voter turnout and fiscal policy abstract in this paper we examine whether shocks in voting costs can impact elected representatives quality defined as the capacity to fund projects at the lowest cost using data on french municipalities and local variations in seasonal infections incidence as a shock on voting cost we estimate that higher incidence lowers voter turnout increases subsidies obtained by a municipality decreases harmful financial decisions and increases the municipality s investment in infrastructure we present a model where these predictions would hold in particular for municipalities with a high base level of turnout

pareto improving campaign finance policy this paper argues that campaign finance policy in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing can be pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters the optimistic assumptions are that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on the basis of the information they have seen the argument also assumes that campaign contributions are provided by interest groups and that candidates can offer to provide policy favors to attract higher contributions

the third way and the third sector new labour s economic policy and the social economy this paper reviews the relationship between labour s economic policy and the third sector since 1997 the third sector has received significant government support and has gradually moved from the economic periphery towards the centre such that it is now instrumental in the delivery of a range of government policies it operates alongside both the private and public sectors in delivering employment education health and social care housing and environmental policies the impact of this has been seen in measures of social exclusion poverty the environment social capital as well as gdp and employment future policies should strive to maintain and develop the distinctive capabilities of third sector organisations and the balance between economic social and environmental objectives

consensus building how to persuade a group many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups the paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal adopting a mechanism design approach to communication it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in which members who are brought on board sway the opinion of others the paper unveils the factors such as the extent of congruence among group members and between them and the sponsor and the size and governance of the group that condition the sponsor s ability to maneuver and get his project approved

optimality of the friedman rule in an overlapping generations model with spatial separation recent models with spatial separation and limited communication suggest that the friedman rule may not be optimal this is important in light of the disparity between theory and practice concerning optimal monetary policy we take a close look at these models and show that intergenerational transfers are key to the suboptimality of the friedman rule the friedman rule is a necessary condition for achieving the efficient allocation in equilibrium we also show that the friedman rule is chosen whenever agents can implement mutually beneficial arrangements

an overlapping generations model for monetary policy analysis abstract we integrate an overlapping generations structure into the standard lagos and wright 2005 framework and show that mild inflation can be welfare improving the reason behind this result is that inflation induces young agents to reduce their savings and to increase their consumption which overpowers the utility loss of old agents however the beneficial effect disappears for higher inflation rates such that the optimal inflation rate is one at an intermediate level

compulsory versus voluntary voting an experimental study abstract we report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions if voting is compulsory then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely i e against their private information if voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed then sincere voting in accordance with a voter s private information is always rational while participation may become strategic we find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data moreover voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible the latter finding may serve to rationalize the co existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature

media markets and localism does local news en espanol boost hispanic voter turnout the same time the availability of these products reduces the consumption of local news not only because some consumers prefer national and global content to local information but also because local media products that lose a significant number of consumers are forced to cut qual ity and they may even cease to exist if their audience falls below a critical threshold for these reasons some scholars claim that the rise of integrated media markets undermines local civic engagement robert d putnam 2000 against this backdrop many regulatory agencies including the federal communications commission fcc of the united states seek to protect local media and promote localism for instance by limiting ownership concentration 1 however localism is desirable only if there are in fact positive spillovers from the provision of local content that can help justify the loss of private welfare that integrated media markets would provide in this paper we propose a simple test for the existence of spillovers from local news pro gramming asking if the presence of local television news affects civic behavior the ubiq uity of local news programming across all us metro areas makes it impossible to study its effects on the general population in contrast the availability of spanish language news has increased considerably in recent years providing us with an experiment to study the effect of local news on one important measure of civic engagement voter turnout in local elections in particular we use a differencing approach asking whether hispanic voter turnout is higher in relation to non hispanic turnout in metro areas with spanish language local television news our results indicate that spanish language local television news raises hispanic turnout by more than 4 percentage points local news targeted at hispanics has no effect on the participa tion of non hispanics and as one would expect a significantly smaller effect in years with a presidential race in markets with spanish language news about a quarter of hispanics turn to these programs our estimates thus imply that news in spanish caused about a fifth of spanish language news viewers to start voting interestingly hispanics with access to news in spanish do not increase the time they spend watching news content analyses of spanish language news programs in the united states find that these shows are much more likely to report on

imposing a turnout threshold in referendums we construct a model of a yes no referendum for which the outcome is valid only if the voter turnout rate is greater than a predetermined value with such a turnout threshold three types of equilibria exist in each of which the voters who favor the status quo either go to the polls abstain or use mixed strategies we show that abstaining is more likely to realize the status quo than going to the polls if the threshold is sufficiently high whereas one of the mixed strategy equilibria is least likely to realize the status quo for any level of threshold

heterogeneity redistribution and the friedman rule we study monetary models with nondegenerate stationary distributions of money holdings we find that the friedman rule does not typically maximize ex post social welfare an increase in the rate of growth of the money supply has two effects the standard distortionary or rate of return effect makes money a less desirable asset for all moneyholders a second redistributive effect creates a transfer from one type of agent to the other an increase in the rate of growth of money away from the friedman rule can produce a rate of return effect that dominates the standard effect

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

interest on reserves and sunspot equilibria friedman s proposal reconsidered friedman s 1960 proposal to pay interest on required reserves is considered in a setting that eliminates the indeterminacy of steady state equilibrium discussed by sargent and wallace 1985 in an overlapping generations model where the real rate of interest is technologically determined the payment of interest on reserves results in a determinate pareto optimal steady state equilibrium however interest payments on reserves reduce the steady state welfare of all young agents and for many economies result in the existence of stationary sunspot equilibria this is the case even if such equilibria cannot exist when reserves do not earn interest

monetary policy committees and interest rate setting abstract this paper shows that it is preferable for monetary policy to be conducted by a committee instead of a single policy maker if there is uncertainty about potential output we examine three decision procedures an optimal procedure averaging and voting and find that the latter is the appropriate way to reach decisions if policy makers are not equally skilled finally we demonstrate that efficient decision procedures reduce the persistence of shocks

information aggregation and turnout in proportional representation a laboratory experiment abstract this paper documents a laboratory experiment that analyzes voter participation in common interest proportional representation pr elections comparing this with majority rule consistent with theoretical predictions poorly informed voters in either system abstain from voting thereby shifting weight to those who are better informed a dilution problem makes mistakes especially costly under pr so abstention is higher in pr in contrast with private interest environments and welfare is lower deviations from nash equilibrium predictions can be accommodated by a logit version of quantal response equilibrium qre which allows for voter mistakes

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

why vote for losers voting theory generally concludes that in first past the post elections all votes should go to effective candidates duverger s law and parties should adopt a similar platform median voter theorem however such predictions are not always met in practice we show why divergence and vote dispersion is a natural outcome when a parties are opportunistic b there is uncertainty on the position of the median voter and c elections are repeated voting for losers increases the informational content of elections and may induce mainstream parties to relocate towards extremists as a result to maximize their probability of being elected they do not adopt median

presidential coattails versus the median voter senator selection in us elections abstract we show that senators elected in presidential elections are more ideologically extreme than senators elected in midterm elections this finding is in contrast to the literature suggesting that voters in presidential elections are more ideologically moderate than voters in midterm elections to explain this incongruence we propose a theory of spillover effects in which party labels enable voters to update their beliefs about candidates across contemporaneous races for office unexpected support for a candidate in one race carries marginal candidates from the same party in other races our theory implies that presidential coattails may skew representative government away from the median voter ideal

electoral competition and politician turnover abstract in this paper we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the candidates who run for election we consider a setting with incomplete but symmetric information about the candidates abilities in which electoral campaigns provide voters with additional information about candidates parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election while voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information we first argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability rather than an established good candidate next we establish that the discrepancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate leads to inefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates i e each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters viewpoint

the economics of new labour policy and performance this paper reviews the foundations of new labour s economic policies and the performance of the economy since 1997 it argues that new labour s policies have evolved from thatcherism and that it has largely embraced the tenets of neo liberalism new labour has rejected most aspects of keynesianism and its policies have eschewed the use of active demand management policies but it has been the high levels of demand in particular consumption expenditure that have driven economic growth in the uk and which have ensured that as yet new labour has not faced the problems of dealing with a major economic downturn

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

informational origins of political bias towards critical groups of voters abstract we show how non symmetric politicization can arise in a democracy where voters are distributed across several ex ante symmetric sectors the voters are uncertain about the administrative ability of an elected official they observe the quality of her performance which depends on her ability and her effort the official can allocate her efforts symmetrically or non symmetrically across sectors we show the existence of a non symmetric equilibrium in which the official allocates more effort to administering one critical sector because voters in other sectors rationally respond less to what they observe about the quality of to her administration

the conduct of monetary policy with a shrinking stock of government debt this article considers the consequences for a central bank of a declining stock of government debt the model has a treasury that taxes spends and issues debt a central bank that conducts open market operations in treasury debt and banks that intermediate private savings it suggests that a sufficiently small stock of debt can put an economy on the pareto inferior side of the seigniorage laffer curve implying unnecessarily high inflation if there is also a primary budget deficit equilibrium might not exist discount window lending is a potentially desirable alternative to open market operations especially if the loans are not subsidized

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

a new approach to measure tactical voting evidence from the british elections although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences in this article we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results this approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies we show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election mainly for liberal democratic voters supporting labour moreover our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes we also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting

the case for nil votes voter behavior under asymmetric information in compulsory and voluntary voting systems in an informational voting environment we study the impact of an explicit nil vote option on the ballot when some voters are uninformed and face the swing voters curse we postulate a simple model of strategic voting in which voters entertain heterogeneous thresholds on legitimacy of different voting actions we predict that introducing a nil vote option reduces the number of uninformed and invalid votes increasing expected welfare in both voluntary and compulsory voting we test our model in a pen and paper laboratory experiment and find that the predictions of the model hold in the data for both voting systems

information access and contributions a signaling model of lobbying interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker if their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker s constituency they have costless access and report their private information truthfully if their interests conflict they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to enhance the credibility of their reports the policymaker bases her policy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contributions accompanying these reports the interest groups contribution decisions are plagued by a free rider problem i derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the degree of information aggregation

what price accountability the lucas island model and the politics of monetary policy this paper develops a model of an electoral cycle in inflation and output based on rational inflation expectations and rational retrospective voting voters are heterogeneous and partially informed about aggregate macroeconomic variables they observe precisely how monetary policy stimulates their local economies but their observations of economic activity in other sectors are imprecise voters extract information about the incumbent policymaker s economic competence from cross sectoral spillover effects the incumbent has incentives to generate preelection monetary surprises that stimulate the local economies and generate cross sectoral spillover effects he thereby creates an impression of economic competence and furthers his reelection prospects his policy manipulations are the price of political accountability on a positive note the incumbent is more likely to survive voter scrutiny if he is more competent than the average political candidate

does education improve citizenship evidence from the united states and the united kingdom abstract many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation but none credibly investigate causal links we explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the united states and the united kingdom we find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the united states but not for the united kingdom our us results approach the uk findings when conditioning on registration possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation

electoral thresholds as coordination devices this paper studies one person one vote parliamentary elections where voters care both about the winner of elections and about the composition of the parliament parties enter the parliament if and only if their vote share exceeds some predetermined threshold we show a that there generically exist equilibria in which all parties get a non degenerate vote share and perhaps more importantly b that the size of the electoral threshold acts as a coordination device which crucially affects the win prospects of the condorcet winner party in particular we argue that the win prospects of the condorcet winner party are decreasing in the size of the entry threshold

misconceptions and political outcomes a large literature shows that strategic interactions among actors with conflicting objectives can cause the political process to produce outcomes that lower welfare this paper investigates an alternative explanation of such outcomes if individuals errors in assessing the likely effects of proposed policies are correlated democratic decisionmaking can produce welfare reducing outcomes even in the absence of conflicting objectives under plausible assumptions choosing candidates from among the best informed individuals does not remedy the problems created by such errors but subsidising information and exposing representatives to information after their election do concentration of power has ambiguous effects

information aggregation and strategic abstention in large laboratory elections this paper compares strategic abstention in ad hoc committees versus standing committees ad hoc committees meet only once and then dissolve while standing committees the central finding from this study is that most of the predictions of swing voter curse theory hold up in large elections conducted under controlled laboratory conditions there is significant abstention and significant balancing of partisans by uniformed voters and vote balancing increases with the partisan imbalance elections with no partisan imbalance successfully aggregate information and lead to efficient outcomes consistent with swing voter curse theory this efficiency falls off as partisan imbalance increases but to a significantly greater extent than is predicted in equilibrium it is instructive to compare these findings in large elections with results from the elections reported in battaglini et al 2007 all of the qualitative results are the same concerning the comparative statics balancing and abstention one slight difference is that there was less irrational voting for in the small elections than in the large elections except for the 5 9 m 0 treatment where we observed 20 voting for in the small elections compared with 10 voting for in the large elections these differences were reflected in slightly different efficiency results between small and large elections with the comparisons mirroring the differences in voting for more irrational voting results in lower e ciency we conclude that this scaled up study successfully replicates the initial swing voter s curse experiment reported in battaglini et al 2007 obtaining very similar findings in laboratory committees that are three times the size of those in the original study the one caveat is that we found evidence of a slight increase in irrational nonequilibrium behavior voting for in the larger elections whether this trend would continue as election size is further scaled up is an open question a swing voter s curse environment

economic organization with limited communication this paper presents formal stylized representations of communication accounting systems oral assignment portable object written message and telecommunication systems are considered the environments that allow this formalization are characterized by spatial separation private information and a need to keep track of past actions transfers and shocks in environments that have spatial separation and private information beneficial multilateral arrangements can depend critically on agents ability to communicate to one another values of contemporary shocks and to keep track of histories of past transfers or past announced shocks this paper formalizes this idea and focuses on com

how the electoral college influences campaigns and policy the probability of being florida this paper analyzes how us presidential candidates should allocate resources across states to maximize the probability of winning the election by developing and estimating a probabilistic voting model of political competition under the electoral college system actual campaigns act in close agreement with the model there is a 0 9 correlation between equilibrium and actual presidential campaign visits across states both in 2000 and 2004 the paper shows how presidential candidate attention is affected by the states number of electoral votes forecasted state election outcomes and forecast uncertainty it also analyzes the effects of a direct national popular vote for president

an information rationale for the power of special interests political decisions are often biased in favor of special interests at the expense of the general public and they are frequently inefficient in the sense that the losses incurred by the majority exceed the gains enjoyed by the minority this article explains the bias in terms of information asymmetries and the free rider problem first incumbents increase their reelection prospects by biasing policy toward groups that are better able to monitor their activities second because smaller groups are better able to overcome the free rider problem of costly monitoring policy will be biased in their favor third the effect of asymmetric monitoring on voter welfare is ambiguous the inefficiencies created by the policy bias are offset by a positively valued selection bias incumbents of above average quality are more likely to survive voter scrutiny than are low quality types

advertising effects in presidential elections presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity we use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market level advertising on county level vote shares the results indicate significant positive effects of advertising exposures both instrumental variables and fixed effects alter the ad coefficient advertising elasticities are smaller than are typical for branded goods yet significant enough to shift election outcomes for example if advertising were set to zero and all other factors held constant three states electoral votes would have changed parties in 2000 given the narrow margin of victory in 2000 this shift would have resulted in a different president

patents and cumulative innovation causal evidence from the courts cumulative innovation is central to economic growth do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow on innovation this paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent as measured by later citations we exploit random allocation of judges at the u s court of appeal for the federal circuit to control for the endogeneity of patent invalidation we find that patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in subsequent citations to the focal patent on average but the impact is highly heterogeneous patent rights appear to block follow on innovation only in the technology fields of computers electronics and medical instruments moreover the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers entry of small innovators suggesting that patents may impede the democratization of innovation

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

the economics of career concerns part ii application to missions and accountability of government agencies the paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies officials incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions a lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy the paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives last the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on government bureaucracies 1999 the review of economic studies limited

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

social capital economic growth and regional development iyer s kitson m and toh b 2005 social capital economic growth and regional development regional studies 39 1015 1040 this paper examines the relationships between social capital economic performance and regional development and it stresses the complexity and variability across space of such relationships in contrast to the conventional macroeconomic approach of using indicators of social capital in formal growth models what is required is a more nuanced analysis that evaluates the impact of social capital by region to support this argument the paper examines social capital data from the social capital community benchmark survey 2000 which provides social capital data for more than 24 000 individuals living in 40 communities grouped into nine regions in the usa these data show remarkable diversity of social capital by region multivariate analysis is used to examine the impact of economic and social determinants of social capital and shows that education is important for nearly all ind

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

collective action with uncertain payoffs coordination public signals and punishment dilemmas how can one analyze collective action in protests or revolutions when individuals are uncertain about the relative payoffs of the status quo and revolution we model a calculus of protest of individuals who must either submit to the status quo or support revolt based only on personal information about their payoffs in deciding whether to revolt the citizen must infer both the benefit of successful revolution and the likely actions of other citizens we characterize conditions under which payoff uncertainty overturns conventional wisdom a when a citizen is too willing to revolt he reduces the incentives of others to revolt b less accurate information about the value of revolution can make revolt more likely c public signals from other citizens can reduce the likelihood of revolt d harsher punishment can increase the incidence of punishment and e the incidence of protest can be positively correlated with that of repression

get out the costly vote institutional design for greater participation institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing eects while generating more pieces of information they may decrease the average voter s information quality we examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing participation abstention penalties used in 32 countries around the world and lotteries providing a prize to one randomly chosen participant as proposed on the 2006 arizona ballot we analyze a benchmark rational choice model in which voters vary in their information quality and participation is costly we illustrate that both institutions can improve collective outcomes though lotteries are a more eective instrument asymptotically in an array of lab experiments we empirically assess institutional performance we nd strong evidence for selective participation lab voters participate more when better informed or when institutionally induced however because subjects vote more often than the equilibrium predictions these institutions entail less welfare benets than theory prescribes lotteries do fare better than nes suggesting that they may be a useful alternative to commonly used compulsory

informational limits to democratic public policy the jury theorem yardstick competition and ignorance condorcet s jury theorem provides a possible explanation for the success of democracies relative to other forms of government in its modern form the jury theorem predicts that majority decisions are well informed because they are based upon far more information than possessed by any single individual on the other hand it is evident that democratic politicians and policies are not always as good as the jury theorem implies they should be

demand for slant how abstention shapes voters choice of news media political commentators warn that the fragmentation of the modern media landscape induces voters to withdraw into information cocoons and segregate along ideological lines we show that the option to abstain breaks ideological segregation and generates cross over in news consumption voters with considerable leanings towards a candidate demand information that is less biased towards that candidate than voters who are more centrist this non monotonicity in the demand for slant makes voters ideologies non recoverable from their choice of news media and generates disproportionate demand for media outlets that are centrist or only moderately biased it also implies that polarisation of the electorate may lead to an ideological moderation in news consumption

the option to wait in collective decisions and optimal majority rules abstract we consider a model in which voters over time receive more information about their preferences concerning an irreversible social decision voters can either implement the project in the first period or they can postpone the decision to the second period we analyze the effects of different majority rules individual first period voting behavior may become less conservative under supermajority rules and it is even possible that a project is implemented in the first period under a supermajority rule that would not be implemented under simple majority rule we characterize the optimal majority rule which is a supermajority rule in contrast to individual investment problems society may be better off if the option to postpone the decision did not exist these results are qualitatively robust to natural generalizations of our model

the marginal voter s curse an intuitive explanation for voter abstention is that a voter is uncertain which policy or candidate to vote for and so defers to the rest of the electorate to make the decision in majoritarian elections this has been formally modelled as a strategic response to the swing voter s curse which arises because the rare event of a pivotal vote conveys substantial information in electoral systems other than majority rule however the standard pivotal voting calculus may not apply this paper analyzes one such system namely proportional representation where additional votes continue to push the policy outcome in one direction or the other a new strategic incentive for abstention arises in that case to avoid the marginal voter s curse of pushing the policy outcome in the wrong direction intuitively conditioning on the rare event of a pivotal vote might seem to have a greater impact on behavior but the marginal voter s curse actually presents a larger disincentive for voting than the swing voter s curse this and other predictions of the model are con rmed empirically by a series of laboratory experiments

politics information and the urban bias abstract governments in many ldcs skew public resources towards urban sectors despite a majority of citizens residing in rural areas this paper develops a novel political argument for this urban bias phenomenon in a framework where all voters rural and urban have equal voice but differ in their access to information we argue that this difference is sufficient to give governments an incentive to inefficiently over allocate resources towards urban areas the bias is shown to worsen during adverse economic times leading to increased migration we also examine how voter informativeness affects efficiency of the electoral process in weeding out incompetent governments

some even more unpleasant monetarist arithmetic does monetizing a deficit always result in a higher rate of inflation than bond financing the same deficit t j sargent and n wallace 1981 produced conditions under which the answer was negative unpleasant monetarist arithmetic subsequent authors have challenged the empirical validity of these conditions the authors develop a model similar to that of sargent and wallace and modify it to allow for financial intermediation in the presence of reserve requirements unpleasant arithmetic arises even when the real rate of growth exceeds the real return on bonds moreover under empirically plausible restrictions there exists a unique equilibrium no laffer curve considerations arise

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

pathways to impact and the strategic role of universities new evidence on the breadth and depth of university knowledge exchange in the uk and the factors constraining its development there has been an increasing focus on the strategic role of universities in stimulating innovation and economic growth primarily though the transfer of technology this paper interrogates some of the key aspects of much of the conventional wisdom concerning the transfer of technology and the knowledge exchange process in general it analyses the results from two unique surveys a survey of the uk academic community that generated more than 22 000 responses and a stratified survey of businesses that generated more than 2 500 responses the results suggest that much of the conventional wisdom concerning knowledge exchange involving academia is too narrowly confined or is misinformed first there is an excessive focus in much of the academic and policy discourse on commercialisation and technology transfer there are many knowledge exchange mechanisms used by academics these include commercialisation processes but also many other hidden connections second the focus on the science base ignores that knowledge exchange involves academics from all disciplines third the preoccupation with improving innovation and business performance tends to ignore that knowledge exchange involves partners from the public and third not for profit sectors as well as private sector businesses fourth the main constraints that hinder or limit the knowledge exchange process include a lack of time insufficient internal capability to manage relationships and insufficient information to identify partners problems concerning cultural differences between academics and business and disputes concerning intellectual property are not prominent overall the paper suggests that the notion of an academic ivory tower seems to be a myth as far as the uk is concerned it also suggests that a strategic focus on strengthening connections between academia and the rest of society may generate long term benefits but it will also face challenges and should not distort or divert from the wider foundations of scholarship on which the success of universities are built

common value elections with private information and informative priors theory and experiments abstract we study efficiency and information aggregation in common value elections with contin uous private signals and informative priors we show that small elections are not generally efficient and that there are equilibria where some voters vote against their private signal even if it provides useful information and abstention is allowed this is not the case in large elections where the fraction of voters who vote against their private signal tends to zero in an experiment we then study how informativeness of priors and private signals impact efficiency and information aggregation in small elections we find that there is a substantial amount of voting against the private signal moreover while most experimental elections are efficient we find that it is not generally the case that better private information leads to better decisions

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

strategic voting over strategic proposals prior research on strategic voting has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad it results in destruction of information and hence makes voters worse off we show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous that is independent of the voting rule used we depart from the existing literature by endogenizing the proposal that is put to a vote and establish that under many circumstances unanimity rule makes voters better off moreover in some cases unanimity rule also makes the proposer better off even when he has diametrically opposing preferences in this case unanimity is the pareto dominant voting rule voters prefer unanimity rule because it induces the proposing individual to make a more attractive proposal the proposing individual prefers unanimity rule because the acceptance probabilities for moderate proposals are higher we apply our results to jury trials and debt restructuring

political competition with campaign contributions and informative advertising this paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising policy motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like minded candidates contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates ideologies voters update their beliefs rationally given the information they have received the paper uses the theory to analyze the welfare economics of contribution limits such limits are shown to redistribute welfare from ordinary citizens to members of interest groups jel d72 h40

the evolution of cash transactions some implications for monetary policy this paper considers the implications for monetary policy of a decreasing demand for outside money it finds that even perpetual declines in the demand for base money pose no threat to the traditional methods employed for conducting monetary policy the effects of such reductions in the demand for central bank liabilities however do depend on how monetary policy is conducted four monetary policy regimes are analyzed with a policy of nominal interest rate targeting a secular decline in the volume of cash transactions unambiguously leads to accelerating inflation a policy of maintaining a fixed composition of government liabilities leads to accelerating decelerating inflation if agents have sufficiently high low levels of risk aversion inflation targeting produces falling nominal and real interest rates while a policy of fixing the rate of money growth can easily lead to indeterminacy and endogenous oscillation in interest rates it is argued that a policy of fixing the composition of government liabilities has several advantages if it is known that agents are not too risk averse and that the asymptotic demand for base money is small if this information is not known then interest rate or inflation targeting have an advantage because their consequences are not sensitive to such environmental features

quadratic voting and the public good introduction this introduction to the public choice special issue on quadratic voting qv and the public good provides an opinionated narrative summary of the contents and surveys the broader literature related to qv qv is a voting rule proposed by one of us weyl quadratic vote buying http goo gl 8yeo73 2012 lalley and weyl quadratic voting https papers ssrn com sol3 papers cfm abstract id 2003531 2016 building off earlier work by groves and ledyard econometrica 45 4 783 810 1977a hylland and zeckhauser a mechanism for selecting public goods when preferences must be elicited kennedy school of government discussion paper d 70 1980 where individuals buy as many votes as they wish by paying the square of the votes they buy using some currency an appreciation of the history of research in the field suggests that qv is uniquely practically relevant compared to the other approximately pareto efficient mechanisms economists have proposed for collective decisions on public goods however it faces a number of sociological and ethical concerns regarding how a political system organized around qv would achieve the efficiency aims stated in abstract theory and whether the pure aggregate income maximizing definition of efficiency qv optimizes in its simplest form is desirable the papers in this volume flesh out and formalize these concerns but also provide important responses in two ways by suggesting domains where they are unlikely to be applicable primarily related to survey research of various kinds and versions of qv using an artificial currency that maintain many of qv s benefits while diffusing the most important critiques together this work suggests both a practical path for applying qv in the near term and a series of research questions that would have to be addressed to broaden its application

parties as political intermediaries this paper argues that parties regulate competition among like minded factions so as to enhance reputation building by and voter trust in the politicians standing for a given cause while intra and interparty competition contributes to keeping politicians on their toes unbridled competition may encourage politicians to challenge good platforms and to wage competition along socially suboptimal dimensions for example by privileging form over content the paper builds a simple model of intraparty competition and studies whether various hierarchical or democratic party institutions constitute an efe cient form of party governance the paper shows that intraparty disagreements when they occur hurt the party s position in the general election but that their possibility enhances party image and that parties must be able to avoid behind the scene allocations of portfolios and spoils in order to be credible last it analyzes the impact of political polarization and interparty competition on the choice of party governance

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

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

ignorance and bias in collective decisions we study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule in the experiment as predicted by bayesian equilibrium voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule as opposed to bayesian equilibrium predictions however many committee members vote when uninformed moreover uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information we show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases

abstention ideology and information acquisition we consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity in contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities we show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are we also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity

financial markets in development and the development of financial markets what is the relationship between markets and development it is argued that markets promote growth and that growth in turn encourages the formation of markets two models with endogenous market formation are presented to analyze this issue the first examines the role that financial markets banks and stock markets play in allocating funds to the highest valued use in the economic system it is shown that intermediation will arise under weak conditions the second focuses on the role that markets play in supporting specialization in economic activity the consequences of perfect competition in market formation are highlighted

sincere voting in large elections abstract austen smith and banks 1996 showed that sincere informative voting is not typically an equilibrium of the condorcet voting model when the size of the electorate is large here we reverse their finding by adding a third type of voter one that receives no information in favor of either of the alternatives as well as global uncertainty about the probability that each voter is such a no evidence type the expected number of no evidence type voters can be arbitrarily small nevertheless if the electorate is large enough then each of the two standard condorcet types votes sincerely in every nondegenerate type symmetric equilibrium

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates