bargaining over governments in a stochastic environment in this paper i structurally estimate a stochastic bargaining model of government formation in a multiparty parliamentary democracy and i conduct policy experiments to evaluate the effects of changes in the bargaining procedure i show that the model fits well data on the duration of negotiations and government durations in postwar italy also i show that changes in the proposer selection process would not affect either the duration of negotiations or government durations whereas the imposition of a strict deadline would in general reduce the incentives to delay agreement as well as government durations

an empirical investigation of coalitional bargaining procedures abstract models of government formation processes in multi party democracies are usually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs i e the parties selected to propose a potential government the theoretical literature has focused on two selection rules selection proportional to seat share and selection in order of seat share in this paper we use a new data set on government formations in 11 parliamentary democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data we find that while there is little empirical support for selection in order of seat share proportional selection fits the data well however we also find that a simple alternative that combines the insights of the two selection rules outperforms both of them in their ability to explain the data

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

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

cabinet decision rules and political uncertainty in parliamentary bargaining we investigate how cabinet decision making rules interact with political uncertainty to affect the outcomes of bargaining processes in parliamentary systems our formal models compare two types of decisions rules 1 those that give prime ministers unilateral authority to demand a vote of confidence and 2 those that require prime ministers to obtain collective cabinet approval for confidence motions we examine these models under assumptions of complete information and of political uncertainty that is party leaders lack information about the precise policies that others in the governing coalition will support our analysis suggests that the nature of the cabinet decision rules should influence the distribution of bargaining power the ability to exploit political uncertainty the likelihood of inefficient government terminations the circumstances surrounding such failures and indirectly the political considerations that parties face when choosing prime ministers during government formation simple empirical tests support some of these insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

the trend and the measurement of world inequality over extended periods of accounting abstract the principal result of this paper is the demonstration of a method for measuring an index of e g nominal gnp over extended periods of time and the inequality thereof snap shot inequality for specific points in 1964 1972 and 1980 is also reported and decomposed for six subgroups in 122 countries

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

changes in the world distribution of income between 1950 and 1977 trends in the world distribution of income are much discussed and philosophised about the issue of increasing economic inequality among nonsocialist countries in the post war period is central to the debate about the international economic order in i969 the pearson commission report was already pointing to the widening gap between the developed and developing countries as a central issue of our time and was proposing the reduction of that gap as the main objective of international co operation according to that report gnp per capita had increased between i960 and i967 at annual rates of 2 5 and 3 6 in developing and developed countries respectively morawetz i978 found that the gap between the two sets of countries rose from i 2 6 fold in i950 to i3 2 fold in i975 other authors see a more complicated picture atkinson i975 for instance has argued that although the share of poor countries in world income probably declined between i950 and i970 that of the countries at the middle of the world distribution probably increased 2 what may be a mere assessment of relative growth performances among nonsocialist countries becomes a basic theoretical element in the radical stream of economic literature for authors like amin i974 emmanuel i972 and frank i978 the capitalist mode of development necessarily leads to the rich countries of the centre becoming richer and poor countries of the periphery becoming poorer in a degree depending on their involvement in international trade for them a widening gap between developed and developing countries is simply the statistical confirmation of an unavoidable consequence of the national and international capitalist system in the latter perspective the issue at stake is of such importance that the contrast between the abundance of theoretical literature and the lack of empirical work is striking the few existing studies of changes in world distribution provide an inadequate picture intra country income distributions are not taken into account observation periods do not exceed i5 years 8 for andic and peacock i96i and for beckerman and bacon i970 i5 for kirman and tomasini i969 socialist as well as some non socialist countries are excluded and national incomes are converted to u s dollars at official exchange rates 3 finally none of these studies covers the i970s although several shocks which might have affected world distribution occurred during that decade for the non socialist countries to which they refer the andic peacock and beckerman bacon studies found the gini coefficient almost constant over

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 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

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

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

spatial models of legislative effectiveness spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem through the inclusion of institutional considerations such as political parties committees and various voting and amendment rules such models however implicitly assume that no policy is more effective than another at solving public policy problems and that all proposers are equally capable of advancing proposals we relax these assumptions by modeling proposal quality and the effort needed to make better proposals the resulting legislative effectiveness model lem offers three main benefits first it can better account for policy changes based on the effectiveness or popularity of the status quo changing our understanding of how to overcome gridlock in polarized legislatures second it generalizes canonical models of legislative politics such as median voter setter negative agenda setting and pivotal politics models all of which emerge as special cases within the lem third the lem offers significant new empirical predictions some of which we initially test and find support for within the u s congress

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

corporate bankruptcy reorganizations estimates from a bargaining model this article uses a novel approach to measure the unobserved liquidation value of a firm that relies on the information contained in the allocations that are agreed upon in chapter 11 negotiations i estimate a game theoretic model that captures the influence of liquidation value on the equilibrium allocations using a newly collected data set i find that the liquidation values are higher when the industry conditions are more favorable and the real interest rates are higher i use the estimated model to conduct a counterfactual experiment to quantitatively assess the impact of a mandatory liquidation on the equilibrium allocations

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

coalition governments and comparative constitutional design abstract in this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi party parliamentary democracies the approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary democracy on the formation and dissolution of coalition governments we illustrate our methodology by presenting the results of two counterfactual experiments of comparative constitutional design

intercountry inequalities in income and index of net social progress evidence from recent data abstract intercountry income inequality is computed from real gdp data that became available recently from phase iv of international comparisons project similar inequality measures are also calculated for index of net social progress proposed by estes 1983 and for conventional gnp per capita although the three indicators are strongly and positively correlated intercountry inequality indices derived from these are rather dramatically different

theoretical comparisons of electoral systems abstract elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced a variety of electoral systems are reviewed cox s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates positions when the number of serious candidates is given duverger s law and its generalizations are discussed to predict the number of serious candidates duverger s law is interpreted as a statement about electoral barriers to entry and this idea is linked to the question of the effectiveness of democratic competition as a deterrent to political corruption the impact of post electoral bargaining on party structure in presidential and parliamentary systems is discussed

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

another perspective on changes in international inequality from 1950 to 1980 abstract real income data derived from the third phase of the international comparisons project are used to compute theil s population weighted indices of intercountry inequality for several years between 1950 and 1980 contrary to some recently reported results a substantial increase in inequality is observed internationally comparable consumption data indicate consumption inequality increased more than income inequality

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

a drawback of electoral competition in most major democracies there are very few parties compared to the number of possible policy positions held by voters we provide an efficiency rationale for why it might be appropriate to limit the proliferation of parties in our model the larger the number of parties the greater the inefficiency of the outcome of electoral competition the reason is that when the number of parties increases electoral incentives push each party to focus its electoral promises on a narrower constituency and then special interest policies replace more efficient policies that have diffuse benefits the analysis provides a possible explanation for the existence of institutional features that limit the extent of electoral competition thresholds of exclusion runoff electoral systems and majoritarian two party political systems jel d82 l15

international inequalities in human development and real income abstract two well recommended measures are used to compute intercountry inequalities in real gdp per capita ry and the index of human development hdi despite very high positive correlation between ry and hdi the inequality measures reveal dramatically different pictures

how institutional and organizational characteristics explain the growth of contingent work in china china s traditional model of long term employment has been undermined by an increased reliance on nonrenewable fixed term and temporary agency employment contracts in this study the author draws

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

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

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

individuals and institutions what happens when political and economic forces interact in society recent developments in politics and economics focus attention on how outcomes are determined by the interaction between institutional structure and individual preferences specifying the rules of the game is often seen as a way of producing institution specific answers to how social decisions are made see e g david p baron and john ferejohn 1987 david austen smith and jeffrey banks 1988 baron 1991 in this tradition membership of the institution the set of players of the game is typically taken as given this paper proposes to endogenize the institutional structure by considering the case in which multiple institutions compete for members we present general definitions of equilibrium with multiple institutions and explore conditions for existence charles m tiebout s 1956 approach to the free rider problem demonstrates the application to local public goods there are several communities each of which has a political process for deciding the provision of its local public goods based on the preferences of its population in turn individuals reveal their preference for the provision of local public goods through their choice of a community the existence of an equilibrium in this context was first demonstrated by frank westhoff 1977 if communities use majority rule to determine their public goods and if preferences are single peaked then there exists an equilibrium in which each community follows the preference of its median member and each person belongs to his most preferred community in this paper we consider multidimensional choice problems political processes other than majority rule and other applications such as platform choice of political parties

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

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

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

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

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

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

union organizing in china still a monolithic labor movement in contrast to much of the research that treats the official all china federation of trade unions acftu as a monolithic organization the author argues that there is considerable variation within acftu in terms of local union organizing strategies using extensive field research and interviews with regional union officials grassroots union cadres shop floor workers and employers and managers in china during the period 2005 2007 the author contributes to an understanding of contemporary trade union strategies in china moreover his analysis of regional union strategies suggests three patterns of union organizing the traditional acftu pattern the union association pattern and the regional industry based bargaining pattern each with vastly different consequences for the future of trade unions and collective bargaining in china

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

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

factor decomposition of cross country income inequality 1960 1990 abstract in this paper we present esteban s 1994 esteban j 1994 la desigualdad interregional en europa y en espana descripcion y analisis in esteban j m a vives x dirs crecimiento y convergencia regional en espana y en europa vol 2 instituto de analisis economico decomposition of the theil index of inequality over per capita incomes into the unweighted sum of the inequality indices of i the productivity per employed worker ii the employment rate iii the active over working age population rate and iv the working age over total population rate each of these factors clearly have different meanings for analysis as well as for policy we apply this factoral decomposition to a set of 120 countries we also contrast the empirical findings with the results obtained for the 23 oecd countries oecd labour force statistics several issues paris

demand bargaining and proportional payoffs in majority games abstract we study a majoritarian bargaining model in which players make payoff demands in decreasing order of voting weight the unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome is such that the minimal winning coalition of the players that move first forms with payoffs proportional to the voting weights this result advances previous analysis in terms of one or more of the following a the simplicity of the extensive form finite horizon with a predetermined order of moves b the range of the majority games covered c the equilibrium concept subgame perfect equilibrium is sufficient for a unique prediction

composite indices of physical quality of life basic needs fulfilment and income a principal component representation abstract in the context of international comparisons the multivariate method of principal components is suggested for computing composite indices of economic development that capture per capita income basic needs fulfilment and other possible indicators of well being the method is conceptually appealing easy to apply and seems promising in several directions two illustrative applications are given one develops a composite index based on the three pqli constituents and per capita gnp for 147 countries in the other a composite index of basic needs fulfilment is first computed for 82 countries and then a more inclusive measure that also takes account of per capita gnp is derived

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

international income mobility abstract we perform a novel analysis of the international mobility of per capita gnp we find general but not unambiguous support for the notion that world income mobility increased between 1972 and 1992 counterpointing the increased inequality over this period

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

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

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

the changing nature of labor unrest in china a qualitative shift is underway in the nature of labor protest in china contrary to prior literature that characterized strikes as being largely defensive in nature the authors suggest that since 2008 chinese workers have been striking offensively for more money better working conditions and more respect from employers they explain these developments using a political process model that suggests economic and political opportunities are sending cognitive cues to workers that they have increased leverage leading them to be more assertive in their demands such cues include a growing labor shortage new labor laws and new media openness their argument is supported by a unique data set of strikes that the authors collected two case studies of strikes in aerospace factories and interviews with a variety of employment relations stakeholders

don t stand so close to me spatial contagion effects and party competition in this article we bring together elements from the literatures on economic voting and spatial voting to gain theoretical leverage on the combined role of clarity of responsibility party policy positions and economic performance in elections building on evidence of voter knowledge we develop a theory of spatial contagion effects to explain how factors drawn from both of these literatures combine to shape changes in support for political parties we test this theory with a spatial autoregressive model of party competition in 23 nations from 1951 to 2005 as expected we find evidence of strong spatial contagion effects in elections with low clarity of responsibility

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

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

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

a unified model of cabinet dissolution in parliamentary democracies the literature on cabinet duration is split between two apparently irreconcilable positions the attributes theorists seek to explain cabinet duration as a fixed function of measured explanatory variables while the events process theorists model cabinet durations as a product of purely stochastic processes in this paper we build a unified statistical model that combines the insights of these previously distinct approaches we also generalize this unified model and all previous models by including 1 a stochastic component that takes into account the censoring that occurs as a result of governments lasting to the vicinity of the maximum constitutional interelection period 2 a systematic component that precludes the possibility of negative duration predictions and 3 a much more objective and parsimonious list of explanatory variables the explanatory power of which would not be improved by including a list of indicator variables for individual countries

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

economic dynamics and government stability in postwar italy in this paper i estimate a duration model of the italian government the main finding of the paper is that the downfall probability of an italian government depends on both political and economic factors in particular the higher the inflation rate and the higher the number of workhours lost in strikes both at the time a government forms and during its tenure in office the more likely it is for a government to collapse this result has important consequences for the validity of political theories of the business cycle

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