do legislators votes reflect constituency preference a simple way to evaluate the senate u s senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency assuming that such a preference exists both of a state s senators represent the same constituency whenever they split their votes one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference for the sample of defense related votes analyzed above misrepresentation either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference occurred at least 37 percent of the time at least 46 percent on one vote although party differences accounted for more than two thirds of the vote splitting a substantial number of splits remained besides a party difference for a state s senatorial pair is itself problematical

on the efficiency of law a public choice perspective economists have not yet developed a comprehensive theoretical framework incorporating transaction cost economics within a public choice perspective for predicting when there will be an efficiency problem with the law transaction cost reasoning and the rent seeking insight have not been applied systematically in a dynamic institutional context to evaluate when the law will be used to increase or not minimize problems of bounded rationality and opportunism this paper takes a first step at identifying and remedying this deficiency the paper first provides a critical review of relevant theoretical contributions made by becker 1983 1985 posner 1977 priest 1977 rubin 1977 1982 williamson 1975 1985 and others we then show how analysis of the efficiency of law can be synthesized into a broader whole by incorporating transaction cost economics more fully into existing understanding of rentseeking in the political realm thus within the public choice paradigm this paper develops a deeper transaction cost analysis of the efficiency of law building on prior research by the authors crew and rowley 1988a 1988b twight 1983 1988 the paper identifies variables that position legal rules on a spectrum that ranges from those that are predominantly transaction cost

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

a spatial model of legislative voting with perceptual error this paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll call alternatives the model is applied to the senate roll call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators and to examine the role of a liberal conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues in light of the spatial model the paper argues that standard models of roll call voting are not based on a theory of choice and hence that it is difficult to interpret their results alternatives to standard models based on the spatial model are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue coal strip mining

competition in political and economic markets do anomalies play an important role in explaining economic and political choices are political decisions more prone to anomalies irrationality and inefficiency than economic decisions in their integration of results derived from experimental psychology and applied political economy frey and eichenberger 1990 argue that social scientists ought to answer these questions in the affirmative after examining a large body of choice data frey and eichenberger conclude that individuals deviate from the axioms of rational choice in their view the resultant anomalies in individual behavior are unaffected by the aggregation which occurs in the economic marketplace they conclude that political decision making systems correct no larger a proportion of these anomalies than are corrected by the economic market in many institutional settings outlined in their paper decision making systems can be expected to magnify individuals deviations from rational behavior system wide irrational behavior will then produce less frequent trading and a less efficient allocation of resources in this note we examine two components of frey and eichenberger s argument first we reconsider their evidence for irrational behavior in light of a larger body of experimental data which includes choices made in market settings second we argue that competition in political markets will tend to eliminate aggregate anomalies just as it does in economic markets experimental economists often generate data which distinguish between choices individuals indicate in unstructured environments and transactions individuals consummate in markets initial statements regarding choices are often inconsistent with subsequent trading behavior these data indicate that the economist s maximization paradigm based on tenets of rational choice is

endogenizing the median voter public choice goes to school this paper investigates implications of the relationship between voter self selection and the behavior of politicians voter self selection arises in elections because only a portion of eligible voters actually vote it is likely to be more pronounced whenever the implied net benefits from a given electoral choice are disproportionately distributed across voters public choice theory predicts that incumbent officials will manipulate this self election pursuant to the maximization of their personal objective functions this paper provides evidence from school bond elections that politicians influence voter self selection via manipulation of election parameters

toward a public choice theory of monopoly regulation its many dimensions from the perspective of market economics this new thrust was consolidated in 1976 by s peltzman who developed a formal market model in which regulations were viewed as commodities brokered via political markets in response to bids and counter bids by those who stood to gain or to lose from specific regulation outcomes the subsequent contribution by becker 1983 added insights and institutional flesh to the stigler peltzman embryo confirming regulation as an integral component of mainstream market economics an important implication of such contributions especially those from the chicago perspective is that regulation for the most part confirms resource efficiency within market process that political markets in the absence of entry barriers are just as effective as are competitive commodity markets in achieving economic efficiency defined within a comparative institutions framework nowhere is this complacency more apparent than in the conclusion drawn by becker 1983 from a detailed formal analysis of competition among pressure groups for political influence

international institutions and economic sanctions economic sanctions have long occupied the attention of both scholars and policy makers despite the widespread use of sanctions many observers have concluded that the inherent problems associated with imposing sanctions involving multiple senders substantially limit their effectiveness this article reviews two books that analyze the factors that influence cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions these books indicate that international institutions can do much to promote cooperation of this sort however this essay argues that the extent to which international institutions facilitate cooperation among senders of sanctions is likely to depend on the domestic politics of members the type of institution being used for this purpose the nature of the strategy being pursued and the distribution of power among members although these books make significant contributions to our understanding of the factors that promote cooperation among senders of multilateral sanctions they examine the factors that promote the effectiveness of sanctions in only a peripheral manner one potential influence on the effectiveness of sanctions that are organized by an international institution however is the likelihood that the institution will be captured by member states or by interest groups within them additional research that investigates the conditions under which international institutions are likely to be captured and the implications of institutional capture for their performance may therefore prove useful to scholars of international relations and economic statecraft

the recurrent cost problem in the least developed countries the manifestation of the recurrent cost problem at the micro and macro levels is continuing if not worsening least development the article examines the causes of the recurrent cost problem and shows that there is no one simple cause and that responsibility lies in varying degrees between the least developed country governments and their aid partners given the diversity of the possible causes of the recurrent cost problem a broad package of measures including domestic policy changes and international support measures are proposed

industrialisation as a structural determinant of inflation performance in imf stabilisation programmes in less developed countries this article considers the impact of imf stabilisation programmes on inflation performance in ldcs it is argued that the success of a programme in effecting a change in the inflationary process will be influenced by the structural characteristics of the economy and in particular by the stage of industrialisation reached the empirical analysis is based on a sample of ldcs which undertook adjustment programmes supported by fund resources during the 1970s and the results obtained are consistent with the hypothesis of an association between economic structure and inflation performance

environmentalism democracy and pollution control this paper makes two empirical contributions to the literature based on predictions generated by a lobby group model first we investigate how environmental lobby groups affect the determination of environmental policy in rich and developing countries second we explore the interaction between democratic participation and political electoral competition the empirical findings suggest that environmental lobby groups tend to positively affect the stringency of environmental policy moreover political competition tends to raise policy stringency in particular where citizens participation in the democratic process is widespread

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

an explanation for why senators from the same state vote differently so frequently abstract this paper explains why rational well informed voters elect politicians with divergent platforms given well defined constituencies and the costliness of any individual politician creating transfers across all interest groups we show that different politicians from the same district can successfully represent vastly different constituencies and still have each politician producing the support maximizing level of transfers our explanation focuses on how obtaining wealth transfers reduces successful constituencies returns to obtaining additional transfers the evidence strongly rejects alternative explanations based upon the median voter and polarized policy preference approaches

ceo pay and the argument from peer comparison chief executive officers ceos are typically paid great amounts of money in wages and bonuses by commercial companies this is sometimes defended with an argument from peer comparison roughly that our ceo has to be paid in accordance with what other ceos at comparable companies get at first glance this seems like a poor excuse for morally outrageous pay schemes and consequently the argument has been ignored in the previous philosophical literature in contrast however this article provides a partial defence of the argument from peer comparison moreover it is demonstrated how a serious consideration of this argument sheds further light on both incentive and desert based theories of just pay

implications for gaap from an analysis of positive research in accounting based on extant literature we review the positive theory of gaap the theory predicts that gaap s principal focus is on control performance measurement and stewardship and that verifiability and conservatism are critical features of a gaap shaped by market forces we recognize the advantage of using fair values in circumstances where these are based on observable prices in liquid secondary markets but caution against expanding fair values to financial reporting more generally we conclude that rather than converging u s gaap with ifrs competition between the fasb and the iasb would allow gaap to better respond to market forces

towards an understanding of the role of standard setters in standard setting abstract we investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting we examine how certain professional and political characteristics of fasb members and sec commissioners predict the accounting reliability and relevance of proposed standards notably we find fasb members with backgrounds in financial services are more likely to propose standards that decrease reliability and increase relevance partly due to their tendency to propose fair value methods we find opposite results for fasb members affiliated with the democratic party although only when excluding financial services background as an independent variable jackknife procedures show that results are robust to omitting any individual standard setter

incomplete information and ideological explanations of platform divergence one of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates a solution is that candidates are ideological have policy preferences when candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences then platform divergence is theoretically predicted experimental tests of the ideological model are presented it is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences however candidate positions are more convergent on average than the theory predicts suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment

demand for environmental goods evidence from voting patterns on california initiatives this article studies voting behavior on 16 environmental ballot propositions in california in order to characterize the demand for environmental goods the environment is found to be a normal good for people with mean incomes but some environmental goods are inferior for those with high incomes at least when supplied collectively an important price of environmental goods is reduced income in the construction farming forestry and manufacturing industries income and price can explain most of the variation in voting there is little need to introduce preference variables such as political ideology

political shirking and the last term problem evidence for a party administered pension system studies of political shirking have disagreed both over whether the voting behavior of members of congress changes in their last term and over the manner in which last term shirking can be controlled through electoral sorting or through a pension system this paper presents evidence that members of congress who leave the house to run for statewide office do alter their voting behavior between the two sessions of their last house term and that this change includes an ideological shift toward their state party delegations the results suggest that a party driven pension system influences the voting of house members who aspire to higher office but that the pension system is not sufficient to control the last term shirking likely to occur if term limitations were imposed on house members

the statistical analysis of roll call data modern studies of legislative behavior focus upon the relationship among the policy preferences of legislators institutional arrangements and legislative outcomes in spatial models of legislatures policies are represented geometrically as points in a low dimensional euclidean space each legislator has a most preferred policy or ideal point in this space and his or her utility for a policy declines with the distance of the policy from his or her ideal point see davis hinich and ordeshook 1970 for an early survey the primary use of roll call data the recorded votes of deliberative bodies 1 is the estimation of ideal points the appeal and importance of ideal point estimation arises in two ways first ideal point estimates let us describe legislators and legislatures the distribution of ideal points estimates reveals how cleavages between legislators reflect partisan affiliation or region or become more polarized over time e g mccarty poole and rosenthal 2001 roll call data serve similar purposes for interest groups such as americans for democratic action the national taxpayers union and the sierra club to produce ratings of legislators along different policy dimensions second estimates from roll call analysis can be used to test theories of legislative behavior for instance roll call analysis has been used in studies of the u s congress both contemporary and

structural determinants of government budget deficits in developing countries abstract the purpose of this study is to examine the possibility that certain structural factors make some developing countries more likely to incur government budget deficits than others empirical evidence is provided to support the hypotheses that developing countries are likely to have larger government budget deficits the lower their level of economic development the greater the degree of government participation in the economy and the less control exercised over government expenditures less convincing support is given for the hypothesis that revenue instability contributes to government budget deficits an unexpected result of the study is that growth of government revenues is positively related to budget deficits which leads the author to consider the possibility of a please effect

ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent seeking society abstract the paper develops a model of rent seeking in a democratic political context where voting as well as rent seeking matters in this context the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent seeking in a setting where there are both rent seeking and ideological interest groups rent seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues which tends to reduce rent seeking effort in a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts both rent seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase

are stock options grants to ceos of stagnant firms fair and justified prior research has examined several ethical questions related to executive compensation the issues that have received most attention are whether executives pay is fair and justified by performance since more recent studies show that stock options grants constitute the single largest component in executive compensation we examine the relations of these grants to economic determinants and corporate governance for firms in the stagnant stage of their lifecycle we find that on average stock options grants comprise a significant portion of annual ceo compensation 26 4 for stagnant firms we also find that economic corporate governance factors explain less or more of the cross sectional variation in stock options grants for stagnant firms than for growth firms furthermore we document lower pay performance sensitivity i e weaker incentive alignment and no improvement in future firm performance from past stock options grants to ceos of stagnant firms in particular our study provides empirical evidence on some inefficiencies associated with stock options grants to ceos of low potential stagnant firms a long standing concern of business ethics researchers moriarty 2005 nichols and subramaniam 2001 perel 2003 our results also provide support for the corporate governance reforms discussed in matsumura and shin 2005 especially those proposed provisions that curtail the power of ceos in the governance of firms

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

a roll call analysis of the endangered species act amendments public choice economics view legislative process as a transaction in the political market interest groups demand regulation in their favor and lobby lawmakers the lawmakers analyze an assortment of factors and supply legislation to the winning group thereby maximizing their rent from the political market this article examines endangered species act esa amendments from a public choice perspective congressional voting on the esa amendments are assessed using a model based on political incentive and ideology the results show that the lawmakers voting behavior is correlated with their party affiliation ideology and several characteristics of their home state such as number of endangered species proportion of urban population contribution of the natural resources and construction sectors in gross state product and geographical location copyright 2001 oxford university press

executive compensation and principal agent theory the empirical literature on executive compensation generally fails to specify a model of executive pay on which to base and test hypotheses regarding its determinants in contrast this paper analy

a reexamination of the principal agent relationship in politics abstract that senators from the same state often have a large difference in their ideological voting records has proven inconvenient for a literature that has largely relied on a median voter model of elections one exception is palfrey review of economic studies 1984 51 139 156 whose analysis implies the hypothesis that the expected difference in such voting records varies directly with the variance of that state s density function of constituent ideological preferences this paper provides empirical testing consistent with this hypothesis the paper then argues that currently accepted methodology for measuring senatorial shirking is systematically biased towards indicating shirking and provides empirical analysis consistent with this argument

shirking representation and congressional behavior voting on the 1983 amendments to the social security act our central goals at the outset of the paper were three 1 to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable ada score that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate 2 demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters not citizens are the only effective principals in influencing a legislator s voting activities and 3 call into question on both theoretical and empirical grounds the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences in order to evaluate our efforts consider table 5 for a large majority 15 of the 18 relevant runs the ideological variable is significant our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable but this does not indicate shirking as opposed to shirking we may observe ideological voting because 1 it provides brand name capital 2 it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents or 3 it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences further ada scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations for 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables the results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the lasi school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research a breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the house and senate may exist this is important in that most research has focused only on the senate where ideological voting is more prevalent for the house table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant and in fully one half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable knocking ada out of the race as noted earlier the insignificance of ada is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error voter ideology or reputational capital in the senate the results are more evenly split though it is clear that the adjusted for reelection constituency economic interest variable is an improvement ada is significant in all 12 senate regressions and the respective economic variables are significant in 5 or just under half this side by side comparison is provocative though it remains to be tested in detail but our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows first as peltzman 1984 suggested a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces though it does not eliminate the role of the ada variable in the senate second we find evidence that ideological shirking if it exists is much smaller in the house in fact from an institutional perspective it can be argued that economic interests are dominant since house districts are smaller and more homogeneous further the shorter terms for house members may make them more directly accountable to voters and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self

the political economy of state level welfare benefits several new relationships ware indicated by this study first the percentage of adults with a college degree seems to increase welfare spending as noted above this does not necessarily imply that this group is particularly altruistic overall higher afdc levels could be encouraged by a politically productive minority in this group second the percentage black in the population is a better predictor of afdc levels than is the percentage of black afdc recipients that is discrimination against blacks via lower afdc levels is more closely related to the relative size of the black community than the relative size of the black welfare population the results suggest similar discrimination against hispanics in regard to afdc levels the percentage catholic increases afdc levels this does not necessarily imply that catholics have a higher preference for welfare spending than non catholics although this may be the case it may reflect the effect of pressure from catholic interest groups since catholics are the largest religious group in most states they may be better able to support political pressure groups that demand more generous welfare programs union pressures may contribute to higher levels of welfare benefits this is more likely to be the case when unemployment levels are particularly high the relative size of the poverty population is not significantly related to benefit levels the greater cost to taxpayers of increasing benefit levels when the poverty group is large seems to offset the rent seeking efforts of a larger recipient group finally jurisdiction size play a significant role in determining benefit levels with larger states providing more generous benefits in general the results suggest that the influence of rent seeking recipients is not a dominant factor in explaining afdc benefit levels this result is not surprising given the lack of political influence of this particular recipient group it is likely that rent seeking behavior is more important among more politically active groups such as social security recipients and public employees the influence of altruistic motives in affecting aid levels is more subtle than has been suggested in many past studies income was not found to be an important direct determinant of afdc levels the presence of altruistic motives coupled with the ability to effectuate these desires politically seems to be the key to explaining this type of transfer

the ideological component of senate voting different principles or different principals evidence exists on both sides of the question of whether or not legislator specific ideologically driven shirking of constituent interest occurs in this paper we use a well known model of such shirking by senators as our point of departure and add measures of inter state constituent interests the role of campaign contributions and hence the importance of whether or not senators are up for reelection we find some evidence that the model provides a stronger explanation for senators up for reelection than for those who are not and that campaign contributions help determine voting decisions by these legislators finally accounting for inter state constituent interests shirking is not a significant variable in the voting decisions of senators facing reelection thus it appears that the reelection interests of some senators have been mistaken for ideologically driven shirking

beyond the median voter preferences district heterogeneity and political representation despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts however all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter we utilize a unique data set consisting of individual level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences we find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts

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

the influence on congress by the thrift industry abstract the investigation of the influential role of the thrift industry on congress as demonstrated by voting behavior on regulatory policy changes in the eighties is the focus of this study specifically we search for the degree to which the inadequately capitalized component of the thrift industry has captured the house of representatives we examine the influence on congress by the thrift industry using the votes by the house of representatives associated with three different legislative acts the garn st germain act the competitive equality banking act and the financial institutions reform recovery and enforcement act addressing the thrift crisis using a multi chotomous voting model we identify traditional public choice variables that could influence the probability of voting for legislation to capture the variation of the thrifts interests we consider a series of financial variables motivated by the thrift literature of failure prediction models these variables allow us to investigate the influences from the health of the congressional district s thrifts their asset composition characteristics and their reliance on regulatory forbearance

ideology and legislator shirking we argue that legislator shirking voting on the basis of personal ideology rather than the interests of one s constituents can exist but its appearance should conform to the law of demand we test and confirm this theory using votes on defense expenditure bills in the u s senate in 1982 we assume the cost of shirking is relatively higher on narrowly focused bills on specific weapons systems with well defined beneficiaries and relatively lower on general defense expenditure bills with uncertain final distribution of funds we find greater influence for senators ideology in general versus specific bills

self interest altruism and health risk reduction an economic analysis of voting behavior while classical economic theory suggests that the demand for private goods is motivated by economic self interest a growing body of literature suggests that the demand for public goods is driven both by self interest and by altruistic motives the political arena has been a major testing ground for this hypothesis recently a number of studies have tried to empirically isolate and determine the importance of economic versus ideological factors in explaining political choices by representatives kau and rubin 1979 peltzman 1984 kalt and zupan 1984 while congressional voting records have provided a rich source of data for empirical analysis a consensus opinion on the importance of self interest versus altruism has not been reached and remains controversial altruistic motivations have also been

political shirking opponent quality and electoral support several recent papers in the public choice literaturesuggest that legislators shirk or vote in a mannercontrary to constituent interest this paper exploresthe relationship between senatorial shirking andelectoral consequences i model political shirking opponent quality and election outcomes assimultaneous and find significant evidence of arelationship between shirking over the senatorial termand electoral outcomes however i find that voterspunish recent shirking much more than they punishearly term shirking and that senators apparently actconsistently with this relationship

what s wrong with executive compensation i broadly explore the question by examining several common criticisms of ceo pay through both philosophical and empirical lenses while some criticisms appear to be unfounded the analysis shows not only that current compensation practices are problematic both from the standpoint of distributive justice and fairness but also that incentive pay ultimately exacerbates the very agency problem it is purported to solve

coalitions in congressional voting scholars of congress generally agree on four points concerning roll call votes first roll call votes are important to members of congress who care about reelection public policies or both second members have neither sufficient resources nor incentives to acquire process and interpret information about the content and consequences of hundreds of roll call votes considered on the floor each year 1 third insufficient resources and incentives induce members to apply simple decision rules on most votes fourth a voting model should conform to the choices members make under uncertainty 2 the scholars however differ in their specification of the simple rules members adopt familiar specifications include voting decisions rooted in two or three party alignments one or more policy dimensions self interest or ideology and cue taking to varying degrees most command an intuitive appeal and empirical support clearly it is important to evaluate each model based on its a refutable implications or b performance relative to the competing models to test a unidimensional voting model in which members vote based on an imprecise perception of the issues involved 4 this paper adopts the first approach it seeks to refute a pair of comparative static implications of the model two reasons account for the adoption of approach a and not b first to the extent feasible a comparison of the unidimensional model with the competing voting models appears in poole and rosenthal 1985a 1985b second the likelihood ration test considered to be statistically unambiguous requires that competing models generate a nested set of hypotheses see amemiya 1981 unfortunately models of roll call voting with substantially different origins 5 seldom meet this requirement

non binding linked issues referenda analysis and an application non binding referenda petitions are an instrument of direct democracy that allows citizens to signal preferences to politicians outside the electoral cycle this paper provides a simple theoretical and empirical analysis of a particular form of non binding referenda so called linked issues petitions it analyzes the ability of issue linkage to increase participation levels above those of single issue petitions and applies the analytical insights to a controversial referendum held in austria in 2002 that linked issues of transboundary nuclear risk and eastern enlargement of the european union

separating economic from political influences on government decisions abstract the public interest theory is a poor predictor of government decisions relative to interest group theories but a sophisticated public interest theory is a more serious alternative to the former testing the sophisticated theory s predictions is problematic however when public interest is coincident with an interest group s interests a four step method is developed that disentangles public interest and interest group interests by separating economic from political incentives applying the method to the national forest service decisions about wilderness designations indicates whether interest groups were successful in influencing allocation decisions and whether allocation decisions were in the public interest

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

campaign war chests as a barrier to entry in congressional races i introduction issues surrounding the nature and degree of competition in political races have been examined extensively in both the economic and political science literature with most attention focused on the interplay between incumbent and challenger expenditures and electoral success this study extends our understanding of political competition by investigating the impact of an incumbent s war chest on a challenger s decision to mount a campaign 1 for this purpose a war chest is defined as a pool of unencumbered funds accumulated prior to the start of a campaign for elective office 2 sorauf 1988 182 has observed that early receipts even without early spending discourage competition in the primary and attractive challengers in the general election jacobson 1985 26 has argued the most effective strategy for keeping a seat in congress is to avoid serious opposition contemporary critics and reformers of campaign financing practices use such words as frighten intimidate and overpower to describe the role of an incumbent s war chest 3 despite this kind of attention little is actually known about the degree to which war chests diminish entry or reduce the quality of a challenge we present three alternative mechanisms to explain how an incumbent s war chest might deter entry each is based upon a war chest serving as a credible commitment to spend heavily if challenged specifically war chests may either represent excess capacity in financing a campaign or serve as a signal of non observable incumbent characteristics that define a formidable opponent aside from determining whether an incumbent is challenged a war chest might also affect the quality of the challenger for example potential candidates with prior political experience may be unwilling to risk their political capital on a long shot proposition to test for these effects on entry into house races a trichotomous logit model is estimated the choices are uncontested race contested by an ordinary challenger and contested by an experienced challenger although the empirical model is not sufficiently rich to fully distinguish among competing mechanisms the regression results are robust incumbent war chests negatively affect the likelihood of a contested race and the quality of the challenger ii war chests as a barrier to entry becker 1958 106 in comparing economic and political competition observed i n an ideal political democracy competition is free in the sense that no appreciable costs or artificial barriers prevent an individual from running for office in the theory of the firm entry occurs when the expected postentry stream of profits minus the cost of entry is positive analogously an individual will enter a political race when the expected gain from holding office is positive expected gain as defined by baron 1989 is a function of campaign costs the probability of winning and the personal valuation placed by the candidate on the office the first two determinants are partly endogenous depending upon the strategic interplay of the candidates the third aside from its direct effects indirectly affects the first two for example persons hungry for office may be committed to expending greater effort and funds on their campaigns thus increasing their probability of winning similarly as lott has emphasized nontransferable brand name capital would be another factor creating a commitment to aggressively pursue office thereby affecting campaign costs and the probability of winning 4 that some challengers are deterred however need not imply the existence of a political market failure in a contestability sense the lack of a viable challenger on the ballot does not imply a lack of competition good representation will discourage entry similarly the fact that some incumbents will aggressively seek re election frightening away potential challengers is not a sign that competition is lacking

earning through learning in legislatures this inquiry applies gary becker s theoretical notions of general and specific training to the experiential learning that occurs within political institutions in particular the u s congress in the process we isolate economic facets of these legislative experiences that influence the rental value of human capital derived from congressional training we identify four factors that structure legislators post elective wages pre congressional salary year of entry tenure and variables closely related to general training in congress specifically assignment to powerful legislative committees acquisition of broad skill packages investment in expanding skill set proficiencies and to a lesser extent life cycle driven declines in such investments

representation voluntary retirement and shirking in the last term there is disagreement over whether or not representatives shirk previous studies however have used raw interest group scores thatdo not allow for accurate comparisons over time i take advantageof recently published indexed ada scores by groseclose levitt andsnyder 1999 that adjust for temporal differences to test forshirking i compare results from adjusted ada scores to poole androsenthal s nominate scores with a simple straightforward test ofdyadic representation i provide additional evidence that shirkingexists among voluntarily retiring members of congress