reversal of a detrimental economic development. We ask whether this could be accomplished by platforms of political parties. Therefore, we analyze a signaling game between a governmental party and voters. We find that extreme reform proposals are particularly credible, and therefore might be the appropriate device for successful reform. date: 2005 type: Dissertation type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis type: NonPeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/6140/1/beilharz_diss.pdf identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00006140 identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-61407 identifier: Beilharz, Hans-Jörg (2005) Democracy, Crises, and Misconceptions. [Dissertation] relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/6140/ rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html language: eng