the logic of institutional preferences german electoral law as a social choice outcome institutions determine the results of social decision processes yet institutions are themselves endogenous products of earlier social choices this paper explores the hypothesis that participants in the choice of institutions seek alternatives that favor their desired policies the choice of institutions can be analyzed in terms of bargaining between individuals or parties where preferences derive from preferences over policy and bargaining is structured by existing institutions this approach is used to study the choice of an electoral system in germany after world war ii the hypothesis that parties choose electoral institutions to maximize their future policy influence explains both the adoption of proportional representation in 1949 and the switch to a two vote ballot in 1953

the need for enemies we develop a model where some politicians have an edge in undertaking a task and this gives them electoral advantage creating an incentive to underperform in the task we test the empirical implications in the context of fighting against insurgents using colombian data the main prediction is that large defeats for the insurgents reduce the probability that these politicians fight them especially in electorally salient places we find that after the largest victories against farc rebels the government reduced its counterinsurgency efforts especially in politically important municipalities politicians need to keep enemies alive in order to maintain their political advantage

election goals and the allocation of campaign resources this paper compares the equilibrium behavior and outcomes in a model of two party competition for legislative seats under two different assumptions about the parties goals 1 parties maximize the expected number of seats won and 2 parties maximize the probability of winning a majority of the seats the two goals may lead to qualitatively different behavior and studying the differences yields insights into the relationship between the goals and the role of assymetries between the parties

local economic gains from primary election spending this article asks how government and private consumption spending affect earnings in service sectors to do this we exploit the variation across states and time in the money spent while campaigning for a party s presidential primary nomination we create a novel data set combining the date each state held its primary from 1976 to 2008 the date in each election cycle in which only one candidate remained and quarterly state earnings by sector using an instrumental variable strategy we find that hosting a primary election increases earnings particularly in the retail and accommodation sectors these results remain consistent when using data on primary campaign expenditures across states in the 2004 and 2008 elections

forecasting the presidential vote in the states this research examines an equation developed to forecast the two party presidential vote in the states the equation is composed of 16 independent variables measured at the national regional and state levels it includes national trial heat polls from early in the campaign the growth in the national economy presidential incumbency the state s voting record in the previous two presidential elections home state and regional advantages for the candidates the partisan division of the state legislature following the last midterm election an index of state ideology based on the roll call voting of its house delegation and five regional trend variables to take into account partisan shifts over time the equation is estimated over 531 state elections from 1948 to 1988 the overall fit of the equation is quite good it accounts for nearly 85 of the variance leaves a standard error of less than four percentage points and has an average error of just three percentage points of the vote this level of accuracy is comparable to that of steven rosenstone s equation in his forecasting presidential elections 1983 moreover the equation is quite parsimonious and yields forecasts by early september of the election year

what is the probability your vote will make a difference i introduction what is the probability that one vote will make a difference this is of interest in the utility theory of voting and also for campaign strategists who must assess the costs and benefits of attempting to persuade or turn out voters in particular states 1 in a presidential election the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win times the probability the vote in your state is tied conditional on your state being necessary broadly speaking there are three ways of estimating the probability of a decisive vote the first approach and the oldest in the literature 2 is to set up a theoretical model for the joint distribution of the popular vote margin in the separate jurisdictions in this case the 50 states plus the district of columbia and then analytically compute the probability of each state being nationally decisive and locally tied such models offer important insights but are not directly useful for presidential elections given that our interest is in the particularities of individual states in 2008 rather than on general properties of an electoral system the second approach is purely empirical an estimate of the form y n where n is the number of elections in some large historical sample and y is the number that were tied elections are very rarely tied so one can instead use an estimate such as y 2 000 n where y is now the number of elections decided by less than 1 000 votes such an empirical analysis can be embedded into a regression of vote differential on election level predictors mulligan and hunter 2003 use such a model for estimating the average probability of a decisive vote in legislative elections and gelman katz and bafumi 2004 use the distribution of aggregate vote margins to study the dependence of the probability of a tie on the number of voters 3 unfortunately the complex structure and the small number of presidential elections rule out a purely empirical approach in this case the third method which we use here is to set up a forecasting model for the current election the uncertainties for the 50 statewide elections in such a model should be correlated or equivalently the model should have a national error term and possibly regional error terms in addition to any independent state errors given a forecast that is a joint probability distribution one can calculate the probability of decisive vote using simulation or in a setting such as a national election in which the probability of a tied election is tiny one can use a mix of simulation and analytic calculations as was done by gelman king and boscardin 1998 4 ii method we use a state by state election forecast computed on october 24 2008 based on the latest opinion polls silver 2008 earlier in the campaign polls are not particularly informative and it is better to use regression based forecasts at least to account for possible national swings see lock and gelman 2008 and for further discussion wlezien and erikson 2004 and the references therein by late october however polls are close to the actual election outcome and so it is reasonable to construct a forecast distribution using poll aggregation 5 the result of our forecasts is a 10 000 x 51 matrix representing 10 000 computer simulations of the election with each simulation including the vote margin for obama e g a margin of 0 208 in alabama corresponds to obama and mccain receiving 60 4 and 39 6 respectively of the two party vote in the state we convert this percentage to a numerical vote margin by multiplying by the voter turnout in the state which we estimate by taking the two party turnout from 2004 and adding 4 corresponding to population increase and another 4 to account for an anticipated increase in turnout this year 6 as discussed earlier the simulations for the states are correlated the joint probability distribution of the 51 election outcomes includes uncertainty about the national swing as well as state by state fluctuations

the provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending we compare a winner take all system where all the spoils go to the winner to a proportional system where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote in a winner take all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable we then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency

supplying trade reform political institutions and liberalization in middle income presidential democracies correcting the relative lack of attention to the supply side of trade policy this article addresses how political institutions channel societal demands for protection i hypothesize that strong presidents with significant legislative powers and strong party leaders empowered through electoral rules that rein in the personal vote can help overcome protectionist biases these arguments compare with two institutional alternatives first that protectionism should decrease as electoral district size grows because elections become more proportional and second that the collective action problems in fragmented party systems thwart trade reform i evaluate these hypotheses empirically using pooled time series cross sectional data involving 18 developing countries from 1971 to 1997 i find that delegation to presidents and party leaders is significantly related to trade liberalization and some evidence suggests that the effective number of parties and the size of electoral districts may also influence levels of protectionism

democratic institutions and exchange rate commitments since the collapse of the bretton woods system countries have been able to choose from a variety of exchange rate arrangements we argue that politicians incentives condition the choice of an exchange rate arrangement these incentives reflect the configuration of domestic political institutions particularly electoral and legislative institutions in systems where the cost of electoral defeat is high and electoral timing is exogenous politicians will be less willing to forgo their discretion over monetary policy with a fixed exchange rate in systems where the costs of electoral defeat are low and electoral timing is endogenous politicians are more likely to adopt a fixed exchange rate regime consequently differences in domestic political systems can help account for variations in the choice of exchange rate arrangements we test this argument using constrained multinomial logit and binomial logit on a sample of twenty democracies over the period 1974 95 domestic political institutions have a significant effect on exchange rate regime choice even after controlling for systemic macroeconomic and other political variables

the size and scope of government comparative politics with rational politicians we try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system a downsian model of electoral competition and forward looking voting indicates that majoritarian as opposed to proportional elections increase competition between parties by focusing it into some key marginal districts this leads to less public goods less rents for politicians more redistribution and larger government a model of legislative bargaining and backward looking voting indicates that presidential as opposed to parliamentary regimes increase competition between both politicians and voters this leads to less public goods less rents for politicians less redistribution and smaller government we confront these predictions with cross country data from around 1990 controlling for economic and social determinants of government spending we nd strong and robust support for the prediction that the size of government is smaller under presidential regimes and weaker support for the prediction that majoritarian elections are associated with less public goods

campaign allocations under probabilistic voting we develop a probabilistic voting model where candidates compete by advertising in different media markets ads are viewed by everyone within a market and cannot be targeted to subgroups such as one candidate s partisans candidates estimate the distribution of voter preference intensities in a market and campaign ads then shift this distribution individuals with any intensity vote with some probability for each candidate we derive comparative static implications of changes in a variety of factors on the advertising decisions of each candidate using campaign advertising data from 2002 we find these results to be consistent with actual campaign allocation behavior

exploring domestic micro cogeneration in the netherlands an agent based demand model for technology diffusion abstract micro cogeneration micro chp is a new technology at the household level producing electricity in cogeneration with domestic heating thereby increasing the overall efficiency of domestic energy production we have developed a prototypical agent based simulation model for energy technologies competing for demand at the consumer level the model is specifically geared towards the competition between micro chp and incumbent condensing boilers in the model both technologies compete on purchase price and costs of usage to which various types of consumers decide on the installation of either technology simulations with various gas and electricity prices show that micro chp diffusion could be seriously inhibited if demand for natural gas decreases e g due to insulation measures further simulations explore various subsidy schemes a subsidy for purchase is only found to be effective within a limited range of 1400 3250 a subsidy based on decreasing price difference between the competing technologies is much more cost effective than fixed purchase subsidies simulations of a subsidy scheme for usage show that a fast market penetration can be reached but this does not yet take full advantage of technological progress in terms of decreasing co2 emissions selection of the most effective scheme thus depends on the policy criteria assumed

electoral systems and public spending we study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public expenditure in oecd and latin american countries we emphasize the distinction between purchases of goods and services which are easier to target geographically and transfers which are easier to target across social groups we present a theoretical model in which voters anticipating government policymaking under different electoral systems have an incentive to elect representatives more prone to transfer public good spending in proportional majoritarian systems the model also predicts higher total primary spending in proportional majoritarian systems when the share of transfer spending is high low after dee ning rigorous measures of proportionality to be used in the empirical investigation we e nd considerable support for our predictions

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

interaction effects in mixed member electoral systems theory and evidence from germany japan and italy the past decade has witnessed a surprising growth in the popularity of mixed member electoral systems under these systems voters choose representatives simultaneously under both proportional representation pr and single member district plurality smdp rules it is widely accepted that smdp rules tend to winnow competition down toward two large parties and evidence from mixed systems suggests that this duvergerian gravity reduces the number of parties surviving smdp competition under mixed systems as well nevertheless we argue simultaneous balloting under pr rules softens this winnowing effect operating as a centrifugal force that prevents duvergerian gravity from reducing competition to the degree it does under pure smdp systems thus these newsystems produce effects unanticipated by their designers to test for the presence of this centrifugal force we examine elite level electoral strategies in germany japan and italy and compare district level smdp election results from pure systems w

dynamic incentives of environmental regulations the effects of alternative policy instruments on technology diffusion abstract we develop a framework for comparing empirically the effects of alternative environmental policy instruments on the diffusion of new technology market based and command and control approaches can he quantitatively compared by estimating the economic penalty that firms through their actions reveal to be associated with violation of standards in the context of concerns about global climate change we empirically examine the likely effects of pigouvian taxes technology adoption subsidies and technology standards we employ state level data on the diffusion of thermal insulation in new home construction comparing the effects of energy prices insulation cost and building codes

inter regional redistribution through infrastructure investment tactical or programmatic in this paper we study the political economy of the inter regional allocation of investment in infrastructure in an effort to disentangle tactical and programmatic motives where tactical politics refers to the discretionary allocation of investment to districts with more political clout and programmatic politics refers to the allocation of investment according to certain objective criteria e g income level we use a panel of data from the spanish electoral districts for the period 1964 2004 to estimate an equation in which investment depends both on economic and political variables the results show that tactical politics do matter since the districts receiving the most funds are those in which i the incumbent s vote margin is low ii few votes are needed to win an additional seat in the legislature iii the central and regional governments are controlled by the same party and iv regional parties play a pivotal role in the legislature however the results also show that programmatic politics matter since inter regional redistribution is shown to increase i with the arrival of democracy and european union funds ii under leftist governments and iii the weaker the correlation is between political clout and regional income

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

duverger s law is working in italy in 1993 italy adopted an electoral system based largely on single member districts smd based at least in part on the hope that smds would lead to a two party system and alternation in government that idea is known in political science as duverger s law the overwhelming consensus among specialists in italian politics would appear to be that duverger s law is not working very well in italy i will argue to the contrary that duverger s law is working exactly as should have been expected although one may see little evidence of movement toward a two party system at the national level between the 1994 and 1996 elections more than 80 of electoral districts moved closer to bipolar competition between two candidates a dynamic analysis of electoral districts confirms the powerful operation of duverger s law in italy

consensus versus majoritarian democracy political institutions and their impact on macroeconomic performance and industrial disputes this article argues that consensual political institutions as operationalized by lijphart and crepaz 1991 have significantly favorable effects on unemployment inflation and the number of working days lost whereas economic growth remains unaffected although this finding is consistent with olson s theoretical concept of encompassing organizations this study shows that olson s empirical operationalization is flawed strong two party westminster systems based on single member district electoral rules and single party bare majority cabinets do not perform as well as weak multiparty coalition governments with proportional representation as an electoral rule an empirical measure of encompassing organizations is introduced termed popular cabinet support a cross sectional time series panel study of 162 elections 18 countries and 9 elections per country n 162 provides strong evidence that governments with consensual inclusive and accommodative constitutional structures and wider popu

presidential pork executive veto power and distributive politics mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others the model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers including the effects of divided government electoral rules and term limitations for the executive

a swing state theory of trade protection in the electoral college this paper analyzes trade policy determination in the electoral college in the presence of swing voters it determines the circumstances under which incumbent politicians have an incentive to build a reputation for protectionism thus swaying voting decisions and improving their re election probability strategic trade protection is shown to be more likely when protectionist swing voters have a lead over free trade supporters in states with relatively strong electoral competition and in states representing a larger proportion of electoral college votes an empirical test using a measure of industrial concentration in swing and decisive u s states lends support to the theoretical findings

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

the impact of competition on management quality evidence from public hospitals in this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality we analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition and english public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market structure since almost all major english hospitals are government run closing hospitals in areas where the governing party has a small majority is rare due to fear of electoral punishment we find that management quality measured using a new survey tool is strongly correlated with financial and clinical outcomes such as survival rates from emergency heart attack admissions ami more importantly we find that higher competition as indicated by a greater number of neighboring hospitals is positively correlated with increased management quality and this relationship strengthens when we instrument the number of local hospitals with local political competition adding another rival hospital increases the index of management quality by one third of a standard deviation and leads to a 10 7 reduction in heart attack mortality rates

fragmented fiscal policy abstract this paper explores on a panel of 19 oecd countries the role of fragmentation in determining fiscal outcomes over the 1970 95 period we first define the notion of fragmentation of fiscal policy making as the degree to which the costs of a dollar of aggregate expenditure are internalized by individual decision makers empirically this notion has two key logical components the number of decision makers and the rules of the game or the budget process in turn the number of decision makers can refer to the number of parties in a coalition or the number of ministers in the cabinet we test all these determinants against each other and against perhaps the oldest explanation of all ideology we show that cabinet size and to a lesser degree coalition size and ideology are significant and robust determinants of fiscal outcomes in particular transfers are the budget items most affected by these factors

differentiating mixed member electoral systems mixed member majoritarian and mixed member proportional systems and government expenditures the increasing use of mixed member electoral systems has led to an explosion of research attempting to specify their effects yet there has been no work on the economic policy effects of such systems even though this has been a significant subject of debate for scholars analyzing other electoral systems an analysis of mixed member system policy effects is problematic given the wide variation in institutional rules among different systems this article attempts to determine whether the institutional differences between mixed member majoritarian mmm and mixed member proportional mmp systems lead to differences in policy outputs the political economy literature finds that government expenditures are positively correlated with electoral system proportionality our statistical analysis of government expenditures in 17 mixed member systems between 1990 and 2000 shows that mmp systems which are more proportional than mmm systems are correlated with higher levels of government spending thus the mmm mmp

do polls create momentum in political competition abstract we explore how public opinion polls affect candidates campaign spending in political competition generally polls lead to more asymmetric behavior under a majority rule there always exists an equilibrium in which the initially more popular candidate invests more in the campaign and thereby increases her lead in expectation polls create momentum when campaigning is very effective and the race is very close a second type of equilibrium may exist the trailing candidate outspends and overtakes his opponent regardless of the type of equilibrium polls have a tendency to decrease expected total campaigning expenditures by amplifying ex ante asymmetries between candidates and thus defusing competition when candidates care also for their vote share in addition to having the majority candidates incentives crucially depend on the distribution of voters candidate preferences

information and intellectual property the global challenges the paper analyses the contribution of golden papers seminal works whose ideas remain as fresh and relevant today as when they were first published decades ago and which continue to dominate academic discourse among successive generations of scholars the authors analyse why two works written within an industrial development context the simple economics of basic scientific research by richard nelson 1959 and kenneth arrows economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention 1962 are so relevant in today s knowledge driven economic paradigm focusing on the papers application to current global policy debates on information knowledge and intellectual property they argue that while the context has changed the essential nature of innovation driven by widespread access to the ability to replicate and improve remains the same hence a focus on endogenous innovation policy is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago

a structural model of electoral accountability this paper proposes a structural approach to measuring the eects of electoral ac countability we estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection eects using data on u s governors for 1982 2012 we nd that the possibility of reelection provides a signi cant incentive for incumbents to exert eort we also nd a selection eect although it is weaker in terms of its eect on average governor performance according to our model the widely used two term regime improves voter welfare by 4 2 compared to a one term regime and nd that a three term regime may improve voter welfare even further

majoritarian electoral systems and consumer power price level evidence from the oecd countries a straightforward extension of the standard stigler peltzman model of regulation coupled with a taagepera shugart analysis of electoral system effects suggests a that the greater seat vote elasticities of majoritarian electoral systems will tilt policy in favor of consumers while propor tional systems should strengthen producers and b that the pro con sumer bias of majoritarian systems should be manifested in systemati cally lower prices empirical tests controlling for the structural determi nants of national price levels estab lished in the earlier law of one price literature establish majoritarian elec toral systems as a significant and robust predictor lowering national price levels in the mean oecd coun

going it alone strategic entry under mixed electoral rules recent studies on strategic voting and entry in elections that combine plurality or majority and proportional representation pr have found candidate placement in single member district smd races to improve a party s pr performance the primary implication of the existence of contamination effects is that parties have an incentive to nominate candidates in as many single member districts as possible pre electoral coordination in the majoritarian component of mixed electoral systems however is far from uncommon in this article we identify a number of institutional incentives that induce political parties to form pre electoral alliances in spite of contamination effects by identifying institutions that favor and hamper coordination we seek to advance the understanding of pr smd interactions and to assess their implications for the design classification and empirical analysis of mixed electoral rules our statistical tests evaluate strategic entry in a diverse sample of countries

suspiciously timed trade disputes abstract this paper shows that electoral incentives crucially affect the initiation of trade disputes focusing on wto disputes filed by the united states during the 1995 2014 period we find that u s presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re election moreover u s trade disputes are more likely to involve industries that are important in swing states to explain these regularities we develop a theoretical model in which re election motives can lead an incumbent politician to file trade disputes to appeal to voters motivated by reciprocity

does negative advertising affect giving behavior evidence from campaign contributions abstract this paper contributes to a growing literature that explains why individuals contribute to political campaigns we build a panel dataset that follows contributors from primary to general elections to quantify the persistence of giving in political contests those who gave to winning candidates in the primary were most likely to contribute again in the general election next we use an instrumental variable strategy to document that within party negative advertising decreases the probability that individuals contribute to their preferred party in the general election regardless of whether they initially contributed to a winning or losing primary candidate

the road to power partisan loyalty and the centralized provision of local infrastructure this paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalties to the ruling party the model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances long run machine politics considerations and the more immediate concern to win over swing voters empirical results obtained from a panel of electoral districts in quebec provide robust evidence that districts which display loyalty to the incumbent government receive disproportionately more spending especially close to an election at odds with the standard swing voter view

vote motivated candidates abstract we study stochastic voting models where the candidates are allowed to have any smooth strictly increasing utility functions that translate vote shares into payoffs we find that if a strict nash equilibrium exists in a model with an infinite number of voters then nearby equilibria should exist for similar large but finite electorates if the votes are independent random events then equilibria will not depend on the utility functions of the candidates our results have implications for existing models of redistributive politics and spatial competition as the properties of pure strategy equilibria in such games carry over to equilibria in games with arbitrary candidate preferences on the other hand candidate utility functions will matter if the individual voting decisions are correlated in the presence of aggregate uncertainty such as changing economic conditions or political scandals the preferences of parties and candidates with respect to shares of votes will have an effect on political competition

the diffusion of biological waste water treatment plants in the dutch food and beverage industry this article develops an economic model of environmental technology adoption decisions the model is applied econometrically to the diffusion of biological waste water treatment plants in the dutch food and beverage industry it shows that it is possible to explain the overall diffusion pattern of biological waste water treatment plants in terms of a rational choice model in which prospective adopters trade off the costs of effluent treatment against the savings on effluent tax payments effluent charges are shown to be a significant positive factor in the timing of adoption of biological effluent treatment plants this result is brought out by both the rational choice and the epidemic models none of the models however can explain year to year changes in the ownership of biological waste water treatment plants during the 1974 91 period which suggests that there are other factors not included in the model that affect the timing of adoption

is it whom you know or what you know an empirical assessment of the lobbying process abstract do lobbyists provide issue specific information to members of congress or do they provide special interests access to politicians we present evidence to assess the role of issue expertis

symbolic convergence and the hydrogen economy this article documents that the hydrogen economy continues to attract significant attention among politicians the media and some academics we believe that an explanation lies in the way that the hydrogen economy fulfills psychological and cultural needs related to a future world where energy is abundant cheap and pollution free a fantasy that manifests itself with the idea that society can continue to operate without limits imposed by population growth and the destruction of the environment the article begins by explaining its research methodology consisting of two literature reviews research interviews of energy experts and the application of symbolic convergence theory a general communications theory about the construction of rhetorical fantasies we then identify a host of socio technical challenges to explain why the creation of a hydrogen economy would present immense and possibly intractable obstacles an argument supplemented by our research interviews next we employ symbolic convergence theory to identify five prevalent fantasy themes and rhetorical visions independence patriotism progress democratization and inevitability in academic and public discussions in favor of the hydrogen economy we conclude by offering implications for scholarship relating to energy policy more broadly

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

hydrogen technological innovation systems in practice comparing danish and american approaches to fuel cell development this paper investigates danish and american hydrogen fuel research from a modified technological innovation system tis perspective we ask which approach to hydrogen research is more effective and what do the differences between the two cases tell us about the research process and theories of innovation to answer these questions we begin by justifying our selection of hydrogen systems and denmark and the united states as our case studies we proceed to introduce a modified theoretical framework of tis and focus on seven core elements of hydrogen research knowledge development and diffusion entrepreneurial experimentation political and social influence market formation legitimation resource mobilization and positive externalities we conclude by offering insights from our comparison as they relate to hydrogen research strategy and policy effectiveness at achieving national goals and the need for further research and better conceptual models about innovation

a theory of endogenous commitment commitment is typically modelled by assigning to one of the players the ability to take an initial binding action the weakness of this approach is that the fundamental question of who has the opportunity to commit cannot be addressed as it is assumed this paper presents a framework in which commitment power arises endogenously from the fundamentals of the model we construct a finite dynamic game in which players are given the option to change their minds as often as they wish but pay a switching cost if they do so we show that for games with two players and two actions there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium with a simple structure this equilibrium is independent of the order and timing of moves and is robust to other protocol specifications moreover despite the perfect information nature of the model and the costly switches strategic delays may arise in equilibrium the flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to various environments in particular we study an entry deterrence situation its equilibrium is intuitive and illustrative of how commitment power is endogenously determined copyright 2008 wiley blackwell

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

diffusion paths for micro cogeneration using hydrogen in the netherlands we estimate the diffusion of micro cogeneration systems micogen using hydrogen produced from natural gas in the netherlands for the 2000 2050 period on the basis of economical factors the diffusion is important for the transition to a hydrogen economy based on renewables with natural gas paving the way for hydrogen from renewables for three scenarios full diffusion takes place in the period 2020 2050 the most important factors behind the diffusion are 1 growing energy demand resulting in lower hydrogen costs and higher energy costs in the reference case and 2 lower costs of micogen stemming from learning economies the model is advanced by considering all costs components for heterogeneous users which have been calculated for the entire diffusion period it is the first threshold diffusion model that is being applied to the diffusion of technological clusters involving new or adapted infrastructures 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

electoral systems and the number of parties in postcommunist states scholars studying electoral systems have consistently found that single member plurality elections tend to constrain the number of parties operating in a polity to a much greater extent than multimember proportional representation systems this article tests this hypothesis in the postcommunist context by examining the effects of proportional representation and single member district elections on the number of parties in five postcommunist states it is shown that some postcommunist states most notably poland and hungary have followed the standard pattern of party consolidation over time in reaction to incentives of electoral systems while others most notably russia and ukraine have not the author argues that the different effects of electoral systems can be attributed to different levels of party institutionalization found in postcommunist states these findings have policy implications under conditions of extreme party underdevelopment the electoral system that promotes the use of party labels proportional representation may be more effective than the plurality system in constraining the number of parties provided a legal threshold is used this runs counter to the conventional wisdom that plurality elections offer the greatest constraint on the number of parties

dynamics of energy technologies and global change technological choices largely determine the long term characteristics of industrial society including impacts on the natural environment however the treatment of technology in existing models that are used to project economic and environmental futures remains highly stylized based on work over two decades at iiasa we present a useful typology for technology analysis and discuss methods that can be used to analyze the impact of technological changes on the global environment especially global warming our focus is energy technologies the main source of many atmospheric environmental problems we show that much improved treatment of technology is possible with a combination of historical analysis and new modeling techniques in the historical record we identify characteristic l such network e ects yield high barriers to entry even for superior competitors these simple observations allow three improvements to modeling of technological change and its consequences for global environmental change one is that the replacement of long lived infrastructures over time has also replaced the fuels that power the economy to yield progressively more energy per unit of carbon pollution from coal to oil to gas such replacement has d they also include endogenous generation of s we show that doing so can yield projections with lessened environmental impacts without necessarily incurring negative e ect on the economy arriving on that path by the year 2100 depends on intervening actions such as incentives to promote greater diversity in technology and lower barriers to entry for new infrastructures that could accelerate historical trends of decarbonization 1999 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

the political participation puzzle and marketing abstract this study shows that one of the most intriguing findings on political participation that the participation rate is higher in close elections is due to the omission of variables namely the marketing activities this relationship between closeness and participation is intriguing because 1 it implies that people participate in elections because their vote might be decisive but 2 such an incentive to vote is unreasonable this study presents a theoretical model that suggests that closeness does not affect the turnout rate directly but rather through the marketing activities of the parties in other words in equilibrium close elections attract higher marketing spending which in turn increases turnout the author uses data on the 1996 2004 presidential elections in the united states to examine the model and its implications using structural and nonstructural estimation the author finds that the data support the model and its implications furthermore the effect of marketing on turnout i

public education and pensions in democracy a political economy theory a dynamic political economy theory of scal policy is presented to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies the driving force of the model is the intergenerational conict over the allocation of the public budget successive generations of voters choose scal policies through repeated elections the political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations since it expands future pension possibilities we characterize the markov perfect equilibrium of the voting game in a small open economy the equilibrium reproduces salient features of intergenerational