smoking drinking and income in an effort to increase understanding of the alcohol income puzzle the finding that drinking appears to lead to higher income this paper presents maximum simulated likelihood estimates of a system of limited dependent variables governing smoking and drinking patterns and income with all else held constant moderate drinking is associated with 10 percent higher income and heavy drinking associated with 12 percent higher income than drinking abstention smoking is associated with larger effects on income than drinking single equation estimates suggest smokers earn 8 percent less than nonsmokers and the smoking penalty rises to 24 percent after correcting for endogeneity

the structure of citizen attitudes and the european political space a common concern regarding the viability of institutional reform of the eu is whether european citizens constitute a political community that facilitates democratic governance one important aspect of this concern is whether public perceptions are structured so as to ease or impede political discourse across europe to investigate this question the authors examine whether the eu mass public organizes its attitudes toward eu policy issues in systematic and meaningful ways specifically they examine whether eu citizens attitudes across a broad range of policies decided at the eu level are structured consistently with several prominent models of the eu policy space using eurobarometer data the authors show that citizens policy positions on eu issues are systematically organized along a single dimension that is different from domestic left right

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

political representation and public contracting evidence from municipal legislatures abstract this study examines how partisan representation in multiparty legislatures affects direct expenditures contract allocation design and selection of politically connected firms as suppliers in public procurement for identification i exploit quasi random variation in partisan electoral outcomes near the effective representation thresholds in czech proportional municipal elections my regression discontinuity estimates suggest that partisan representation matters for public procurement for instance if local level political parties barely enter legislatures at the expense of the national parties municipalities decrease their direct procurement spending and allocate fewer contracts to the corporate donors of the national parties fewer contracts are awarded especially in pre election years and in auctions restricting competition among procurement suppliers the results are not associated with higher government fragmentation or selection of more competent candidates but rather with reduced political power of the national parties

is post smoking cessation weight gain a significant trigger for relapse while the surgeon general s consumer guide lists weight gain as an important relapse trigger the 2001 surgeon general s report on women and smoking concludes paradoxically that actual weight gain during cessation does not appear to predict relapse this dichotomous view reflects longstanding scientific uncertainty about the role of weight gain in triggering relapse this scientific uncertainty which stems from mixed clinical trial results is problematic for insurance coverage decisions such as state medicaid programme decisions to cover or exclude smoking cessation and weight control pharmaceuticals analysts hypothesize that selection bias may explain the inconsistency between the negative clinical results and the persistent view that weight gain triggers relapse if weight concern is both a key determinant of the transition from smoker to ex smoker and a key moderating variable in the relationship between weight gain and relapse we therefore use the nationally representative 1997 national lon

do expenditures on tobacco control decrease smoking prevalence effectiveness of tobacco control programmes in reducing smoking prevalence during 2001 to 2005 is examined tobacco control spending is found to exert no significant effects on smoking prevalence across the 50 states cigarette prices are found to lower prevalence of daily smokers but exert no effect on nondaily smoking prevalence several reasons are suggested for why these results might conflict with previous research these include that most previous studies examined two states california and massachusetts with long standing tobacco control programmes and that most studies examined periods in which many of the states in their samples did not actively fund their programmes another reason may be that unlike most previous studies this study controls for the possibility that tobacco control spending is endogenous when for example states exhibiting relatively low smoking prevalence are also states with relatively high distaste for smoking and accordingly fund tobacco control programmes more generous

elections governments and parliaments in proportional representation systems this paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system a formateur selected based on party representation in parliament and parties that cannot commit to the policies they will implement once in government government formation involves efficient proto coalition bargaining and elections yield unique strong nash equilibrium outcomes depending on the status quo minimal majority surplus or consensus governments can form if parties and voters are myopic and the status quo is subject to shocks consensus governments and centrist policies occur only in a crisis otherwise governments are minimal winning and policies reflect only the preferences of the government parties

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

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

proportional representation with citizen candidates we construct a simple model incorporating bothcitizen candidates and proportional representation andinvestigate its properties in a basic case with auniform distribution of citizen ideal points and purepolicy motivations and in further cases which allowof office rents and other distributions ofpreferences the idea of citizen candidates developedby osborne and slivinski 1996 besley and coate 1997 endogenises the decision to stand as acandidate and allows explicit study of the number andtype of candidates as an equilibrium phenomenon theidea of proportional representation allows a moreflexible relationship between the pattern of votescast and the final policy outcome and also providesa richer model of political representation ourdiscussion points to the widespread possibility ofequilibria involving non median policy outcomes provides insights into the relationship betweenproportional representation and the equilibrium numberof candidates and also provides an explicit accountof the trade off between candidate benefitsdistributed on a winner take all basis and those thatare mediated through proportional representation

throwing out the bums protest voting and unorthodox parties after communism the electoral rise of unorthodox parties uop s in recent east european elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies why did the power alternation of the mid 1990s not result in party system consolidation as suggested by some earlier studies but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals why did this reversal in eastern europe happen during a period of economic recovery remarkable western integration progress and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town this article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence while protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism the beneficiaries of these protest votes have changed in recent elections whereas in the first two generations of postcommunist elections disgruntled voters could opt for untried mainstream alternatives in third generation elections defined as elections taking place after at least two different ideological camps have governed in the postcommunist period voters had fewer untried mainstream alternatives and therefore opted in greater number for unorthodox parties this explanation receives strong empirical support from statistical tests using aggregate data from seventy six parliamentary elections in fourteen east european countries from 1990 to 2006 survey evidence from twelve postcommunist elections from 1996 to 2004 and a survey experiment in bulgaria in 2008

self command in practice in policy and in a theory of rational choice an increasingly familiar occurrence for obstetricians is being asked by patients to withhold anesthesia during delivery the physician often proposes that a facemask be put beside the patient who may inhale nitrous oxide as she needs it but some determined patients ask that no such opportunity be provided if gas is available they will use it and they want not to be able to the request is interesting for decision theory and raises questions of ethics policy and physician responsibility even if the woman is merely making a mistake if she simply does not know how painful labor will be and how glad she will be even in retrospect if the pain is relieved but some women who make this request have had earlier deliveries during which they demanded anesthesia and received it they are acquainted with the pain they anticipate asking for relief and they want it withheld when they do they expect to regret afterwards any recourse to anesthesia this particular instance of attempted selfdenial has features that are special but many that are common the woman is so far as we know in good health physically and mentally she anticipates a transient period when her usual values and preferences will be suspended or inaccessible she has reasons for wanting to frustrate her own wishes at the critical time she needs cooperation she may ratify her choice afterward by expressing herself grateful that no anesthesia was offered even when requested there are ethical dilemmas and legal issues and there is conflict if say the husband disagrees with the physician in the delivery room about what his wife really wants

built to last or meant to end intertemporal choice in strategic alliance portfolios a salient but rarely explicitly studied characteristic of interfirm relationships is that they can intentionally be formed for finite periods of time what determines firms intertemporal choices between different alliance time horizons shadow of the future theorists suggest that when an alliance has an explicitly set short term time frame there is an increased risk that partners may behave opportunistically this does not readily explain the high incidence of time bound alliances being formed reconciling insights from the shadow of the future perspective with nascent research on the flexibility of temporary organizations and shifting the focus from the level of individual transactions to that of strategic alliance portfolios we argue that firms may be willing to accept a higher risk of opportunism when there are offsetting gains in strategic flexibility in managing their strategic alliance portfolio consequently we hypothesize that environmental factors that increase the need for strategic flexibility namely dynamism and complexity in the environment are likely to increase the relative share of time bound alliances in strategic alliance portfolios our analysis of longitudinal data on the intertemporal alliance choices of a large sample of small and medium sized enterprises provides support for this argument our findings fill an important gap in theory about time horizons in interfirm relationships and temporary organizations and show the importance of separating planned terminations from duration based performance measures

a nearly global look at the dynamics of youth smoking initiation and cessation the role of cigarette prices this study investigates the role of cigarette prices on smoking initiation and cessation among youth in a sample of eight primarily non western low middle and high income countries with a particular focus on a subsample of 40 low and middle income countries lmics using split population duration models on longitudinally transformed individual data from the global youth tobacco survey gyts the average impact of cigarette prices in the presence of unobserved country heterogeneity and shifting cultural norms within countries is identified by the variation of cigarette prices within countries over time price increases are found to effectively reduce initiation in early youth and girls are considerably more responsive than boys the price elasticity of initiation in lmics is 0 82 for the combined gender analysis 0 46 for boys only and 1 5 for girls only there is some indication that youths in developing countries may be slightly less responsive to price changes than in high income countries no

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

learning from competing partners outcomes and durations of scale and link alliances in europe north america and asia this paper investigates the outcomes and durations of strategic alliances among competing firms using alliance outcomes as indicators of learning by partner firms we show that alliance outcomes vary systematically across link and scale alliances link alliances are interfirm partnerships to which partners contribute different capabilities while scale alliances are partnerships to which partners contribute similar capabilities we find that partners are more likely to reorganize or take over link alliances than scale alliances by contrast scale alliances are more likely to continue without material changes the two types of alliances are equally likely to shut down at similar ages these results support the view that link alliances lead to greater levels of learning and capability acquisition between the partners than do scale alliances copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

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

logrolling under fragmented authoritarianism theory and evidence from china this paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of logrolling between interest groups on social welfare in a non democratic political system in particular we focus on china where bureaucratic interest groups are separate vertical organizations reaching down from beijing to the provinces and cities the key question in this paper is what are the effects of the logrolling of parochial interest groups on state policies and social welfare in autocracies we address this question both theoretically and empirically the theory predicts a specific distortion in resource allocation because of logrolling while the empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction we find policy outcomes under logrolling are characterized by excessive spending on all the interest groups preferred goods and insufficient spending on public goods we test the existence of logrolling between the ministry of civil affairs and ministry of health in china our result shows logrolling between the two ministries lead to inefficiencies in social security and health care policies

the duration of the smoking habit i introduction most smokers smoke out of habit once the habit is ended many of smoking s most harmful effects decline rather quickly preventing and ending cigarette addiction is therefore the straightest path toward preventing the health damage done by cigarette smoking consequently the related questions of why people start smoking and why they quit are central to formulating and evaluating effective antismoking policies duration or hazard models are designed to measure the probability of transition between states and are thus ideal for investigating the structural determinants of the transition between addiction and non addiction nevertheless most previous work in the economics literature uses the aggregate smoking participation rate defined as the percentage of people who currently smoke or an individual s probability of participation rather than a hazard rate to measure the attractiveness of habitual smoking this paper models the hazard rates of both starting and quitting the cigarette smoking habit the starting hazard rate is the probability that an individual will start smoking in a given time period conditional on being a nonsmoker until then the quitting hazard rate is the probability of quitting smoking in a given time period conditional on being a smoker since the starting date both of these rates should rise and fall in response to changes in the attractiveness of smoking the two rates will respond differently to different stimuli since the starting hazard reflects the point of view of nonsmokers and the quitting hazard reflects the point of view of smokers hazard or duration models possess several advantages over smoking participation models most obviously smoking participation rates cannot directly distinguish between increased starting rates and decreased quitting rates but the hazard models can also in a participation rate model it is difficult to control for the effect of the duration of the habit whereas duration models are designed specifically to allow for and measure the dependence of the hazard rate on duration another advantage is that the participation rate at any one time will oversample the number of long term smokers relative to those who had a short term habit whereas a duration model is designed to avoid this source of bias one drawback however is that because of their inherent panel nature the data requirements of duration models are somewhat more difficult to satisfy as shall be seen the only previous work in the economics literature that estimates the hazard rate of starting smoking is douglas and hariharan 1994 my paper improves upon douglas and hariharan in at least three important ways first it estimates the hazard rate of quitting smoking as well as that of starting second it takes into account variation in state level regulation third its time varying covariate model allows hazard rates to respond dynamically to changes in cigarette price regulation and information variables the use of time varying covariates is important because it brings the empirical model into much closer accord with theory the decision whether or not to start or quit smoking is an ongoing decision made one day at a time on the basis of current information the hazard of starting is greatest when the cost of the habit appears lowest and its benefit appears highest this comparison of cost and benefit changes through time as price information income and life cycle variables change while douglas and hariharan 1994 used price information from the potential smoker s most vulnerable age on the theory that its marginal effect is greatest at that time the model used in this paper allows each individual s hazard rate to respond to changes in price and public information as they occur the leading theoretical model of the decision to smoke is the rational addiction model of becker and murphy 1988 which assumes that consumers of addictive goods begin smoking only after fully weighing the costs and benefits of the habit

the effect of energy on output per worker in the balkan peninsula a country specific study of 12 nations in the energy community in this paper we explore the long run co integration relationship between output per worker capital per worker and energy per worker for 12 countries in the balkan peninsula albania austria bulgaria cyprus greece hungary italy macedonia romania slovakia slovenia and turkey which are part of the energy community in line with the current developments in energy economics 62 we add to the literature by reviewing the elasticity coefficients for the 12 countries using the augmented solow 63 framework and the ardl bounds procedure 57 the causality nexus is explored using the toda and yamamoto 1995 procedure the results show that output capital and energy in per worker terms are co integrated we note that all countries have positive and statistically significant long run energy elasticity coefficients except for macedonia we note that energy is statistically significant in the short run for all other countries the causality results support the conservation hypothesis for 7 countries albania bulgaria cyprus hungary italy romania and turkey the growth hypothesis for 2 countries austria and macedonia and the feedback hypothesis for 3 countries greece slovakia and slovenia respectively

clientelism and voting behavior evidence from a field experiment in benin the author conducted a field experiment in benin to investigate the impact of clientelism on voting behavior in collaboration with four political parties involved in the 2001 presidential elections clientelist and broad public policy platforms were designed and run in twenty randomly selected villages of an average of 756 registered voters using the survey data collected after the elections the author estimated the effect of each type of message by comparing voting behavior in the villages exposed to clientelism or public policy messages treatment groups with voting behavior in the other villages control groups the author found that clientelist messages have positive and significant effect in all regions and for all types of candidates the author also found that public policy messages have a positive and significant effect in the south but a negative and significant effect in the north in addition public policy messages seem to hurt incumbents as well as regional candidates finally the evidence indicates that female voters tend to have stronger preference for public policy platforms than male voters

judicial power in domestic and international politics although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide polit ical science into subfields rigid boundaries remain in some contexts in this essay we suggest that the assumption that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is characterized by hierarchy continues to divide research on the conditions under which governments are constrained by courts international or domestic we contend that we will learn more about the process by which courts constrain governments and do so more quickly if we relax the assumption and rec ognize the substantial similarities between domestic and international research on this topic we review four recent books that highlight contemporary theories of the extent to which domestic and international law binds states and discuss whether a rigid boundary between international and domestic scholarship can be sustained on either theoretical or empirical grounds

blame game politics in a coalition government abstract delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics this paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision making process nor politicians preferences for a reform we show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption thus delaying it until after the next election and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non adoption we refer to this strategy as blame game politics we then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame game one is to make an issue salient in the next election a second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue a third reason is to enhance bargaining power during the formation of the next government

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

origin of alliance portfolios entrepreneurs network strategies and firm performance alliance portfolios are ubiquitous and influential for firm performance extant research addresses attributes of high performing alliance portfolios but not how executives originate such portfolios

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

the budget process and the size of the budget the new congressional budget process provides members of congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions this article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process modeled as first selection of the size of the budget and second its division produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually the theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets a testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed members of congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement usually a rule that yields the most favorable outcome empirical results from the budget process in the house from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements

tobacco taxes and starting and quitting smoking does the effect differ by education this article uses duration analysis to investigate the role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking applying a variety of parametric duration models to a sample of irish women it finds that in general tobacco taxes do influence starting and quitting smoking in the expected direction it also finds that the effect for starting differs by education but in a nonmonotonic way with the greatest effect for women with intermediate levels of education the results for quitting suggest the greatest effect for women with the lowest level of education these results are unchanged when account is taken of unobserved heterogeneity

learning and protection of proprietary assets in strategic alliances building relational capital one of the main reasons that firms participate in alliances is to learn know how and capabilities from their alliance partners at the same time firms want to protect themselves from the opportunistic behavior of their partner to retain their own core proprietary assets most research has generally viewed the achievement of these objectives as mutually exclusive in contrast we provide empirical evidence using large sample survey data to show that when firms build relational capital in conjunction with an integrative approach to managing conflict they are able to achieve both objectives simultaneously relational capital based on mutual trust and interaction at the individual level between alliance partners creates a basis for learning and know how transfer across the exchange interface at the same time it curbs opportunistic behavior of alliance partners thus preventing the leakage of critical know how between them copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

electoral competition and agricultural support in oecd countries agricultural trade protectionism in developed countries remains a politically charged issue yet few studies have attempted to explain the political dynamics behind this important trade issue we consider agricultural subsidies as a type of distributive policy that targets the agricultural sector at the expense of consumers and taxpayers based on cox 1987 1990 and myerson 1993 we argue that electoral systems that encourage politicians to appeal to a narrow constituency tend to have a higher level of agricultural support we test this theoretical hypothesis using oecd agricultural support data disaggregated by commodity and country a cross classified multilevel model is employed to account for complex variation of agricultural support across countries commodities and time our empirical results show that electoral systems that encourage politicians to target narrow broad constituencies are associated with relatively high low levels of agricultural subsidies

voting weights and formateur advantages in the formation of coalition governments over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions to test key predictions of these models we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001 these predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties minimal integer voting weights we calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties in addition we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts we find that for parties that join but did not form the government there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts the party that forms the government the formateur receives a substantial bonus relative to its voting weight the latter finding is more consistent with proposal based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power

making the first move a two stage analysis of the role of formateurs in parliamentary government formation a standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move the formateur party will determine the bargaining outcome most empirical studies of parliamentary coalition formation have paid surprisingly little attention to the formation process in this paper we model government formation as a two stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects this process the first step involves the selection of a formateur party and the second involves the choice of partners by the predicted formateur we evaluate several hypotheses for the two stages using a data set of all cabinets formed in the western european countries from 1970 to 2006 in our analyses of formateur selection we find that party size is clearly the dominant feature in the second stage we show that when predicting government composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis

demographic diversity and district level party systems scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude however no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society furthermore the relationship between diversity and electoral rules on one hand and the effective number of parties on the other hand has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross national comparative context this article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross district diversity i argue that the extent of cross district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district level diversity and the effective number of parties support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies

service induced campaign contributions and the electoral equilibrium candidates for office are modeled as promising services such as support for legislation and intervention in the bureaucracy to interest groups in exchange for campaign contributions an electoral equilibrium is characterized in which candidates choose service contribution offers and interest groups choose whether to contribute the model provides several explanations of congressional incumbents success in over 90 percent of their reelection contests a recognition advantage a high personal valuation of the office a lower cost of providing services and policy alignment with high demand interest groups the model yields predictions that are consistent with empirical findings on the relation between campaign contributions and election outcomes

constraints on cabinet formation in parliamentary democracies coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution free world yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments we develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties more adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior

lessons from strange cases democracy development and the resource curse in the u s states the work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under development suffers from several shortcomings in this article the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting using a new data set for the u s states spanning 73 years and case studies of texas and louisiana the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has they provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth poorer developmental performance and less competitive politics using this empirical setting they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development they draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross national and cross state work

party system institutionalization and government formation in new democracies party systems provide the essential structure of the coalition bargaining environment stability in party systems ensures the presence of regularities that can be observed in government formation but most empirical research focuses on established democracies in new democracies party systems are less institutionalized which means that interactions between parties can be unpredictable and has significant implications for coalition formation this article presents the first study of coalition formation in new democracies that employs an empirical design comparable to that of the leading research on western europe the author uses a new data set of potential coalitions in central and eastern europe to examine three explanations for government formation that arise when party systems are weakly institutionalized the results show first that incumbency is a disadvantage for governments in new democracies when formation occurs postelection this disadvantage is due to high levels of electoral volatility caused by policy failure and clientelistic practices incumbents are advantaged when formation takes place midterm as weak party system institutionalization leads to an inchoate pattern of interaction between opposition parties which therefore fail to provide a viable alternative second the presence of former dominant parties influences government formation by stifling the development of programmatic competition instead programmatic competition is subjugated to contestation based on historical enmities and third established parties collude to exclude new parties from coalition formation a possible indicator that a party system is becoming more institutionalized the article provides new insights into the importance of routinized and stable political practices and institutions

balancing exploration and exploitation in alliance formation do firms balance exploration and exploitation in their alliance formation decisions and if so why and how we argue that absorptive capacity and organizational inertia impose conflicting pressure

local government service production the politics of allocative sluggishness a partial adjustment model with endogenous speed of adjustment is developed to analyze how pressure from interest groups and mass media influence the adjustment process of local governments a survey questionnaire to the local politicians is used to measure the pressure indicators based on a combined cross section and time series data base for norwegian local governments the sluggishness of the adjustment process is estimated the dynamics of the adjustment process is shown to reflect the activity of interest groups and media pressure pressure groups related to primary education explain an important part of the sluggishness observed pressure groups promoting kindergartens and health care care for the elderly stimulate reallocations

predictability and power in legislative bargaining the rules and procedures of legislatures often provide legislators with information bearing on the identities of upcoming proposers for a broad class of legislative bargaining games we establish that markovian equilibria necessarily deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer whenever the information structure permits the legislators to rule out some minimum number of proposers one round in advance this result holds regardless of the recognition process and even if players vary in patience and risk aversion it raises the possibility that procedures adopted in the interest of transparency may contribute to the imbalance of political power

a model of endogenous government formation political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the formateur enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions however empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of gamson s law of portfolio allocation this article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously in equilibrium if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties sizes

oil wealth and regime survival in the developing world 1960 1999 the global oil market and its associated booms and busts have generated a large literature in political science one contention in this literature is that political instability is a near certain long term outcome of oil wealth another line of argument maintains just the opposite that oil makes authoritarian regimes stronger by funding patronage and repressive apparatuses in this article i conduct the first cross national tests of these arguments and investigate the effects of oil wealth and the oil booms and busts on political stability drawing on data from 107 developing countries between 1960 and 1999 i estimate the effects of oil wealth on regime failure antistate social protest and domestic armed conflict thus as a first goal this article addresses an analytic shortcoming in previous studies by separating regime survival empirically from both economic policy and regime type democratic or authoritarian and by focusing on the direct effects of oil wealth on several measures of political stability i address the relationship between oil wealth and these outcomes both by comparing exporters to the rest of the developing world and by comparing oil rich states across pre boom boom and bust periods the results indicate that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes and significantly related to lower levels of protest and civil war moreover

a dynamic duverger s law electoral systems promote strategic voting and affect party systems duverger les partis politiques 1951 proposed that plurality rule leads to bi partyism and proportional representation leads to multi partyism we show that in a dynamic setting these static effects also lead to a higher option value for existing minor parties under plurality rule so their incentive to exit the party system is mitigated by their future benefits from continued participation the predictions of our model are consistent with multiple cross sectional predictions on the comparative number of parties under plurality rule and proportional representation in particular there could be more parties under plurality rule than under proportional representation at any point in time however our model makes a unique time series prediction the number of parties under plurality rule should be less variable than under proportional representation we provide extensive empirical evidence in support of these results

strategic flexibility in information technology alliances the influence of transaction cost economics and social exchange theory utilizing a model drawn from both transaction cost economics and social exchange theory we analyze determinants of strategic flexibility in a sample of strategic alliances involved in joint development agreements or joint research pacts findings indicate that in general determinants suggested by transaction cost economics provided flexibility in modification and inflexibility in exit from social exchange theory trust was found to be positively related to both types of flexibility while another component of social exchange theory dependence was found to be negatively related to the strategic flexibility of the alliance results also found that factors suggested by both transaction cost economic theory and social exchange theory were related to the concept of trust economic constraints as suggested by transaction cost economics were positively related to trust between the alliance partners while dependence was negatively related to trust additionally the quality of communication and the existence of shared values were positively related to trust between the exchange partners results provide support for the role of determinants from both transaction cost economics and social exchange theory in the flexibility of strategic alliances

do voters demand responsive governments evidence from indian disaster relief abstract using rainfall public relief and election data from india we examine how governments respond to adverse shocks and how voters react to these responses the data show that voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control however fewer voters punish the ruling party when its government responds vigorously to the crisis indicating that voters reward the government for responding to disasters we also find evidence suggesting that voters only respond to rainfall and government relief efforts during the year immediately preceding the election in accordance with these electoral incentives governments appear to be more generous with disaster relief in election years these results describe how failures in electoral accountability can lead to suboptimal policy outcomes

the stability of joint ventures reciprocity and competitive rivalry the focus of the following empirical analysis is the influence of reciprocity and long term relationships on the stability of joint ventures these cooperative incentives are offset by industry structural conditions which may promote competitive rivalry among the partners to separate these effects on joint venture survival the hypothesized relationships are proxied by variables drawn from industry and questionnaire data and estimated under a hazard model specification a theoretical implication of the findings is to suggest a shift of attention from the transaction to the economic relationship as the unit of analysis copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

interfirm diversity organizational learning and longevity in global strategic alliances organizational theorists have correctly argued that the emergence and maintenance of robust cooperation between global strategic alliance partners is related to the diversity in the partners characteristics yet previous research has failed to systematically delineate the important dimensions of interfirm diversity and integrate the dimensions into a unified framework of analysis this paper develops a multilevel typology of interfirm diversity and focuses on organizational learning and adaptation as critical processes that dynamically moderate diversity s impact on alliance longevity and effectiveness

the countervailing effects of competition on public goods provision when bargaining inefficiencies lead to bad outcomes political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents electoral incentives we argue that political competition additionally mediates public goods provision by reducing the efficiency of legislative bargaining these countervailing forces may produce a net negative effect in places with weak parties and low transparency typical of many young democracies we provide evidence of a robust negative relationship between political competition and local public goods using panel data from mali tests of mechanisms corroborate our interpretation of this relationship as evidence of legislative bargaining inefficiencies to explore the generalizability of these findings we analyze cross country panel data and show that political competition leads to better worse public goods provision under high low levels of party system institutionalization the paper sheds light on why political competition is only selectively beneficial and underscores the importance of considering both the electoral and legislative arenas

coalition theory and its applications a survey we survey some of the major advances in coalition theory in recent years we then look at the recent applications of the theory in the area of political economy and touch upon some important theoretical and applied open questions in the field

are moderates better representatives than extremists a theory of indirect representation few if any elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms rather they choose between options generated by other actors and or external events we present a theory of voters preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf and show that in this setting voters preferences over candidates platforms will not look like voters preferences over policies we demonstrate that these induced preferences for representation tend to favor more extreme representatives and we present two models of electoral competition in which induced preferences over representatives lead to elite polarization

cutting through the smoke separating the effect of price on smoking initiation relapse and cessation i employ a large national representative dataset current population survey tobacco use supplements to investigate how cigarette prices affect smoking decisions a standard econometric approach is to estimate the relationship between cigarette prices and smoking participation at a point in time i extend this approach to model past year decisions to start resume or quit smoking considering reverse causality i apply an instrumental variable excise taxes for cigarette prices i include an index of state level anti smoking sentiment to control for omitted variable bias after estimating separate models for smoking initiation relapse and cessation and for different age groups i find no evidence that increasing taxes on cigarettes can prevent the onset of youth smoking neither does it effectively induce young smokers to quit however cigarette prices do play an important role to prevent relapse and encourage quitting at older ages

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

is there a broader deeper trade off in international multilateral agreements it is commonly thought that there is a trade off between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions that is multilaterals that are more inclusive in their memberships will necessarily be shallower in their level of cooperation using a multilateral bargaining model with self seeking rational actors i show that such a trade off does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems the conclusion that there is a broader deeper trade off follows from the assumption that the members of the multilateral must set their policies at an identical level the multi lateral agreement modeled in this article allows states to set their policies at different levels once this change is made there is no broader deeper trade off a finding that has obvious empirical and policy implications it explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for the class of cooperation problems modeled in this article

demand competition and policy compromise in legislative bargaining i propose a new majoritarian bargaining model in which more than one implicit proposal can be on the table at the same time institutional differences from system to system affect the order of play the equilibrium majorities and the policy outcome the ex post distribution of payoffs within a winning coalition is however invariant to fundamental institutional differences and it is always proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power the bargaining process is modeled as a sequential demand game in which players are called to propose a policy and to specify their desired share of the private benefits related to being in office the order of play is endogenous and the distribution of payoffs within an equilibrium majority usually does not depend on who is the proposal maker the role of the head of state and the advantages to center parties are also studied

oil nontax revenue and the redistributional foundations of regime stability nontax revenues make up a substantial amount of government revenue around the world though scholars usually focus on individual sources of such revenue for example foreign aid and state owned oil companies using a theory of regime change that builds on recent models of the redistributional foundations of dictatorships and democracies i generate hypotheses regarding all nontax revenue and regime stability i argue that an increase in nontax revenue should be associated with less taxation of elites in democracies more social spending in dictatorships and more stability for both regime types i find support for all three of these hypotheses in a cross sectional time series analysis covering all countries and years for which the necessary data are available significantly i show that the particular source of nontax revenue does not make a difference they all act similarly with regard to regime stability and the causal mechanisms

events equilibria and government survival theory a game theoretic model of government formation yields an equilibrium government the robustness of which may be explored by subjecting it to exogenous shocks this permits an examination of government durability and survival in a cruel political world hypotheses the vulnerability of a government to exogenous shocks depends upon the nature of the shock a government may be quite resistant to some classes of shock while it is highly vulnerable to others methods game theoretic analysis yields equilibrium results a simulation technology is crafted which allows us to subject this equilibrium to perturbations of its underlying parameters much in the spirit of wind tunnel experiments in engineering results the technology does indeed allow the systematic examination of well defined cases we find for the case of two european governments in the 1980s and 1990s that they differ considerably in their vulnerability to exogenous shocks

blessing and curse oil and subnational politics in the argentine provinces recent studies on the subnational resource curse contend that subnational rentier units suffer from the same nondemocratic tendency as their national counterparts however subnational rentier states worldwide exhibit contrasting political outcomes why are some subnational rentier units politically competitive whereas others are not this article argues that rent sharing regimes the fiscal institutions for sharing resource revenues among levels of government condition political competitiveness at the provincial level using novel time series cross sectional data on argentina a case with several hydrocarbon rich units with exogenously created rent sharing regimes i show that oil creates negative political effects at the provincial level only when these institutions do not share or share minor amounts of rents with municipal governments conversely political competition emerges when rent sharing regimes distribute rents to municipal governments as this shrinks large provincial budgets allows municipal

shades of brown and green party effects in proportional election systems small parties play an important role in proportional election systems for exam ple the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in europe over the last three decades but we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy since no methods exist for credibly estimating the eect of legislative represen tation in proportional election systems because party representation is not randomly assigned both observable and unobservable factors in uence policy outcomes as well as party representation using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random i estimate the causal eect of party representation on immigration policy environmental policy and tax policy i use data swedish municipalities where key poli cies for each policy area are under direct jurisdiction of the municipal councils the results show that party representation has a large eect on the rst two policies but not on the tax policy

expectations and informal rules in coalition formation why do informal rules emerge alongside and at variance with the formal constitutional constraints that shape bargaining over coalition governments the presence of informal rules at odds with formal rules appears as an anomaly within both institution free and institution focused theories of coalitions the author argues that politicians create informal rules in order to alter formal institutions that do not function to their benefit the costs of a formal change in institutions offer incentives to politicians to invent informal rules as alternatives to such change and repeated interactions teach politicians what to expect and then invent the author s emphasis on the manipulability of rules echoes long standing themes in the study and practice of politics

natural resource wealth and the survival of autocracy does natural resource wealth impede transitions to democracy this article revisits this question with an event history design that differs from the approach used in other recent statistical tests of rentier state theory the research confirms that autocracy is typically more durable in countries with substantial resource wealth and the author finds this effect is robust to other measures proposed to explain the dearth of democracy in the middle east or the muslim world along the way the author raises concerns about the use of all countries and all years samples to test theories of democratization arguing that this design can obscure important differences in the forces driving stability and change among different types of political regimes

the missing dimension of the political resource curse debate given the methodological sophistication of the debate over the political resource curse the purported negative relationship between natural resource wealth in particular oil wealth and democracy it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to the basic statistical issue of how to deal with missing data this article highlights the problems caused by the most common strategy for analyzing missing data in the political resource curse literature listwise deletion and investigates how addressing such problems through the best practice technique of multiple imputation affects empirical results i find that multiple imputation causes the results of a number of influential recent studies to converge on a key common finding a political resource curse does exist but only since the widespread nationalization of petroleum industries in the 1970s this striking finding suggests that much of the controversy over the political resource curse has been caused by a neglect of missing data issues

the power of parties evidence from close municipal elections in norway we show that small shifts in representation can affect policy in proportional election systems using data from norway we find that a larger left wing party leads to more property taxation higher child care spending and less elderly care spending while local public goods appear to be a non partisan issue these effects are partly due to shifts in bloc majorities and partly due to changes in the left right position of the council keeping the majority constant the estimates on spending allocations are rather imprecise but they are consistent with evidence on politicians fiscal preferences and patterns in media attention this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

voting equilibria under proportional representation this article studies the consequences of strategic voting by outcome oriented voters in elections under proportional representation pr i develop a model of elections under pr in which voters choose among an arbitrary finite number of parties and the policy outcome is determined in a postelection bargaining stage i use a new solution concept robust equilibrium which greatly mitigates the well known problem of indeterminate predictions in multicandidate competition applying the equilibrium concept to the model i find that pr promotes representation of small parties in general even when voters are strategic however the median voter plays a critical role in shaping policy outcomes which reflects the majoritarian nature of parliamentary policy making rules thus pr may not be incompatible with the majoritarian vision of representative democracy if voters main concern is policy outcomes

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

interorganizational alliances and the performance of firms a study of growth and innovation rates in a high technology industry this paper investigates the relationship between intercorporate technology alliances and firm performance it argues that alliances are access relationships and therefore that the advantages which a focal firm derives from a portfolio of strategic coalitions depend upon the resource profiles of its alliance partners in particular large firms and those that possess leading edge technological resources are posited to be the most valuable associates the paper also argues that alliances are both pathways for the exchange of resources and signals that convey social status and recognition particularly when one of the firms in an alliance is a young or small organization or more generally an organization of equivocal quality alliances can act as endorsements they build public confidence in the value of an organization s products and services and thereby facilitate the firm s efforts to attract customers and other corporate partners the findings from models of sales growth and innovation rates in a large sample of semiconductor producers confirm that organizations with large and innovative alliance partners perform better than otherwise comparable firms that lack such partners consistent with the status transfer arguments the findings also demonstrate that young and small firms benefit more from large and innovative strategic alliance partners than do old and large organizations copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

alternative origins to interorganizational trust an interdependence perspective on the shadow of the past and the shadow of the future despite the widespread acceptance of trust as an informal governance institution our understanding of its origins is nascent our review of the literature identified two distinct explanations trust emerges from either a shadow of the past i e prior history or a shadow of the future i e expectations of continuity in this paper we develop and empirically examine a third perspective the potential interdependence of these two explanations our results strongly endorse this third perspective we find that prior history does not directly affect trust instead the observed positive relationship between the two is mediated by expectations of continuity consistent with this result analyses further show that a longer prior history makes the effect of continuity on trust much stronger than a shorter prior history we interpret these findings as suggesting 1 the criticality and centrality of a shadow of the future i e a forward looking calculus in generating trust in interorganizational exchanges and 2 that a shadow of the past plays a facilitating albeit indirect role in trust building our conceptual model also extends the conventional use of the transaction cost logic to show how reciprocal investments in asset specificity and uncertainty drive expectations of continuity and consequently interorganizational trust our results also show unexpectedly that prior history has a direct negative effect on trust after specifying the mediating path of continuity our moderation analysis indicates when this effect occurs when weak expectations of continuity exist trust is lower for exchanges characterized by a longer prior history suggesting a potential darkside of overembedded ties

redistributing income under proportional representation although majoritarian decision rules are the norm in legislatures relatively few democracies use simple majority rule at the electoral stage adopting instead some form of multiparty proportional representation moreover aggregate data suggest that average income tax rates are higher and distributions of posttax income flatter in countries with proportional representation than in those with majority rule while there are other differences between these countries this paper explores how variations in the political system per se influence equilibrium redistributive tax rates and income distributions a three party proportional representation model is developed in which taxes are determined through legislative bargaining among successful electoral parties and the economic decision for individuals is occupational choice political economic equilibria for this model and for a two party winner take all majoritarian system are derived and compared

government turnover in parliamentary democracies in this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies that accounts for the following phenomena 1 cabinet terminations due to replacement or early election 2 cabinet reshuf es 3 minority and surplus governments 4 the relative instability of minority governments

stable governments and the allocation of policy portfolios different members of coalition governments typically have responsibility for different aspects or dimensions of policy such responsibilities are allocated as portfolios to government members given a distribution of such portfolios final government policy is derived as the accumulation of individual members decisions in regard to their respective responsibilities we develop a portfolio allocation model of government formation and policy decision in multiparty legislatures in particular we focus on stable portfolio allocations where a stable allocation is one that yields a policy that no legislative coalition is willing or able to overturn several notions of stability are considered and related to the usual concept of the core among the results are that although stable allocations are not guaranteed such allocations can exist with minority governments and that final policy outcomes associated with stable governments need not be centrist

demand commitment in legislative bargaining morelli 1999 provides a model of government formation in which the parties make payoff demands and the order of moves is chosen by the leading party morelli s main proposition states that the ex post distribution of payoffs inside the coalition that forms is proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power we provide a counterexample in which the leading party is able to obtain the entire payoff furthermore there are coalitions for which proportional payoff division does not occur for any order of moves

electoral rules strategic entry and polarization abstract how does electoral rule disproportionality affect the structure of the party system i e the number and the policy platforms of the competing parties by studying a model where both party entry and platform choice are endogenous we are able to provide a unified theory an increasing electoral rule disproportionality exhibits a a first order negative effect on platform polarization b a second order negative effect on the number of parties as polarization decreases centrist parties are squeezed between other contenders and prefer not to enter and c an additional third order negative effect on polarization via the reduction of the number of parties we then conduct a laboratory experiment and strongly confirm the theoretical predictions of the model

comparing electoral systems a geometric analysis this paper constructs a game theoretic model of elections inalternative electoral systems with three or four candidates each electoral system specifies how the platforms of thecandidates and their scores give rise to an outcome whengeometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can competeagainst each other for victory a pivot probability isassociated to that pair each voter is rational and picks thecandidate that maximizes her expected utility which resultsfrom the balancing of her preferences and beliefs about thepivot probabilities candidate positioning is endogenous andthe result of a nash game the possible equilibria arecomputed for plurality and runoff majority systems

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

the disadvantaged incumbents estimating incumbency effects in indian state legislatures this paper estimates the incumbency effects using a large dataset on state legislative elections in india during 1975 2003 i use a regression discontinuity design rdd that estimates the causal effect of incumbency by comparing candidates in closely fought elections i find that there is a significant disadvantage to incumbency in indian state legislative elections and the adverse effect of incumbency has increased after 1991 also the incumbency disadvantage is higher in states that have lower availability of public goods such as health centers and lower employment poverty and per capita income

explaining the oil advantage effects of natural resource wealth on incumbent reelection in iran why does natural resource wealth prolong incumbency using evidence from parliamentary elections in the islamic republic of iran the author shows that natural resource revenues boost incumbent reelection rates because they are used to provide public or private goods to constituents which incentivizes voters to reelect incumbents over challengers to test this hypothesis the author employs originally assembled data on five parliamentary elections in iran 1992 2008 in longitudinal hierarchical regression analyses at the district and province levels by leveraging iran s mixed member electoral system he shows that the resource incumbency mechanism works primarily in single member districts with little evidence of an incumbency advantage for politicians in resource rich multimember districts building on the rentier theory of natural resource wealth the results suggest that voting for the incumbent is attributable to patronage and public goods distribution the findings offer new insights into the understudied context of iranian legislative elections illustrate the mechanisms driving the relationship between resource wealth and incumbency advantage at the subnational level in a nondemocratic setting and highlight the mediating effects of electoral institutions on the resource incumbency relationship

monotonicity in electoral systems much of the literature concerning the relative merits of alternative electoral rules is centered around the extent to which particular rules select representative legislatures and an important concern in evaluating the representativeness of an electoral rule is whether or not the rule responds positively to changes in individuals preferences that is whether or not the rule is monotonic by explicitly considering electoral rules in the context of a complete electoral system voting selection of legislature and legislative choice of policy we argue that monotonicity in electoral systems is a nonissue depending on the behavioral model governing individual decision making either everything is monotonic or nothing is monotonic

party policy and campaign costs in a multi constituency model of electoral competition in this essay a multi constituency model of electoral competition was developed under the assumption that party candidates possessed no effective autonomy such a model describes the polar extreme opposite that of the more common single constituency framework in which candidates have complete autonomy the existence of a nash equilibrium to the multi constituency election game was established under the assumption that parties maximize the expected number of winning seats or behaved as pure independents under any other reasonable election goal e g maximize probability of winning a majority of constituencies this existence breaks down the nature of any equilibrium was investigated in some detail and the influence of campaign costs both statutory and non statutory on party behaviour analysed this was found to be qualitatively important in particular differingeconomic resources between parties is sufficient to prevent convergence inpolicy space

prices inflation and smoking onset the case of argentina this article examines the effect of tobacco prices on the decision to start smoking in argentina argentina is an interesting case to explore given its high smoking rates its recent experience with periods of very high and hyperinflation and the mixed evidence of the effect of prices on smoking onset particularly in low and middle income countries we used data from four cycles of two large national surveys conducted between 2005 and 2011 and discrete time hazard models we found that tobacco prices had a statistically significant and fairly large impact on the hazard of smoking onset and these findings were robust to alternative specifications we also found that prices had little effect on the hazards of smoking onset during periods of hyper and very high inflation which provide some support for the notion that prices lose their informational role in such periods governments need to be cognizant that their most important policy tool to reduce tobacco use taxes that increase real tobacco prices is likely no longer effective during these times jel c41 h20 i12 i18