district magnitude and representation of the majority s preferences evidence from popular and parliamentary votes representatives have more effective incentives to cater to the preferences of the majority of citizens when they are elected in districts with few rather than many seats we investigate this hypothesis empirically by matching swiss members of parliament s voting behavior on legislative proposals with real referendum outcomes on the same issues for the years 1996 to 2008 we thus identify the impact of district magnitude on representatives incentives to adhere to citizens revealed preferences we find systematic statistically significant and economically relevant evidence that individual representatives from districts with few seats vote more often in line with majority preferences

a broken public americans responses to the great recession did americans respond to the recent great recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity an expectation of state of the art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion or did the recession erode support for government activism in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect we find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010 yet both fixed effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy attitude formation what accounts for these surprising developments we consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes analyzing the general social surveys panel our results suggest political partisanship has been central gallup and evaluations of government and society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government o

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theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971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

ideological extremism and electoral design multimember versus single member districts relying on a formal theoretical model gary cox demonstrates that single member districts induce candidates toward policy positions at their constituency median while multimember districts encourage dispersion we test this theoretical implication in the context of the arizona state legislature in which each legislative district chooses one senator and two representatives in single member and multimember contests respectively to do so we generate w nominate estimates of scores based on roll call data from the arizona state legislature that are comparable across chambers senate and house our results are substantially less supportive of the formal theory than are those of prior studies

constituent interest vs legislator ideology the role of political opportunity cost this paper applies the economic model of legislative voting to the automobile industry domestic content vote in the u s house of representatives in 1982 we consider constituent interests for and against the ml and compare the predictive powers of alternative indicators of ideological preferences we also examine the role of political opportunity cost and find that lame ducks were significantly less likely to vote for the bill than were returnees to congress given the political advantages of voting for the bill this is consistent with the view that legislators were influenced by the case for freer trade

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

is the median voter decisive evidence from referenda voting patterns abstract this paper examines whether the voter with the median income is decisive in local spending decisions previous tests have relied on cross sectional data while we make use of a pair of california referenda to estimate a first difference specification the referenda proposed to lower the required vote share for passing local educational bonding initiatives from 67 to 50 and 67 to 55 respectively we find that voters rationally consider future public service decisions when deciding how to vote on voting rules however the empirical evidence strongly suggests that an income percentile below the median is decisive for majority voting rules especially in communities that have a large share of high income voters with attributes that suggest low demand for public services based on a model that explicitly recognizes that each community contains voters with both high and low demand for public school spending we also find that an increase in the share of low demand voters is associated with a lower decisive voter income percentile for the high demand group this two type model implies that our low demand types individuals over age 45 with no children have demands that are 45 lower than other voters collectively these findings are consistent with high income voters with weak preferences for public educational services voting with the poor against increases in public spending on education

ideology and interest groups this paper analyzes the interaction between ideological shirking by legislators and interest group activities in a two stage game between a legislator a challenger and an interest group some comparative statics results are derived in some circumstances campaign contributions decrease as the legislator shirks more they increase with committee power and seniority other things equal an empirical test provides some support for this model the interpretation of those results is made difficult by the methodological problems of ideological shirking measures it is problematic to interpret the standard residual as ideological shirking because it ignores the effect of campaign contributions on legislative voting

a downsian spatial model with party activism a unidimensional spatial model is proposed in this article although its formal structure parallels the spatial model of electoral competition this model examines the decisions of individuals as they choose whether or not to become activists in one of two political parties an individual calculus of participation is developed that is similar to the spatial interpretation of the calculus of voting this calculus is then generalized by examining conditions that may hold for aggregate activism probabilities and the relationship between the two forms is investigated some results are then presented which concern the distributions of activists in the two parties these results in general conform to the existence of party cleavages in which there are two stable equilibrium distributions of activists such that the two parties activists are relatively cohesive internally and relatively distinctive externally finally some suggestions are offered about how this model can be combined with the spatial model of candidate competition to provide a more complete model of elections

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

is polarization bad abstract the adverse effects of political and social polarization on government policies are empirically well documented yet some democracies seem to cope well or even benefit from diversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to show how elections in polarized societies contribute to improve quality of government we consider both polarization among citizens and political actors political polarization where the second is endogenously determined by parties competing to win the support of the majority of voters we find that more heterogeneous societies are more likely to be politically polarized but that the divergence of positions in the political arena helps the electorate control government corruption by raising electoral stakes our results which are consistent with the findings of a substantial empirical literature suggest that when funneled into political competition polarization may help improving quality of government and policies

who is more rational we report on the results of a large scale field experiment that enables us to test for consistency with utility maximizing behavior and to investigate the correlation between individual behavior and demographic and economic characteristics we conducted the experiment with the centerpanel a representative sample of over 2 000 dutch households using procedures similar to those used by choi et al 2007b in a setting with risk we find a high level of consistency in the individual level decisions there is also considerable heterogeneity in subjects consistency scores high income and high education subjects display greater levels of consistency men are more consistent than women and young subjects are more consistent than those who

theoretical foundations and empirical evaluations of partisan fairness in district based democracies we clarify the theoretical foundations of partisan fairness standards for district based democratic electoral systems including essential assumptions and definitions not previously recognized formalized or in some cases even discussed we also offer extensive empirical evidence for assumptions with observable implications we cover partisan symmetry the most commonly accepted fairness standard and other perspectives throughout we follow a fundamental principle of statistical inference too often ignored in this literature defining the quantity of interest separately so its measures can be proven wrong evaluated and improved this enables us to prove which of the many newly proposed fairness measures are statistically appropriate and which are biased limited or not measures of the theoretical quantity they seek to estimate at all because real world redistricting and gerrymandering involve complicated politics with numerous participants and conflicting goals measures biased for partisan fairness sometimes still provide useful descriptions of other aspects of electoral systems

a theory of divided government this paper extends the spatial theory of voting to an institutional structure in which policy choices depend upon not only the executive but also the composition of the legislature voters have incentives to be strategic since policy reflects the outcome of a simultaneous election of the legislature and the executive and since the legislature s impact on policy depends upon relative plurality to analyze equilibrium in this game between voters we apply coalition proof type refinements the model has several testable implications which are consistent with voting behavior in the united states for instance the model predicts a split tickets where some voters vote for one party for president and the other for congress b for some parameter values a divided government with different parties controlling the executive and the majority of the legislature and c the midterm electoral cycle with the party holding the presidency always losing votes in midterm congressional elections

the influence of ideology on congressional voting i introduction the question of what determines congressional voting on legislation has inspired a number of recent empirical analyses all are in agreement that congressional voting on specific bills is correlated with the economic self interest of the representative s constituents and a measure of the representative s ideology as indicated by his broader voting record however the interpretation of the empirical results regarding the influence of ideology has generated more debate than consensus in the current literature kau and rubin 1979 find evidence that a congressman s ideology influences his voting but also find evidence for an alternative but not mutually exclusive hypothesis that a congressman s rating by ideological groups reflects membership in a logrolling coalition kalt and zupan 1984 argue that although a representative s votes are likely to reflect the economic interests and the ideology of his constituents the weak incentive for the constituent principal to monitor the voting behavior of his representative agent gives the representative the opportunity to shirk or vote according to his personal ideology rather than his constituents both nelson and silberberg 1987 and mcarthur and marks 1988 find that the degree of shirking increases as the opportunity cost of shirking decreases in contrast to the above findings peltzman 1984 argues that ideological voting by congressmen need not necessarily reflect shirking but instead may be a way for the representative to cheaply provide his constituents with information about his general position on issues what appears to be shirking allowed by an imperfect principal agent relationship may instead be signaling designed to at least partially overcome the imperfect nature of the relationship lott 1987 extends peltzman s signaling argument by hypothesizing that if politicians are viewed by constituents as search goods rather than experience goods then they will have an incentive to establish a political brand name by establishing a consistent ideological voting record dougan and munger s 1989 approach is similar to lott s they argue that politicians with strongly held views that match those of their constituents make ideal representatives because they are less likely to vote against their constituents interests when pressured by special interest groups an incumbent therefore has an incentive to invest in reputational capital by maintaining the consistency over time of his broader voting record because this reputational capital generates quasi rents in electoral competition with candidates who possess less of it neither lott nor dougan and munger find evidence of shirking in their analyses of congressmen s broader voting records as measured by ideological groups ratings dougan and munger also develop a variable intensity of commitment version of the reputational capital hypothesis this version contends that voters with unambiguously liberal or conservative ideologies may prefer a candidate whose voting record indicates that his views are more extreme than their own such a zealous candidate voters believe is even less likely to be influenced by special interest groups a congressman serving an unambiguously liberal or conservative constituency therefore has an incentive to establish and maintain an extremely ideological overall voting record in contrast a congressman serving a constituency with centrist ideological preferences has an incentive to establish an overall voting record that matches his constituency s ideological leanings the systematic deviation of a congressman s voting record from his constituents preferences when near either extreme of the ideological spectrum is not inconsistent with a faithful principal agent relationship one cannot help but be struck by the observation that those researchers finding evidence consistent with shirking studied voting on specific legislation whereas those researchers finding no evidence of shirking studied representatives broader voting records as measured by ideological ratings

the micro empirics of collective action the case of business improvement districts abstract this paper carries out a micro level analysis of collective goods provision by focusing on the formation of business improvement districts bids the paper s theoretical and empirical analysis is unusually complete in that it considers the entire process of collective action including participation in initial organization voting and ultimate impact on property values bid benefits are shown to be highly uneven and bid formation is not a pareto improvement furthermore large anchor participants benefit disproportionately and are crucial for the viability of the institution consistent with olson 1965 these results while demonstrated in a particular setting apply to collective action more generally whenever a market failure leaves room for a collective response the presence of anchor participants encourages collective action and the action even though in a sense voluntary has uneven benefits

demographics and the politics of capital taxation in a life cycle economy this article studies the effects of demographics on the mix of tax rates on labor and capital it uses a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generations model where tax rates are voted without past commitments in every period and characterized as a markov equilibrium in the united states the younger voting age population in 1990 compared to 1965 accounts for the observed decline in the relative capital tax rate between those two years a younger population raises the net return to capital leads voters to increase their savings and results in a preference for lower taxes on capital conversely aging might increase capital taxation

evaluating the median voter model s explanatory power abstract we match individual senators voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24 real referendum decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording this setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model s quality with revealed constituents preferences results indicate a limited explanatory power of the median voter model it explains 17 6 points more than random voting and that a senator s probability to accept a proposal in parliament increases on average by 8 4 points when the district median voter accepts the proposal

explaining variation in the competitiveness of u s senate elections 1922 2004 we develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the u s senate to do so we deliberately abstract away from candidate specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape in our framework party specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates linked to the national party organization and its contributors interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive senate contests three hypotheses emerge from this model 1 the greater the diversity of a party s national legislative delegation the more highly competitive senate elections we will observe 2 states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections and 3 highly competitive senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries we provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third

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

alternative characterizations of three bargaining solutions for nonconvex problems abstract this paper studies compact and comprehensive bargaining problems for n players and axiomatically characterize the extensions of the three classical bargaining solutions to nonconvex bargaining problems the nash solution the egalitarian solution and the kalai smorodinsky solution our characterizing axioms are various extensions of nash s original axioms

legislative voting and the economic theory of politics empirical studies of legislative voting have multiplied since the mid 1970s early work 13 distinguished two modes of representation delegates who vote as voters want and trustees who use their own judgment more recently researchers have considered only delegates claiming that legislators who use their own ideology are shirking following principal agent theory representatives are conceived as conduits through which citizens transmit and express interests empirical work on this question however has found that the legislator s ideology explains more variation in vote choices than is explained by measures of constituent interest the seeming contradiction has led some 9 10 17 to reject the economic theory of legislator behavior as erroneous the truth is that no such theory has ever been fairly stated much less tested estimating equations have been ad hoc and the usual approach to measuring ideology has imposed correlation between the equation error and an explanatory variable 8 in both cases the result is

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

random interactions in the chamber legislators behavior and political distance abstract i investigate the role of social interaction among members of parliament mps and the impact of such interaction on the political distance between parties using the random allocation of seats in the icelandic parliament i find that mp s voting and speech behaviors are affected by the behavior of legislators seated nearby i also show that greater random exposure to mps from different parties ultimately reduces the political distance between parties similar evidence is found using historical data for the u s house of representatives by exploiting the introduction of a lottery mechanism to determine desk assignments in 1845 i argue that random seating arrangements could constitute a low cost way of reducing differences within the political arena

a tale of two unions divergent platforms and their constituencies the median voter theorem has regularly been used in economics to represent the behaviour of teachers unions little empirical work however tests whether this framework is a good fit for teachers

how do senators vote disentangling the role of voter preferences party affiliation and senate ideology this paper develops a methodology for consistently estimating the relative weights in senator utility functions despite the fact that senator ideologies are unobserved the empirical results suggest that voter preferences are assigned only one quarter of the weight in senator utility functions the national party line also has some influence but the senator s own ideology is the primary determinant of roll call voting patterns these results cast doubt on the empirical relevance of the median voter theorem estimation of the model requires only roll call voting data making it widely applicable copyright 1996 by american economic association

district complexity as an advantage in congressional elections scholars of congressional elections have argued that an increase in constituent diversity increases the level of electoral competition following models of boundedly rational candidates we argue that there is strong reason to believe that the opposite is true as the complexity of the electoral landscape increases challengers will have a more difficult time locating an optimal platform when facing an experienced incumbent using data from the 2000 national annenberg election study we construct a novel measure of district complexity for u s house districts and test whether the entry of quality challengers and the incumbent s share of the two party vote are affected by the complexity of the electoral landscape we find strong support for the hypothesis that complexity benefits incumbents for both indicators of electoral competition which stands in contrast to most of the existing literature on diversity and incumbent performance

campaign contributions and congressional voting does the timing of contributions matter theoretical and empirical studies do not address whether campaign contributions from more than one election cycle are important for congressional voting behavior further they do not address whether campaign contributions from different periods have different effects on legislative voting behavior this paper analyzes the cumulative effect of campaign contributions over two time periods moreover this paper studies the importance of the timing of contributions for legislative voting behavior ten roll call votes on price supports and quotas for various farm commodities in 1981 and 1985 are analyzed most of the estimated contribution coefficients are statistically significant the results show that without campaign contributions farm interest would have lost in five of the seven votes that were won moreover contributions that were given at approximately the same time as the vote have a larger impact on voting behavior than contributions that the legislator received one or two years prior to the vote copyright 1995 by mit press

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

federal tax policies congressional voting and natural resources can abundance of natural resources affect legislators voting behavior over federal tax policies we construct a political economy model of a federalized economy with district heterogeneity in natural resource abundance the model shows that representatives of natural resource rich districts are more less willing to vote in favor of federal tax increases decreases this occurs because resource rich districts are less responsive to federal tax changes due to the immobile nature of their natural resources we test the model s predictions using data on roll call votes in the u s house of representatives over the major federal tax bills initiated during the period of 1945 2003 in conjunction with the presence of active giant oil fields in u s congressional districts our identification strategy rests on plausibly exogenous giant oil field discoveries and exploitation and narrative based aggregate federal tax shocks that are exogenous to individual congressional districts and legislators we find that i resource rich congressional districts are less responsive to changes in federal taxes ii representatives of resource rich congressional districts are more less supportive of federal tax increases decreases controlling for legislator congressional district and state indicators our results indicate that resource richness is approximately half as dominant as the main determinant namely party afiliation in driving legislators voting behavior over federal tax policies