legislative district configurations and fiscal policy in american states in accordance with the median voter theorem the median legislator is decisive in representative democracy if the preferences of the median legislator differ from the preferences of the median voter in the polity fiscal policy choices will predictably diverge from those favored by the median voter this paper seeks to identify the median district and therein the preferences driving the median legislator in american state legislatures using economic characteristics of constituents we find substantial differences between the median district and the statewide median as the income of the median district rises above the median income of the polity government expenditures increase in addition the degree to which income is skewed across legislative districts affects spending for redistribution programs finally we find that direct democracy procedures which allow the statewide median voter to check legislative decisions limit the impact of differences between the district and polity medians

equilibrium in a stock market economy with shareholder voting this paper demonstrates the existence of a shareholders equilibrium for a two period stock market economy in which there may be fewer securities than states of the world there are two allocation mechanisms in the economy firms owners may vote direction restricted majority rule to change firms production plans across states while keeping shareholdings fixed and individuals may trade their shares and stocks of a current production consumption good while keeping firms plans fixed a shareholders equilibrium is a set of firms plans and an allocation of shares and the current good which are stable with respect to both mechanisms copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

electoral equilibria with entry some simulations the objective of this paper is to investigate by means of simulation the impact of third party entry on the spatial separation of candidates specifically we do real time simulations of palfrey s 1984 model of electoral equilibria with entry after relaxing some of its assumptions our finding that the threat of third party entry can induce virtually the same spatial separation of the major party candidates as entry with certainty is both a strong and interesting result

a solution concept for majority rule in dynamic settings we define and explore the notion of a dynamic condorcet winner dcw which extends the notion of a condorcet winner to dynamic settings we show that for every dcw every member of a large class of dynamic majoritarian games has an equivalent equilibrium and that other equilibria are not similarly portable across this class of games existence of dcws is guaranteed when members of the community are sufficiently patient we characterize sustainable and unsustainable outcomes study the effects of changes in the discount factor investigate efficiency properties and explore the potential for achieving renegotiation proof outcomes we apply this solution concept to a standard one dimensional choice problem wherein agents have single peaked preferences as well as to one involving the division of a fixed aggregate payoff

on the mis measurement of legislator ideology and shirking in this paper we show that current statistical measures of legislator s shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested we note that such equilibria do not exist generically and present statistical results showing that cross sectional regressions where legislators voting indices are predicted by district average demograhic and economic data are mis specified we also discuss a weaker equilibrium construct the uncovered set and present statistical evidence showing that differences in voting behavior between senators from the same state are positively related to the heterogeneity of the electorate we argue that current evidence alleged to show shirking by senators is equally consistent with senators who perfectly represent an idiosyncratic constituency that cannot be represented by district average data

multiparty electoral competition in the netherlands and germany a model based on multinomial probit a typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share here we use euro barometer survey data and european elite study data from 1979 for the netherlands and germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response based on multinomial probit estimation for each of these countries we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model the latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics the pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions we use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions we go on to propose a model of internal party decision making based both on pre election electoral estimation and post election coalition bargaining this model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions we argue that maximizing expected vote will not in general be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation

searching for equilibrium positions in a game of political competition with restrictions this paper considers a problem of political economy in which a nash equilibrium study is performed in a proposed game with restrictions where the two major parties in a country vary their position within a politically flexible framework to increase their number of voters the model as presented fits the reality of many countries moreover it avoids the uniqueness of equilibrium positions the problem is stated and solved from a geometric point of view

bureaucratic behavior modeled by reduced rank regression the case of expenditures from the soviet state budget abstract a bureaucratic hierarchy compresses information flowing upward and disaggregates directives passing downward thus making itself amenable to modeling by reduced rank regression applying this technique to the soviet government we find that about eight latent variables are required to characterize the mapping of predetermined variables into a vector of budgetary expenditures the latent variables can be interpreted as targets for expenditures in high priority sectors

voting over income taxation abstract a major problem of the positive theory of income taxation is to explain why statutory income tax schedules in practice are marginal rate progressive while it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of relatively poor voters exceeds that of richer voters in general putting this contention in a voting equilibrium context is not a trivial task we do this here in the context of nonlinear taxation and attempt to provide a formal argument in support of this heuristic claim we first establish the existence of mixed strategy equilibria and identify certain cases in which marginal rate progressive taxes are chosen almost surely by the political parties unfortunately we also find that if the tax policy space is not artificially constrained the support of at least one equilibrium cannot be contained within the set of marginal rate progressive taxes

valence politics and equilibrium in spatial election models spatial models of two party or two candidatecompetition almost never have pure strategy nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension this paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist even in a multidimensional setting we derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist the party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues we consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties incumbency advantages and realigning elections

models and estimation of disequilibrium for centrally planned economies the planned level of output is an important variable in modelling centrally planned economies and the present paper discusses several disequilibrium models in which the plan level is an endogenous variable a key relationship in such a model is the plan adjustment equation which is the counterpart of the usual priceadjustment equation employed in models of free economies seemingly minor differences in assumptions lead to markedly different econometric models the coherency properties of these are studied and several likelihood functions are derived the most complex of the models includes both endogenous plan levels and endogenous prices

the supermajority core of the us senate and the failure to join the league of nations the failure of the united states to join the league of nations is often considered to be an outcome of isolationist influence the supermajority requirement of treaty ratification in the us senate also is blamed for allowing a minority of isolationists to block the will of the majority that supported the treaty to determine the cause of the failure i analyze the senate debate over the treaty using the concepts of the supermajority core and supermajority winset using all 157 votes on the treaty i estimate senatorial positions and the locations of both the status quo and the treaty on the same metric space from this analysis i find that isolationists were not influential enough to block the ratification instead president wilson s unwillingness to compromise is found to have played a critical role in the treaty s defeat the treaty s defeat thus was not an indication of the power of isolationism this study contributes to the growing body of literature that debunks claims about the dominance of isolationism in the interwar period at the same time the paper demonstrates how the core and winset concepts can be useful in answering substantive collective choice questions

nash equilibrium strategies in directional models of two candidate spatial competition the standard approach to two party political competition in a multi dimensional issue space models voters as voting for the alternative that is located closest to their own most preferred location another approach to understanding voter choice is based on preferred direction of change with respect to some specified neutral point e g an origin or status quo point

sophisticated sincerity voting over endogenous agendas the empirical findings on whether or not legislators vote strategically are mixed this is at least partly due to the fact that to establish any hypothesis on strategic voting legislators preferences need to be known and these are typically private data in this note it is shown that under complete information if decision making is by the amendment procedure and if the agenda is set endogenously then sophisticated strategic voting over the resulting agenda is observationally equivalent to sincere voting the voting strategies however are sophisticated this fact has direct implications for empirical work on sophisticated voting

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

common property equality and development the appeal of common property ideas may be traced in large measure to the fact that they seem to embody widely held values of equality on the other hand empirical examination of common property institutions reveals that they can coexist with significant inequality in this paper the relationship between common property and equality is examined it is argued that the role of common property can only be understood in the context of the associated private property institutions common property in agriculture is interpreted as part of a system based on small scale peasant proprietorship of arable land common property institutions provide a method of capturing scale economies and thereby increasing the efficiency of small scale proprietorship in competition with large scale production based on wage labor

majority rule in the absence of a majority what is the meaning of majoritarianism in a judgement aggregation problem when the propositionwise majority view is logically inconsistent we argue that the majoritarian ideal is best embodied by the principle of supermajoritarian efficiency sme it is acceptable to overrule a supermajority in one proposition but only if this allows us to agree with a larger supermajority in some other proposition we show that for certain judgement spaces the sme outcome is generically unique for most spaces however there are a range of sme judgement aggregation rules we show that sme along with separability characterizes the class of additive support rules we then show that the median rule is the unique additive support rule which satisfies reinforcement upper hemicontinuity and a weak regularity condition this can be seen as a judgement aggregation analog of a classic result by young and levenglick

majority rule outcomes and the structure of debate in one issue at a time decision making in many group decision making situations such as faculty hiring decisions outcomes are often arrived at by deciding one issue at a time e g first rank then subfield it is well known that procedures limiting votes to separate orthogonal dimensions always result in a unique outcome at the generalized median the median of each separate issue dimension often however there is conflict within groups over what ought to be the relevant orthogonal dimensions within which choices will be made we show that the way in which debate is structured i e the way in which the dimensions of choice are specified can have important consequences for what outcome gets chosen however we also show that the range of outcomes that could arise from alternative structurings of the decision process is bounded these bounds are expressed relative to the yolk a sphere located centrally in the pareto set whose existence was first noted by tullock 1967 262 and whose properties have recently been developed by mckelvey 1986 and feld et al 1987 we find that in m orthogonal dimensions the feasible outcomes must lie within mathtype mtef 2 1 feaafiart1ev1aaatcvaufebsjuyzl2yd9gzlbvynv2caerbulwbln hiov2dgi1btfmbaexatlxbi9gbaerbd9wdylwzybitldharqqtubsr 4rnchbgeagqivu0je9sqqrpepc0xbbl8f4rqqrffpeea0xe9lq jc9 vqaqpepm0xbba9pwe9q8fs0 yqaqpepae9pg0firpepekkfr0xfr x fr xb9adbaqaaegacigaaiaabeqaamaabaabaagcbawaaoaaaeaaca qgtbaaleqaaaaa 36f8 sqrt text m radii of the center of the yolk

ministerial selection and intraparty organization in the contemporary british parliament preferences we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems specifically promotion is distributed preferentially to members whose own policy preferences are proximate to the uncovered set of all party members preferences our analysis of ministerial appointments in the contemporary british parliament supports this view for both the labour and conservative parties front bench appointments are more sensitive to the collective preferences of backbenchers in each party as measured by the party uncovered set than to the preferences of the parties leaders m odern parliamentary government is at once cabinet government and party government it is cabinet government in that the legislative agenda is set by majority party leaders negotiating in private rather than by members voting on the chamber floor it is party government in that backbenchers generally operate as members of disciplined and programmatic organizations not as free agents these two aspects of parliamentary government are intimately

structure induced equilibria and perfect foresight expectations this paper extends the work on structure induced equilibria by explicitly considering voters expectations the standard assumption of myopic expectations is contrasted with the alternative assumption of perfect foresight expectations in the institutional setting examined perfect foresight means voters know how the outcome on the first issue in a sequence of two issues conditions majority rule outcomes on the second issue if voters act on this knowledge when voting on the first issue then several important results follow first voters may possess multipeaked preferences defined over the first issue with a majority cycle resulting so that there is no equilibrium to the whole sequence of elections second even if cycling does not result the exact location of the equilibrium involves a broader conspiracy than previously thought a conspiracy of not only preferences and institutional structure but also voters expectations as conditioned by that structure

conceptualizing voter choice for directional and discounting models of two candidate spatial competition in terms of shadow candidates in contrast to the traditional modeling of voter choice based on proximity under directional models selection of candidates is based on the direction and or intensity of change from a status quo or neutral point voter choice can also be modeled as representing both approaches e g as a directional model with proximity restraint or alternatively in terms of proximity to discounted positions

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

majority rule and election models abstract this paper surveys the theoretical work that has been done on majority rule and economic models of elections section i provides an overview of the topic section 2 reviews the most important results that have been obtained about majority rule as an abstract collective choice rule section 3 identifies some alternative inferences that can be made from those results section 4 covers some models that include additional features that are present in political institutions where majority rule is used section 5 concentrates on some alternative election models and equilibrium concepts section 6 focuses on election models with abstentions and or candidate uncertainty about voter behaviour section 7 compares and contrasts models where candidates are certain about what the voters choices will be contingent upon about the choices made by the candidates and models where they are uncertain about those choices section 8 closes the survey by identifying some emerging areas of research

polarization politics and property rights links between inequality and growth most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution however empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth the authors analyze the effects of inequality in the broader context of social polarization they argue that social polarization whether rooted in income inequality or in ethnic tension makes large changes in current policies including those guaranteeing the security of contract and property rights more likely under a wide range of institutional arrangements the resulting uncertainties in the policy and contractual environment hinder growth they find strong empirical support for both parts of this argument the policy implications of their argument are quite distinct from those of arguments that inequality reduces growth by increasing pressures for redistribution if redistributive policies per se were to blame for the low growth resulting from inequality governments that seek to mitigate income inequality must inevitably confront a tradeoff between equity and growth if on the other hand the insecurity of property rights slows growth in unequal or otherwise polarized societies governments that commit over the long run to particular redistributive policies incur less risk of slowing economic growth fiscal redistribution that reduces inequality may actually increase growth by reducing the risks of political uncertainty

scattered landholdings in common property systems abstract concepts of common property have received increasing attention in recent years this has been associated with a re evaluation of historical common property institutions such as the medieval commons one of the major problems raised in the process has been the need to explain the phenomenon of scattering of a farmer s landholdings into a number of separate strips an explanation is sought in the need for a smoothly operating collective decision process scattering is seen as a means by which intra group conflict can be minimized other aspects of the problem such as externalities are also examined

do several winning coalitions exist in a state for senators of the same party evidence from an event study we argue that u s senators from the same state and in the same party form different winning coalitions we also develop a theory that stipulates that parties encourage these senators to form very distinct constituency coalitions parties use committee assignments as a carrot to give these senators an incentive to represent different groups in our empirical analysis we find that there are fewer overlapping committee assignments among senators in the same state when they are from the same party we also consider the case of john heinz and arlen specter both pennsylvania republicans when john heinz died in a plane crash political action committees pacs that bought influence from specter but not heinz now had the possibility that the new senator replacing heinz would include them in his resource constituency the resulting competition by the new pennsylvania senator and specter for campaign resources would lower the price these firms had to pay for representation thus improving their expected future earnings

uncovering evidence of conditional party government reassessing majority party influence in congress and state legislatures temporary american legislatures our use of a new analytic technique a grid search program for characterizing the uncovered set enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two dimensional version our conclusions are based on the analysis of real world data rather than on arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions our analysis confirms that when legislators preferences are polarized outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party s wishes even if the majority party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process this conclusion notwithstanding our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party s natural advantage agenda setting by the majority party remains a viable and efficacious strategy in the debate over party organizations in the american congress one side e g aldrich and rohde 1998 2001 argues that the majority party can influence the outcome of legislative proceedings through agenda control or the ability to determine which proposals are considered the other side e g krehbiel 1999 2000 argues that agenda control conveys no power and that the majority party s apparent influence

the calculus of consensus democracy rethinking patterns of democracy without veto players we present a theory of comparative political institutions based on the concept of consensus democracy and social choice theory unlike lijphart we argue that consensus democracy is not a special form of democracy characterized by mutual vetoes but rather the simplest form of democracy which we refer to as pr majority rule we construct a typology of political institutions based on differences with this simple model contra tsebelis s veto players approach our theory predicts that pr majority rule should be the most flexible form of democracy we test this with data on overall patterns of government spending and on welfare state reform

issue yield a model of party strategy in multidimensional space parties in pluralist democracies face numerous contentious issues but most models of electoral competition assume a simple often one dimensional structure we develop a new inherently multidimensional model of party strategy in which parties compete by emphasizing policy issues issue emphasis is informed by two distinct goals mobilizing the party s core voters and broadening the support base accommodating these goals dissolves the position valence dichotomy through a focus on policies that unite the party internally while also attracting support from the electorate at large we define issue yield as the capacity of an issue to reconcile these criteria and then operationalize it as a simple index results of multilevel regressions combining population survey data and party manifesto scores from the 2009 european election study demonstrate that issue yield governs party strategy across different political contexts

stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context majority rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a near core outcome more commonly known as the copeland winner this is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space previous research has not tested the copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core lacking a way to calculate where the copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives we provide a straightforward algorithm to find the copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games we also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the copeland winner finally we show a connection between the copeland winner and the shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the modified power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space

cycle avoiding trajectories strategic agendas and the duality of memory and foresight an informal exposition this paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes the set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance it may be dubbed the banks set in recognition of the important paper by banks 1985 that first made use of this set the purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting in addition we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another embodying respectively dmemory and foresight we also show how to develop the idea of a sophisticated agenda one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation

a model of farsighted voting i present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation in such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future the model can be used to characterize both long term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted

community versus market a note on corporate villages we return to the literature on collective villages and reexamine its central arguments in doing so we focus on an institution for allocating land that we call the rule as claimed by its advocates the rule secures land allocations that result in outcomes differing from those that would be achieved by markets the outcomes are not constrained to be efficient but the economic costs paid fail to secure the attainment of guarantees of subsistence greater equality or a greater sense of community resulting from the elimination of envy however in the face of high levels of risk the form of collective property rights embodied in the rule may create what we call communities of mis fortune in which no one can envy others gains or losses resulting from the random shocks of nature

social choice and electoral competition in the general spatial model this paper extends the theory of the core the uncovered set and the related undominated set to a general set of alternatives and an arbitrary measure space of voters we investigate the properties of social preferences generated by simple games we extend results on generic emptiness of the core we prove the general nonemptiness of the uncovered and undominated sets and we prove the upper hemicontinuity of these correspondences when the voters preferences are such that the core is nonempty and externally stable finally we give conditions under which the undominated set is lower hemicontinuous

towards a theory of bicameralism the neglected contributions of the calculus of consent in the calculus of consent 1962 235 buchanan and tullock assert 1 ceteris paribus while a coalition controlling less than a majority of voters may control in either chamber the greater the difference in the bases of representation in the two houses the less likely is any given coalition of voters to control a majority of the seats in both chambers 2 the potential of cross chamber logrolls on issues of unequal intensity increases the likelihood that a minority may effectively control policy making we link these ideas to social theory approaches to bicameralism and for the empirical study of legislatures

an experimental study of the efficiency of unanimity rule and majority rule scholars traditionally claim that unanimity rule is more capable of producing pareto optimal outcomes than majority rule dougherty and edward public choice 151 3 655 678 2012 make the opposite claim assuming proposals are either random sincere or strategic we test these competing hypotheses in a two dimensional framework using laboratory experiments our primary results suggest 1 majority rule enters the pareto set more quickly than unanimity rule 2 majority rule leaves the pareto set at the same rate as unanimity rule and 3 majority rule is more likely to select a pareto optimal outcome than unanimity rule at the end of the game

common property in agricultural production the determination of the property rights structure in agriculture and particularly the role of common property may be viewed as a problem in industrial organization the analysis will focus on the determination of the efficient property rights structure in a multi output technology characterized by economies of scale and scope but also including outputs for which technology is essentially linear given an appropriate analysis of transactions costs common property may be shown to be an efficient alternative to systems based purely on small scale or large scale private property

egalitarianism subsistence provision and work incentives in china s agricultural collectives abstract collective agriculture in china failed because its reward system was too egalitarian to provide sufficient work incentives to the peasants a popular view attributes egalitarianism to the difficulties of monitoring work effort in a team an alternative view presented here argues that a the egalitarian provision of basic foodgrains to peasant households reflected more generally the consumption problem of the peasantry who were impoverished by the state s policy of extracting agriculture and b as a remuneration system time rates better served the work and income sharing purpose than piece rates and therefore better protected households with high dependency ratios egalitarianism survives under the household farming system

formal versus informal legislative bargaining we study how the formality of a bargaining procedure affects its outcome we compare a formal baron ferejohn bargaining procedure to an informal procedure where players make and accept proposals in continuous time both constitute non cooperative games corresponding to the same bargaining problem a three player median voter setting with an external disagreement point this allows us to study formality in the presence and absence of a core and provides a natural explanation for the effects of preference polarization our results show that polarization hurts the median player and that formality matters the median player is significantly better off under informal bargaining

distributive politics and electoral competition abstract within the framework of pure redistribution dividing one unit of a homo geneous good among identical individuals the paper analyses the redistribution that arises from downsian two party electoral competition it appears that the strategic behavior of vote maximizing parties leads them to propose divisions which are not far from the egalitarian one journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d63 d72

the core and the stability of group choice in spatial voting games the core of a voting game is the set of undominated outcomes that is those that once in place cannot be overturned for spatial voting games a core is structurally stable if it remains in existence even if there are small perturbations in the location of voter ideal points while for simple majority rule a core will exist in games with more than one dimension only under extremely restrictive symmetry conditions we show that for certain supramajorities a core must exist we also provide conditions under which it is possible to construct a structurally stable core if there are only a few dimensions our results demonstrate the stability properties of such frequently used rules as two thirds and three fourths we further explore the implications of our results for the nature of political stability by looking at outcomes in experimental spatial voting games and at belgian cabinet formation in the late 1970s

legislator voting and shirking a critical review of the literature we set out to critically review the progress in answering two related questions what determines how legislators vote and how can shirking by legislators be measured in the first category the hypothesis that legislators shirk in order to indulge their personal ideological preferences has led researchers astray the theoretical underpinning is shaky on two counts first legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage second the original two stage procedure used to measure ideological shirking is severely flawed among many other problems the residual measure of shirking implicitly assumes that the median voter is the relevant constituent principal for the legislator agent

centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems this paper investigates how electoral laws affect the position taking incentives of parties and candidates it seeks to extend the finding presented in the classical median voter theorem to a wide class of electoral systems or to show the limits of such extension the factors examined are the district magnitude the electoral formula the number of votes each voter is allowed to cast whether voters can cumulate their votes and whether voters can partially abstain i suggest a crude division of electoral systems into those producing predominantly centripetal incentives and those producing predominantly centrifugal incentives among the factors found to produce centripetal incentives at least in noncumulative systems are the following increases in the number of votes per voter outlawry of partial abstention and decreases in the district magnitude in systems allowing the cumulation of votes matters are a bit different

the mean voter theorem necessary and sufficient conditions for convergent equilibrium formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution this paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence valence can be interpreted as the non policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders the theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence the condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance when the condition fails the low valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre the inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the israel election in 1996 copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

on the nature of equilibria in a downsian model with candidate valence abstract i analyze mixed strategy equilibria in a downsian model with two office motivated candidates in which one candidate is endowed with a sufficiently large valence advantage that a voter might prefer this candidate even if the voter strictly prefers the other candidate s policies there is a discrete one dimensional policy space and the preferences of the median voter are uncertain i show that there is a range of moderate policies with no gaps that are optimal for the advantaged candidate there is also a range of liberal policies with no gaps and a corresponding range of conservative policies with no gaps that are optimal actions for the disadvantaged candidate the upper and lower bounds on these ranges of policies vary in predictable ways with the size of the advantaged candidate s advantage

do differences in presidential economic advisers matter using data on members on the council of economic advisors as well as us treasury secretaries and omb directors from 1952 through 2005 i investigate the effect of economic advisors educational and employment backgrounds on the time series performance of several policy variables ivy league advisors appear to raise non defense government spending although the size of the impact differs by president while voter preferences appear to matter for a wider variety of policy variables changes in federal regulation and marginal tax rates the share of ivy league advisors is at least as important as voter preferences in explaining non defense spending

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

voting for pareto optimality a multidimensional analysis we compare unanimity rule and majority rule in their abilities to produce pareto superior and pareto optimal alternatives in fixed number of rounds of voting using a two dimensional spatial voting model with random proposals sincere proposals and strategic proposals our findings show that for random or sincere proposals majority rule is at least as likely to select a pareto optimal outcome as unanimity rule for strategic proposals the subgame perfect equilibrium under unanimity rule is pareto optimal for other k majority rules the outcome is pareto optimal or very close to it for outcomes that are both pareto optimal and pareto superior unanimity rule outperforms majority rule

do supermajority rules limit or enhance majority tyranny evidence from the us states 1960 1997 buchanan and tullock 1962 demonstrates that supermajority rules can reduce tyranny of majority problems in a democracy however recent theoretical work by dixit grossman and gul 2000 postulates that this static analysis of supermajority rules may be inadequate to explain political decisions in a dynamic setting in fact supermajority rules may increase the incidence of majority tyranny because of rotating political representation using data from us state legislatures we examine the effect of supermajority rules on different categories of government expenditures and tax revenues during the latter half of the 20th century we find supermajority rules have little effect on general government expenditures and tax revenues however supermajority rules are associated with lower public welfare transfers which supports the traditional analysis of the fiscal effects of supermajority rules