explaining modern economics as a microcosm of society the persistence of mainstream economists with methods of mathematical deductive modelling that most agree do not perform well is something of a puzzle here i show this phenomenon to be a special case of gendered tendencies in play in society at large and i offer a psychological explanation copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

joseph schumpeter lecture ideology i develop a model of ideologies as collectively sustained yet individually rational distortions in beliefs concerning the proper scope of governments versus markets in processing and interpreting signals of the efficacy of public and market provision of education health insurance pensions etc individuals optimally trade off the value of remaining hopeful about their future prospects or their children s versus the costs of misinformed decisions because these future outcomes also depend on whether other citizens respond to unpleasant facts with realism or denial endogenous social cognitions emerge thus an equilibrium in which people acknowledge the limitations of interventionism coexists with one in which they remain obstinately blind to them embracing a statist ideology and voting for an excessively large government conversely an equilibrium associated with appropriate public responses to market failures coexists with one dominated by a laissez faire ideology and blind faith in the invisible hand with public sector capital this interplay of beliefs and institutions leads to history dependent dynamics the model also explains why societies find it desirable to set up constitutional protections for dissenting views even when ex post everyone would prefer to ignore unwelcome news jel h11 d72 d83 p16 z1

media markets and localism does local news en espanol boost hispanic voter turnout the same time the availability of these products reduces the consumption of local news not only because some consumers prefer national and global content to local information but also because local media products that lose a significant number of consumers are forced to cut qual ity and they may even cease to exist if their audience falls below a critical threshold for these reasons some scholars claim that the rise of integrated media markets undermines local civic engagement robert d putnam 2000 against this backdrop many regulatory agencies including the federal communications commission fcc of the united states seek to protect local media and promote localism for instance by limiting ownership concentration 1 however localism is desirable only if there are in fact positive spillovers from the provision of local content that can help justify the loss of private welfare that integrated media markets would provide in this paper we propose a simple test for the existence of spillovers from local news pro gramming asking if the presence of local television news affects civic behavior the ubiq uity of local news programming across all us metro areas makes it impossible to study its effects on the general population in contrast the availability of spanish language news has increased considerably in recent years providing us with an experiment to study the effect of local news on one important measure of civic engagement voter turnout in local elections in particular we use a differencing approach asking whether hispanic voter turnout is higher in relation to non hispanic turnout in metro areas with spanish language local television news our results indicate that spanish language local television news raises hispanic turnout by more than 4 percentage points local news targeted at hispanics has no effect on the participa tion of non hispanics and as one would expect a significantly smaller effect in years with a presidential race in markets with spanish language news about a quarter of hispanics turn to these programs our estimates thus imply that news in spanish caused about a fifth of spanish language news viewers to start voting interestingly hispanics with access to news in spanish do not increase the time they spend watching news content analyses of spanish language news programs in the united states find that these shows are much more likely to report on

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

electoral competition and politician turnover abstract in this paper we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the candidates who run for election we consider a setting with incomplete but symmetric information about the candidates abilities in which electoral campaigns provide voters with additional information about candidates parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election while voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information we first argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability rather than an established good candidate next we establish that the discrepancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate leads to inefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates i e each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters viewpoint

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

ontology and the study of social reality emergence organisation community power social relations corporations artefacts and money the conception of social reality i have previously defended and here extend positing features such as social relations positions and powers is thoroughly naturalistic and even consistent with modern interpretations of quantum field theory it also serves to ground a social science that can be scientific in the sense of natural science this is the thesis defended here central to the argument is an emphasis on a strong form of emergence and the category of organisation in process to bring out various salient features of the position defended i take the opportunity to compare aspects of it with relevant components of the contribution of john searle whose ontological conception appears at once to be both very similar yet also very different copyright the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

rent seeking distributional coalitions taxes relative prices and economic growth the results clearly indicate that much of the considerable variation in the pace and pattern of economic growth between the various american states is explainable by institutional arrangements amenable to revisions through public policy the findings suggest that long run economic growth would be best served by constraining distributional coalitions be it through constitutional restraints e g balanced budget amendments the item veto statutory changes e g subjecting coalitions like labor unions to the antitrust laws or some other means e g labor and capital fleeing distributional coalitions such as in the movement of workers and plants to nonunion areas

what do we really know about wages the importance of nonreporting and census imputation in the most frequently used microdata sets over a quarter of all respondents now refuse to answer some questions about their incomes the census bureau has dealt with this problem which has been increasing in severity over time by imputing incomes of non respondents their imputation procedure called the hot deck essentially matches nonrespondents with demographically similar donors in this paper we evaluate the census imputation methodology and raise some questions first the census procedure is tied to commonality of events in the population rather than the more appropriate informational content of regressors clearly the census procedure severely understates income in certain occupations because it is based on the apparently invalid assumption that income does not affect reporting propensities it most likely understates average incomes as well

the current economic crisis its nature and the course of academic economics the current crisis has triggered significant debate concerning economic theory and policy largely absent from this debate is an informed discussion of the methods used by economists in analysing the economy and formulating their proposals but method matters here i argue that current academic research practices need to be transformed before real insight can be achieved specifically i indicate why and how a more grounded framework than that presupposed by current research practices facilitates a potentially more fruitful approach to understanding the crisis

the case for nil votes voter behavior under asymmetric information in compulsory and voluntary voting systems in an informational voting environment we study the impact of an explicit nil vote option on the ballot when some voters are uninformed and face the swing voters curse we postulate a simple model of strategic voting in which voters entertain heterogeneous thresholds on legitimacy of different voting actions we predict that introducing a nil vote option reduces the number of uninformed and invalid votes increasing expected welfare in both voluntary and compulsory voting we test our model in a pen and paper laboratory experiment and find that the predictions of the model hold in the data for both voting systems

does education improve citizenship evidence from the united states and the united kingdom abstract many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation but none credibly investigate causal links we explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the united states and the united kingdom we find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the united states but not for the united kingdom our us results approach the uk findings when conditioning on registration possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

explaining voter turnout patterns an information theory voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive this paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information a model is presented in which utility maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice the model provides an explanation for the most important cross sectional voter turnout patterns in addition it suggests a novel explanation for the post 1960 decline in u s participation

ecosystems strong sustainability and the classical circular economy abstract in this article i argue that notions such as ecosystem services and strong sustainability can be best understood and developed within the theoretical framework advanced by the classical political economists in which a circular conception of the economy is provided i also argue that the development of notions such as ecosystem services and strong sustainability has been constrained by the dominance of neoclassical economics which provides a linear conception of the economy and leads to an emphasis on weak sustainability which in turn springs from an emphasis on substitutability and aggregate capital when assessing the relevance of classical political economy for studying ecosystem services and strong sustainability i consider not only the contributions of the classical political economists but also more recent contributions which draw upon the classical perspective such as piero sraffa s and amartya sen s

information aggregation and strategic abstention in large laboratory elections this paper compares strategic abstention in ad hoc committees versus standing committees ad hoc committees meet only once and then dissolve while standing committees the central finding from this study is that most of the predictions of swing voter curse theory hold up in large elections conducted under controlled laboratory conditions there is significant abstention and significant balancing of partisans by uniformed voters and vote balancing increases with the partisan imbalance elections with no partisan imbalance successfully aggregate information and lead to efficient outcomes consistent with swing voter curse theory this efficiency falls off as partisan imbalance increases but to a significantly greater extent than is predicted in equilibrium it is instructive to compare these findings in large elections with results from the elections reported in battaglini et al 2007 all of the qualitative results are the same concerning the comparative statics balancing and abstention one slight difference is that there was less irrational voting for in the small elections than in the large elections except for the 5 9 m 0 treatment where we observed 20 voting for in the small elections compared with 10 voting for in the large elections these differences were reflected in slightly different efficiency results between small and large elections with the comparisons mirroring the differences in voting for more irrational voting results in lower e ciency we conclude that this scaled up study successfully replicates the initial swing voter s curse experiment reported in battaglini et al 2007 obtaining very similar findings in laboratory committees that are three times the size of those in the original study the one caveat is that we found evidence of a slight increase in irrational nonequilibrium behavior voting for in the larger elections whether this trend would continue as election size is further scaled up is an open question a swing voter s curse environment

belief in a just world and redistributive politics international surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate at the same time social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain and pass on to their children a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts this paper offers a model that helps explain i why most people feel such a need to believe in a just world ii why this need and therefore the prevalence of the belief varies considerably across countries iii the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology levels of redistribution labor supply aggregate income and popular perceptions of the poor the model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals desired beliefs or ideological choices resulting in two equilibria a first american equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez faire policies the other european equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state more generally the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions including those concerning money consumption and happiness as well as religion

advertising effects in presidential elections presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity we use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market level advertising on county level vote shares the results indicate significant positive effects of advertising exposures both instrumental variables and fixed effects alter the ad coefficient advertising elasticities are smaller than are typical for branded goods yet significant enough to shift election outcomes for example if advertising were set to zero and all other factors held constant three states electoral votes would have changed parties in 2000 given the narrow margin of victory in 2000 this shift would have resulted in a different president

patents and cumulative innovation causal evidence from the courts cumulative innovation is central to economic growth do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow on innovation this paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent as measured by later citations we exploit random allocation of judges at the u s court of appeal for the federal circuit to control for the endogeneity of patent invalidation we find that patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in subsequent citations to the focal patent on average but the impact is highly heterogeneous patent rights appear to block follow on innovation only in the technology fields of computers electronics and medical instruments moreover the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers entry of small innovators suggesting that patents may impede the democratization of innovation

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

media and political persuasion evidence from russia this paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national tv channel independent from the government it was available to three quarters of russia s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables independent tv decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8 9 percentage points increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6 3 percentage points and decreased turnout by 3 8 percentage points the probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent tv even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections jel d72 l82 p26

public information and electoral bias abstract we present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate these findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences e g through pre election polls or expert forecasts may undermine the democratic process our analysis reveals that if the distribution of political preferences is common knowledge then the unique type symmetric equilibrium leads to a stark neutrality result in which each alternative is equally likely to win the election by contrast when citizens are ignorant about the preference distribution the majority is more likely to win the election and expected voter turnout is lower welfare is therefore unambiguously higher when citizens possess less information about the preference distribution

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

a passion for voting we model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters a voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it we find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects when the signal is sufficiently strong the majority outcome is biased this is a possible reason for persistence of public policies

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

interpreting the capitalist order before and after the marginalist revolution in this article i compare the approaches to process and order of classical political economy and marginalist economics taking into account the implicit ontological commitments of each perspective in their explanation of capitalism i draw on the social ontology developed by tony lawson especially the notion of social positioning the classical political economists studied the capitalist economy as a process of reproduction and distribution of the economic surplus where socio economic order depends on the division of society into social classes after the marginal revolution the classical approach is definitely abandoned in a context where the analysis of human institutions in terms of social positions is progressively replaced by methodological individualism this leads to a conception where the notion of socio economic order is interpreted always in terms of market exchange between individuals and in many cases replaced with a concern with the stability of an equilibrium situation

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

critical ethical naturalism and the transformation of economics in this article i shall argue that critical ethical naturalism an ethical position elaborated by tony lawson can help understand lawson s critique of modern mainstream economics according to critical ethical naturalism human action should be concerned with removing obstacles that lie in the way of human development and flourishing the attempt of transforming economics into a discipline that contributes to human development rather than being an obstacle to such a development can be seen as an exercise driven by critical ethical naturalism albeit in a more implicit way in lawson s earlier writings and in a more explicit way in more recent writings but the significance of critical ethical naturalism as elaborated by lawson goes well beyond the problem of transforming economics and so i shall also highlight some more general implications of this ethical position before addressing the specific problem of transforming economics to do so i will first present lawson s critical ethical naturalism while showing the relevance of his social ontology for the study of ethics at various levels of generality including meta ethics ethical theory and applied ethics

does voting history matter analysing persistence in turnout individuals who vote in one election are also more likely to vote in the next modelling the causal relationship between consecutive voting decisions however is intrinsically difficult as this positive association can exist due to unobserved heterogeneity i e some fixed but unobserved characteristics makes voters consistently turn out to vote or habit formation i e past turnout decisions influence subsequent turnout decisions this paper overcomes this problem using longitudinal data from the british national child development study ncds to examine voting behaviour across three elections utilising techniques developed in the econometrics literature we find that failing to control for unobserved heterogeneity overestimates the extent of habit formation by almost 100 estimating a dynamic model of voter turnout allowing for unobserved heterogeneity implies that voting in one election increases the probability of voting in the next by about 13 this figure is far less than previous studies have identified

moral bias in large elections theory and experimental evidence in this article we provide evidence that voters in large elections tend to vote against their material self interest and to vote for a morally or ethically appealing alternative it may seem puzzling that voters might behave differently in small elections than they do in large ones however we show that such behavior is a logical consequence of voters having a conflict between obtaining a better material outcome and choosing a moral action we develop a simple model of this conflict and show that decreasing the probability that a single vote is decisive i e pivot probability reduces the importance of outcomes relative to actions in voter decision making because pivot probability is generally small in large elections alternatives that are understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones thus compared to the preferences of voters election results will be biased in favor of moral alternatives 1 the model produces a set of predictions that we test in a laboratory experiment to clarify ideas consider a situation in which two outcomes are possible a and b assume that b gives

politics information and the urban bias abstract governments in many ldcs skew public resources towards urban sectors despite a majority of citizens residing in rural areas this paper develops a novel political argument for this urban bias phenomenon in a framework where all voters rural and urban have equal voice but differ in their access to information we argue that this difference is sufficient to give governments an incentive to inefficiently over allocate resources towards urban areas the bias is shown to worsen during adverse economic times leading to increased migration we also examine how voter informativeness affects efficiency of the electoral process in weeding out incompetent governments

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

a behavioral model of turnout the so called paradox of voting is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections if voting is costly and citizens are rational then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile yet many people do vote even in large national elections to address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality citizens learn by simple trial and error repeating satisfactory actions and avoiding unsatisfactory ones their aspiration levels which code current payoffs as satisfactory or unsatisfactory are also endogenous themselves adjusting to experience our main result is that agents who adapt in this manner turn out in substantial numbers even in large electorates and even if voting is costly for everyone standard conceptions of rational behavior do not explain why anyone bothers to vote in a mass election turnout is the paradox that ate rational choice theory fiorina 1990 334 we would like to thank stephen ansolabehere sorin antohi glenn ellison dedre gentner sunil kumar david laitin tze lai arthur lupia elijah millgram lincoln moses scott page tom palfrey john patty paul pfleiderer adam simon joel sobel carole uhlaner three anonymous referees and the participants in the political economics seminar at the gsb the stanford caltech workshop the unc american politics research group the ucla conference on cognition emotion and rational choice panels at the annual meetings of the mpsa and the apsa the agent 2000 workshop the seventh annual wallis conference the cmu pitt colloquium series and the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences seminar series for their helpful comments this paper was written while ting was at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and he thanks unc s department of political science for its support it was revised while bendor was a fellow at the casbs and he is grateful for the center s financial and intellectual support

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

strategic voting over strategic proposals prior research on strategic voting has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad it results in destruction of information and hence makes voters worse off we show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous that is independent of the voting rule used we depart from the existing literature by endogenizing the proposal that is put to a vote and establish that under many circumstances unanimity rule makes voters better off moreover in some cases unanimity rule also makes the proposer better off even when he has diametrically opposing preferences in this case unanimity is the pareto dominant voting rule voters prefer unanimity rule because it induces the proposing individual to make a more attractive proposal the proposing individual prefers unanimity rule because the acceptance probabilities for moderate proposals are higher we apply our results to jury trials and debt restructuring

the relative efficiency of private and public transfers this paper develops a model for comparing the relative efficiency of private versus public financing of transfers a distinctive feature of the analysis is explicit recognition of important weaknesses and strengths of each form of financing a collective consumption good our results show that the preferred financing method is ultimately an empirical issue with the answer depending critically on donor motives and the government s ability to correctly ascertain donors tastes

the tullock bastiat hypothesis inequality transfer curve and the natural distribution of income conventional wisdom has long held that public policy has worked to reduce income inequality in contemporary america or that at least it has the real capability of achieving that goal thurow 1971 for example the evidence is strong that there was a pronounced decline in measured inequality during the 1930s and 1940s a period of greatly increased governmental intervention on both the tax and expenditure side designed to reduce inequality lindert and williamson 1980 increased government expenditures went or so it was argued largely to alleviate the plight of the poor and thus greater federal public aid expenditures brought about greater equality similarly it commonly has been maintained that higher and more progressive federal taxes serve to further reduce inequality in america there is another view however which holds that governmental intervention in markets may have a different impact while he believes the modern welfare state has clearly reduced incomes for the extremely wealthy tullock 1983 has suggested that many government transfers are not transfers from higher to lower income groups but rather transfers within the middle class allowing at least the possibility that governmental transfer activity might not in the aggregate increase income equality in any significant manner perhaps the citizenry are interested in promoting income equality but only to some limited extent in that regard evidence compiled by lebergott 1975 is interesting since the midnineteenth century there has been a remarkable rough constancy in government payment levels to the poor relative to wage levels of common laborers to be sure there have been some periods of increased support for the poor such as during the heyday of the war on poverty in the late 1960s but as tullock has expressed in private correspondence with us the body politic has spasms of feeling more than usually charitable and then goes back to normal the conventional wisdom had previously been questioned by reynolds and smolensky 1977 and for that matter by bastiat 1848 1964 who said that the state produces more poverty than it cures along similar lines lebergott 1975 15 speaking of poor elderly americans observed they are not impoverished in spite of the american capitalist welfare state they are in poverty because of it

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

voting when money and morals conflict an experimental test of expressive voting abstract moral considerations may matter much in voting because the costs of expressing support for a morally worthy cause may be low in a referendum these costs depend on whether a voter expects to affect the outcome of the referendum to test the low cost theory of expressive voting we experimentally investigate a proposal to tax everyone and to donate tax revenues the analysis of expectations and voting decisions shows that the low cost theory fails to explain voting decisions instead we find that voters tend to approve of the proposal if they expect others to approve too

ignorance and bias in collective decisions we study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule in the experiment as predicted by bayesian equilibrium voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule as opposed to bayesian equilibrium predictions however many committee members vote when uninformed moreover uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information we show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases

self confidence and personal motivation the maintenance and enhancement of self esteem has always been identified as a fundamental human impulse philosophers writers educators and of course psychologists have all emphasized the crucial role played by self image in motivation affect and social interactions the aim of this chapter is to bring these concerns into the realm of economic analysis and show that this has important implications for how agents process information and make decisions conversely the tools of economic modelling can help shed light on a number of apparently irrational behaviours documented by psychologists