This paper focuses on the introduction of higher re-election bars for office-holders. In particular, we assess which re-election bars are optimal when incumbents gain socially valuable experience in office. We develop a two-period model in which the output of a public good depends on an office-holder’s effort, ability and experience. When campaigning for election to an open seat in the first period, candidates can make binding offers of the minimum share of the votes they must obtain to be re-elected in the second period, should they win in the first. We prove that, in equilibrium, both candidates offer the same vote-share threshold, that it exceeds 50%, and that it is socially optimal. The higher threshold increases the expected effort over both periods and tends to raise the expected level of ability of office-holders in the second. Together, these effects outweigh the expected loss of incumbents’ acquired experience, which results from their reduced chances of getting re-elected with the higher bar. The socially optimal vote threshold is increasing in the value of experience. All of the above conclusions would hold if the optimal threshold were set instead by law.
Political scientists frequently use qualitative evidence to support or evaluate the empirical applicability of formal models. Despite this widespread practice, neither the qualitative methods literature nor research on empirically evaluating formal models systematically address the topic. This article makes three contributions to bridge this gap. First, it demonstrates that formal models and qualitative evidence are indeed frequently combined in current research. Second, it shows how process tracing can be as important a tool for empirically assessing models as statistical testing, because models and process tracing share a common focus on understanding causal mechanisms. Last, it provides new guidelines for using process tracing that focus on issues specific to the modeling enterprise, illustrated with examples from recent research.
Citizen initiatives and referendums play an important role in modern democracies, from treaty ratifications in the European Union to gay marriage in California, to the control of foreign workers in Switzerland. Departing from the classic opposition between direct and representative democracy, we study the equilibrium effects of direct democracy institutions on the incentives and selection of elected officials. We find that facilitating direct democracy induces a negative spiral on politicians’ role and contribution to society, which may dominate any direct benefit. The theory offers predictions on reelection probabilities and politicians’ performance consistent with recent evidence from the US states.
This paper studies pork barrel spending in a model where two symmetric parties compete for an electorate consisting of groups which have different ideological preferences. In equilibrium, party electoral promises decrease with voter ideological biases, and a "swing voter" outcome emerges. In this context, a problem of exclusion from party transfer plans arises which depends on ideology distribution. Groups with extreme ideological preferences are excluded from these plans, and also within moderate groups a share of voters receives a nil transfer from the parties. This exclusion problem is generally reduced if a transformation of the electorate occurs which decreases the polarization of the distribution of ideology.
While a number of studies have examined the politics of tariff decision-making in the United States, little work has examined the subsequent political effects of tariff policy. We help fill this gap in the literature by analyzing—both theoretically and empirically—the electoral implications of tariff revision. Specifically, we investigate the veracity of the Cannon Thesis—the proposition advanced by Speaker Joe Cannon in 1910 that the majority party in the U.S. House was punished when it made major revisions to the tariff. We find that from 1877 to 1934 major tariff revisions were, on average, associated with a significant loss of votes for majority-party members—both regionally and nationally—that translated into a loss of House seats. We find support for the notion that major tariff revisions generated inordinate uncertainty among various business interests, which the opposition party could then use (by leveraging fear and market instability) to mobilize its base and gain ground in the following election. Our results provide a new explanation for the delegation of tariff policymaking to the executive branch.
The lion’s share of policy in the United States is made by administrative agencies. Agencies not only make policy choices, they must also implement policy effectively. Oversight institutions play an integral role in the policymaking process by monitoring, through review of agency policy actions, both policymaking tasks. Through analysis of a formal model I develop a theory of policymaking between agencies and courts and show that review can impact agency effort choices even when bureaucratic subversion is not a concern. At times the court has no impact on this effort and the agency is unconstrained. However, when the agency’s effort dictates whether or not the court defers to the agency’s actions judicial review does affect effort decisions. In this setting, review can either strengthen or, counter-intuitively, weaken agency effort incentives. Implications for executive and congressional oversight are discussed in light of these results.
Political parties in US politics are becoming increasingly polarized, with a growing number of extreme candidates entering electoral races. Why would extremists challenge more moderate opponents, since their chances of winning are supposedly very slim? I develop a model of electoral competition and endogenous entry to show that extremists rely on the possibility that the campaign might reveal information about the opponents’ quality that can induce some voters to change their electoral decision. The weight voters place on candidates’ valence determines the incidence of uncontested elections and the degree of asymmetry in polarization of the candidates’ policy positions in contested elections. Finally, I extend the model to consider asymmetric information about individual valence levels. I show that uncontested races are still possible in equilibrium, that in contested races at least one candidate has high valence, and the valence-advantaged candidate can be the one with the more extreme policy stance.
By incorporating electoral uncertainty and policy dynamics into three two-period models of the appointments process, we show that gridlock may not always occur under divided government, contrary to the findings of static one-shot appointments models. In these cases, contrary to the ally principle familiar to students of bureaucratic politics, the president or the confirmer is willing to move the court away from his or her ideal point as a way to insulate against worse outcomes in period two. By demonstrating how a simple set of changes to a workhorse model can change equilibrium outcomes significantly, this paper provides a foundation for reconsidering the static approach to studying political appointments.
Partisan voters are optimistic about electoral outcomes: their estimates of the probability of electoral success for their party are substantially higher than the average among the electorate. This has large potential implications for political bargaining. Optimistic electoral expectations make costly bargaining delay look more favourable, which may induce partisans to punish their party for agreeing to a compromise rather than waiting, for example by not turning out to vote. Party decision makers should take this into account when bargaining. We set up and analyse a simple game theoretic model to explore the implications of partisan optimism for political bargaining. We show that increased optimism among a partisan group leads to a stronger bargaining position for their party, but may hurt its electoral prospects. Another main finding is that even high levels of partisan optimism do not in themselves cause inefficient bargaining delay.
We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the US Senate. We propose that nominations to the same level court be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with storable votes, allowing each senator to allocate freely across the list a fixed number of total votes. Although each nomination is decided by simple majority, storable votes make it possible for the minority to win occasionally, but only when the relative importance its members assign to a nomination is higher than the relative importance assigned by the majority. Numerical simulations approximate the composition of the 113th and 114th Senates. Under plausible assumptions motivated by a game theoretic model, we find that a minority of 45 senators would be able to win about 20 percent of confirmation battles when the majority party controls the presidency, and between 40 and 60 percent when the president identifies with the minority party. For most parameter values, the possibility of minority victories increases aggregate welfare.
Why do elites in some authoritarian regimes but not others remove from power the leaders who harm their interests? We develop a formal theory explaining this. The theory shows how elites’ ambition prevents them from controlling authoritarian leaders. Because ambitious elites are willing to stage coups to acquire power even when the leader is good, ambition renders elites’ claims that the leader’s actions harm them less credible, making the other elites less likely to support coups. We show that the impact of the proportion of competent politicians on personalist regimes is non-monotonic: personalist regimes are most likely to emerge not only when there are few competent politicians but also when there are lots of them. We also provide insight into which elites become coup-plotters. The theory explains the emergence of personalist regimes, the frequency of coups, and why some authoritarian countries enjoy a more competent leadership than others.
This paper presents a specific dynamic extension to the model outlined by Jackson and Morelli (Political bias and war. The American Economic Review 97(4): 1353–1373). In particular, we focus on the implications of a long-lived leader who possesses bias towards or against war that potentially differs from the country (s)he represents. Bargaining and war outcomes are characterized in this environment. We emphasize three results: (1) war sometimes occurs only after substantial delay; (2) if it is possible to select a leader, a country will always select a leader who is biased towards war; (3) when the distribution of power is uneven, a country might select an aggressive leader who eventually leads the country into war. If applied in the context of a civil war model, the third result implies that particularly disadvantaged rebel groups might select aggressive leaders to bargain with the central government and, potentially, incite conflict.
Many regimes, particularly autocracies, hold elections where the ruling regime’s victory is a foregone conclusion. This paper provides a formal analysis of how these non-competitive elections affect citizen welfare compared to a non-electoral baseline. To do so, I first develop a game-theoretic framework that captures many extant theories of why regimes hold non-competitive elections, which are modeled solely as a public signal of the regime’s strength. Incumbents hold non-competitive elections to signal strength or gather information, which allows the regime to manage political interactions more effectively. However, even though non-competitive elections are a useful tool for (autocratic) regimes, they are also valuable to citizens. This is because citizens can also utilize the information generated by the election, and may receive more transfers, less repression, or more responsive policy than they would with no elections.
The existence of authoritarian elections raises a number of questions regarding the strategies of political opposition. What explains the choice of strategy among key opponents of a regime? What determines when opposition groups willingly participate in elections and when they engage in electoral boycott? To understand the opposition’s strategic choices, we develop a formal model of government–opposition interaction under authoritarianism. We contribute to the literature on election boycotts in emphasizing the effect of uncertainty about the strength of the regime on strategic decisions. The model produces predictions for several key features of authoritarian elections, including the decision to participate, boycott, and mobilize against the regime. Importantly and uniquely, the model provides an explanation for variation in opposition strategies within a particular country. Using the case of Jordan, we illustrate how the results of the model can be used to explain variation in opposition strategy across parliamentary elections.
Observing substantial variations in Senate confirmation durations, existing studies have tried to explain when the Senate takes more or less time to confirm presidential nominees. However, they have largely ignored the president’s incentives to nominate someone who he expects will be delayed and do not specify conditions under which delay occurs. To improve on existing literature, I develop a dynamic model of presidential appointments in which the Senate decides whether to delay as well as whether to confirm the nominee. The model shows that the president rationally chooses a nominee who he expects the Senate will delay if the status quo belongs to a certain interval in a one-dimensional policy space. Moreover, the president sometimes chooses a nominee who may fail to gain confirmation after a delay. Finally, the effects of important factors on expected confirmation duration are analyzed: most interestingly, as presidential popularity increases, the Senate takes longer to confirm the nominee.
Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them. In a tournament style analysis, the model characterizes how contingent allocation of prizes based on relative levels of support affects equilibrium voting behavior. In addition to standard notions of pivotality, voters influence the distribution of prizes across groups. Such prize pivotality supports positive voter turnout even in non-competitive electoral settings. The analysis shows that competition for a prize awarded to the most supportive group is only stable when two groups actively support a party. However, competition among groups to avoid punishment is stable in environments with any number of groups. We conclude by examining implications for endogenous group formation and how politicians structure the allocation of rewards and punishments.
This paper considers an electoral model in which an incumbent and a challenger have ideological policy preferences that are private information. The incumbent may bias pre-electoral policies to signal preferences to the electorate with the aim of affecting the outcome of the election. When the two candidates are of completely different types, such a policy bias can occur only in a moderate direction. However, when their possible types overlap, a policy bias can be created in either a moderate or an extreme direction.
Previous works on vote-buying have highlighted that an informational advantage allows party machines to efficiently distribute discretionary transfers to voters. However, the microfoundations that allow party machines to electorally exploit their informational advantage have not yet been elucidated. The probabilistic model in this paper provides the microfounded mechanism that explains how party machines translate, with a voter-customized strategy, their informational advantage into more efficient allocation of discretionary transfers and win elections with higher probabilities than their contenders. Furthermore, its probabilistic design allows the model to account for why party machines target their own supporters with discretionary transfers. In-depth interviews with 120 brokers from Argentina motivate the model.
This paper provides three versions of May’s theorem on majority rule, adapted to the one-dimensional model common in formal political modeling applications. The key contribution is that single peakedness of voter preferences allows us to drop May’s restrictive positive responsiveness axiom. The simplest statement of the result holds when voter preferences are single peaked and linear (no indifferences), in which case a voting rule satisfies anonymity, neutrality, Pareto, and transitivity of weak social preference if and only if the number of individuals is odd and the rule is majority rule.
This study contrasts the rationalist and psychologist approaches to information failure as the cause of crisis escalation and war. Building on the psychological insights on misperception, it presents a simple game-theoretic model of crisis bargaining, where signals are subject to perceptual errors and thereby multiple interpretations. The model allows us to analyze the interplay between the problem of misrepresentation in sending signals and the problem of misperception in forming beliefs. The analysis offers a rationalist logic of signaling and perception, which links Bayesian learning, incentive problems, misperception, and war. The analysis also shows that misperception generates more than pathologies in crises—misperception, under the right condition, makes signals fully informative, reduces the risk of war, and attenuates the adverse impact of incomplete information on the risk of crisis escalation and war.
When do voters win? We derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests in a setting where politicians can be influenced by contributions from special interests, and are also motivated by electoral incentives. We show that increasing office holding benefits, increasing political competition, decreasing potential rents to special interests, and increasing the salience of policy imply improved policies for the representative voter. We examine panel data on the ratio of taxes paid by individuals relative to corporations in the United States and show that it is negatively correlated with political competition, office holding benefits, and policy salience, as predicted by the model.
Why are judicial nominees allowed to refuse to answer questions about important issues that could come before the courts? We address this question by examining the information environment surrounding judicial nominations. Using the Supreme Court as our example, we formulate a model that departs from the existing literature by incorporating the fact that the Senate often does not know what type of candidate the President is trying to appoint. Our model shows when the President and Senate are ideologically divergent, low information about nominees’ views results in the Senate occasionally rejecting acceptable nominees. However, when the President and Senate are ideologically close, the President benefits from leaving the process opaque—that is, allowing his nominees to avoid answering tough questions. Thus, even though low information can be costly to both parties, keeping the process nontransparent shields the President from being penalized for selecting more like-minded (and possibly extreme) judges.
Sequential majority voting over interconnected binary decisions can lead to the overruling of unanimous consensus. We characterize, within the general framework of judgement aggregation, when this happens for some sequence of decisions. The large class of aggregation spaces for which this vulnerability is present includes the aggregation of preference orderings over at least four alternatives, the aggregation of equivalence relations over at least four objects, resource allocation problems, and most committee selection problems.
We also ask whether it is possible to design respect for unanimity by choosing appropriate decision sequences (independently from the ballot). Remarkably, while this is not possible in general, it can be accomplished in some interesting special cases. Generalizing and sharpening a classic result by Shepsle and Weingast, we show that respect for unanimity can indeed be thus guaranteed in the cases of the aggregation of weak preference orderings, linear preference orderings, and equivalence relations. By contrast, impossibility results can be obtained for the aggregation of acyclic relations and separable preference orderings. As a key technical tool, we introduce the notion of a covering fragment that serves as a counterpart and generalization of the notions of covering relation/uncovered set in voting theory.
Studies have demonstrated that altruistic punishment can motivate pro-social behavior in settings that require group cooperation. This paper extends these findings to the voter participation game. Using a laboratory experiment we find that some subjects are willing to punish abstainers and that punishment increases participation. However, not all subjects respond to punishment equally. We find that punishment increases turnout more among subjects with a egoist social value orientation (SVO) than among subjects with a pro-social SVO. This suggests that increased opportunities for altruistic punishment do not just increase participation, but may also change the composition of the electorate.
Pareto-dominated agreements are shown to prevail with positive probability in an open set of status quo in a Markov perfect equilibrium of a one-dimensional dynamic bargaining game. This equilibrium is continuous, symmetric, with dynamic preferences that satisfy the single-plateau property. It is also shown that there does not exist a symmetric equilibrium with single-peaked preferences.
We specify the level of polarization in a two-party legislature as an explicit function of three factors: (1) the ideological heterogeneity of district median voters, (2) the distance between candidates of different parties in the same or ideologically comparable districts, and (3) partisan bias in choosing between candidates equidistant from the median voter. Our key empirical finding, reinforced by two alternative methods of calculation, is that, while changes in each factor have contributed to the present day extremely high level polarization in the US House of Representatives, at least 80% of the growth in that polarization from 1956 through 2008 can be attributed to a dramatic increase in the second of these factors: party differentiation at the district level.
Political parties field heterogeneous candidates and send a variety of messages about their policy positions. Yet most voting models maintain that office-seeking parties should enforce intraparty homogeneity and cultivate clear party reputations. This article reconciles theory with reality by identifying a strategic rationale for parties to pursue heterogeneity. I develop a model in which two parties each select a distribution of potential candidates to compete in an upcoming election. The model demonstrates that well-positioned parties should indeed offer homogeneous candidate teams, but that parties with platforms distant from the median voter should cast a wide net. Extensions allow for multiple candidate signals, voters who care about party platforms and candidates’ positions, and voter uncertainty.
This article uses agent-based computer simulation to investigate the dynamics of policy diffusion through learning. It compares these dynamics across state systems in which policy-makers possess different capabilities to learn about policy effectiveness: independent decision-makers focusing on own experiences vs. interdependent social learners relying heavily on experiences of others. The simulation can thus compare policy adoption patterns in the presence and absence of policy diffusion within a controlled setting. The simulation makes two propositions. First, it supports the existing critique that relying on the identification of policy clusters can lead researchers to draw false positive conclusions about the relevance of policy diffusion. Second, it suggests that relying on the identification of policy volatility under political stability minimizes this risk.
We use a game-theoretical model and results from laboratory experiments to study the process by which subordinated regions of a country can obtain a more favorable political status. In our theoretical model a dominant and a dominated region first interact through a political process. This process involves two referenda, one at the level of the country as a whole and one at the level of the subordinated region. If the political process succeeds, then the new autonomy level is implemented. If this process fails, then both regions engage in a costly political conflict in which both sides can spend resources to win the upper hand. We show that in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of our game the voting process leads to an intermediate arrangement acceptable for both parts so that the costly political struggle never occurs. In contrast, in our experiments we observe frequent fighting involving high material losses.
Moser et al. provide a formalization of heresthetics, the "art of political strategy", in collective choice settings. In doing so they introduce the heresthetically stable set as the set of outcomes least susceptible to manipulation of issue dimension. In this note we correct a small error in the original paper, and close several open questions asked there in. We examine the heresthetically stable set as a tournament solution, establishing some basic properties it possesses, and many it does not posses. In addition, we relate the heresthetically stable set to other tournament solutions, notably the weak uncovered and refinements thereof. We find lack of vulnerability to heresthetic manipulation is contrary to many desirable properties of choice functions, notably majoritarian support.
In a principal–agent relationship, how should principals budget time for oversight when oversight activity is not instantaneous? We develop a formal model of resource allocation by a principal monitoring multiple agents, where the principal faces a dynamic budgeting problem. Our model reveals a tension between the value of holding resources in reserve to maintain the threat of an audit and the direct policy gains of monitoring activity. We show that as the frequency of principal–agent conflict increases, there are some conditions under which the most effective strategy for a principal is to allocate less and less of their total time to monitoring. The model has important implications for the empirical analysis of a monitoring setting where a principal oversees multiple agents.
I develop a formal model of Supreme Court opinion-writing in an environment of uncertainty. In particular, the model captures how the Supreme Court will optimally design the specificity of its legal rules. The model focuses on the tradeoff between more precise rules which are controlling in a smaller subset of cases against less precise rules, which have wider applicability but yield less certain outcomes. When the basic model is considered in a dynamic world in which the Court is able to hear multiple cases, it yields insights about how the factual representativeness of a case and the clarity of existing precedent jointly affect its optimal opinion-writing and willingness to hear new cases. These last implications provide theoretical foundations for theoretical and empirical questions about rule-making, case selection, and the construction of doctrine.
How do politicians buy votes in secret ballot elections? I present a model of vote buying in which a broker sustains bribed voter’s compliance by conditioning future bribes on whether her candidate’s votes reach an optimally set threshold. Unlike previous explanations of compliance, the threshold mechanism does not require brokers to observe individual voter’s political preferences or even vote totals of the bribed voters. I show that when there is uncertainty about voter’s preferences, compliance can be sustained as long as electoral results of small groups are available. If preferences are observed however, vote buying is not deterred by higher aggregation of electoral results. I also find that vote buying is facilitated when voters care about the welfare of other voters. Using survey data from Nigeria, I provide evidence consistent with the model’s results.
Political clientelism is a dyadic relation in which a politician (the patron) gives material goods and services to a citizen (the client), in exchange for political support. If, at different stages of this relationship, both the patron and the client have incentives to defect and not honor informal agreements, what makes clientelism self-enforcing? The following paper presents a game-theoretical model of political clientelism in which a candidate disciplines a majority of voters through the promise of a future flow of benefits. A mixed strategy involving a randomized allocation of resources among constituencies makes clientelism feasible when the politician’s action is contingent on the result of the election. Higher campaign budgets and lower voter aversion towards clientelistic parties, as well as higher patience and higher heterogeneity across groups of voters, make clientelism more likely. Swing voters tend to be gifted more frequently than core supporters with this frequency increasing as group heterogeneity increases, presenting a positive association.
Stalled progress on explaining institutional change is, in part, the result of two conceptual challenges that hinder effective theory building: concept stretching and concept proliferation. These problems affect a hallmark concept of institutional change, path dependence, whose usefulness has been curtailed by the variety of meanings attributed to it. This article seeks to remedy concept stretching and proliferation by developing a taxonomy of institutional change explanations. Starting with the core attributes of path dependence, increasing returns and endogeneity, we use the procedure of ‘negative identification’ to derive a logically complete set of possible change explanations. The result is a taxonomy in which the scope of path dependence is delimited vis-à-vis other change explanations. We illustrate the usefulness of the taxonomy by assessing stretching in the literature.
I present a model in which a nation must decide whether to reveal its military capacity when the nation faces two possible adversaries. One adversary would be inclined to attack if the country has a weak military capacity, and the other adversary would be inclined to attack preemptively if the country is developing a strong military capacity. I derive conditions under which it is an equilibrium for the nation to be ambiguous about its military capacity as a function of the hawkishness of the adversaries and the accuracy of the adversaries’ national intelligence.
Since the introduction of economic theory to political science, theorists have argued that discussion could serve as an effective information shortcut if individuals communicate with experts who have similar preferences. Previous experimental and survey studies have found mixed results for the efficacy of social communication, but they have not observed the process of discussion partner selection which is so central to the previous models. This paper presents the results of a group-based experiment that allows for discussion partner selection. We fail to find aggregate enlightenment through social communication: lesser informed subjects are helped by social communication, but better informed subjects are harmed. This result is caused in part because subjects are too willing to seek out more expert discussion partners who have different ex ante preferences.
Over the past three decades multilateral financial aid has become an important institutional arrangement enabling environmental cooperation between developed and developing countries. However, previous research suggests that financial institutions are largely ineffective in achieving environmental goals. I show that financial assistance can be successful in increasing recipients’ contributions to environmental programs, thereby promoting environmental protection. This positive impact of aid, I argue, should be attributed to the effects of donor-recipient interactions that can alter incentives of recipient governments and induce their cooperation rather than to capacity building through inflows of aid. I study environmental assistance by first developing a game-theoretic model of strategic interaction between the donor and aid recipients. To avoid a common methodological problem of misspecification and to unify theory with empirical testing, I then derive a strategic statistical model and conduct empirical tests using a new dataset on projects financed by the Global Environment Facility.
We examine strategic voting in open primary elections by developing a Poisson voting game. In the model, two parties simultaneously hold primary elections, with two candidates competing in each party. Each voter chooses to vote for one of the four candidates without knowing how many other voters participate in each primary. Analyzing the model, we investigate what types of strategic crossover voting occur in equilibrium and under what circumstances they occur. In particular, we focus on two types of crossover voting: hedging (voting for the moderate candidate of the opposite party) and raiding (voting for the extreme candidate of the opposite party). We show that the pattern of strategic voting in equilibrium critically depends on candidate positions and uncertainty about the outcome in the general election.
Pundits, politicians, and political scientists alike often bemoan the long delays in filling both executive and judicial vacancies. However, most political science scholarship has ignored why executives delay nomination, instead focusing on why legislatures delay confirmation. In this article, I develop a formal model that seeks to explain the causes and consequences of both types of delay. By incorporating the effects of time, nominee competence, and nonpolicy incentives, the model provides a number of important findings: (1) the passage of time exacerbates the executive’s first-mover advantage and may result in less-competent nominees; (2) confirmation delay results when the executive’s costs of searching for new nominees are sufficiently high and/or the pool of potential candidates for nomination is sufficiently incompetent; and (3) nomination delay results when the executive’s internal vetting process indicates a candidate for nomination is sufficiently incompetent relative to the pool of potential nominees.
This paper offers a new electoral geography perspective on two stylized facts that do not fit easily with our current understanding of the implications of electoral rules for electoral politics and social policy: (1) proportional representation (PR) electoral rules are not always associated with more generous social spending. In some cases, we observe comparatively high levels of social spending in majoritarian single-member district (SMD) systems. (2) Contrary to our theoretical expectations, national two-party competition occurs rarely, even under SMD rules. Here, I demonstrate the importance of electoral geography through a series of analytic examples that are based on a simple model of electoral politics, and in which all possible combinations of electoral boundaries, rules, and voter locations are manipulated.
We present a formal model explaining that US presidents strategically unionize federal employees to reduce bureaucratic turnover and ‘anchor’ the ideological composition of like-minded agency workforces. To test our model’s predictions, we advance a method of estimating bureaucratic ideology via the campaign contributions of federal employees; we then use these bureaucratic ideal point estimates in a comprehensive empirical test of our model. Consistent with our model’s predictions, our empirical tests find that federal employee unionization stifles agency turnover, suppresses ideological volatility when the president’s partisanship changes, and occurs more frequently in agencies ideologically proximate to the president.
Within the international system, states frequently fight even when opponents have little or nothing to offer them. Yet, international relations scholars envision conflict as a means for states to acquire some amount of a desired good, and view bargaining through this lens. This paper presents a model in which war and conflict bargaining can serve as signals to potentially hostile third parties. The analysis indicates that states sometimes have incentives to bargain harder than they would otherwise, in order to conceal information from future enemies. This can lead to war, even when a peaceful settlement should be possible.
How can governments manage transnational problems when other governments refuse to cooperate? We examine the conditions under which regulation in one jurisdiction can induce other jurisdictions to regulate. The analysis emphasizes the relationship between public policy, private actors, and technological change. We find that ambitious regulations in large markets can induce private actors to make technological changes that lower the cost of regulation for less ambitious jurisdictions. Our model specifies the conditions under which such transboundary effects are possible, qualifying the received wisdom on global collective action by outlining conditions under which unilateral regulatory leadership can be effective. Case studies of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells provide empirical support.
Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such power to the majority. In this paper, I develop a theory of lawmaking in an incomplete-information environment. The model allows for information transmission through both majority agenda-setting and minority speech making. This is one of the first models of parties in Congress that allows for the minority to have an active and vital role. Comparative statics show that, for a wide set of parameter values, the institutional arrangement proposed is optimal for the floor median when compared to strict majoritarian and minority-free settings.
Why do democracies sometimes fight long, politically divisive wars that end poorly? I argue that electoral accountability, induced by party competition, can sometimes promote this and other tragic outcomes. To demonstrate this, I analyze a bargaining model in which one state is conceived of as a unitary actor while the other consists of a government and an opposition that is motivated both by electoral ambition and concern for the national interest. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the opposition’s concern for the national interest that causes the most tragic outcomes, as they may choose not to advocate peace when doing so would prevent war so as to avoid undercutting the government’s bargaining position. I close with a discussion of why the United States appears to be particularly prone to such tragic outcomes, treating the Vietnam War as an illustrative example.
States often delegate compliance monitoring to international monitors. It is commomly assumed that these monitors will report accurately on the information they gather. However, the effectiveness of compliance monitors varies widely. Monitors may fail to collect information about non-compliance or even collude with non-compliant states and deliberately fail to report the information they gather. To explain this variation, we present a formal theory of how structural conditions and institutional designs lead to different levels of monitoring efficacy. We show that international institutions can improve monitoring by avoiding ruthless sanctions, and that intrinsically motivated monitors generally achieve better outcomes than neutral bureaucrats. Our theory contributes to the broad literature on international institutional design and treaty effectiveness.
While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another.
We remedy this by specifying an executive appointment model jointly incorporating delays and appointee ideologies. Besides predicting appointees’ equilibrium ideologies, and contrary to past claims about the relationship between ideology and duration, this theory details how ideological differences between the president and his opposition do not straightforwardly induce longer delays; rather, effects are conditioned by factors such as the office’s policy importance and divided government. Additionally, different pathways for parties to impact appointee ideology and duration are flexibly incorporated. Empirically, theoretical hypotheses receive support and evidence of parties impacting Senate trade-offs between delay and policy outcomes and successfully pressuring key members over high-stakes appointments are uncovered.
This paper addresses two problems: how can we identify a verisimilar policy space and how can we detect Nash equilibria in this space for parties’ policy positions? We argue that the ideological party positions that voters perceive are fixed during the time span of one electoral campaign and that they constrain the policies parties offer the electorate in search of optimal vote shares. We apply the valence model developed by Schofield to party competition during the German federal election campaign 2009. First three issue scales are combined with a left–right scale to form one homogeneous space in which equilibrium locations of parties are sought. The results show that local Nash equilibria in this combined space depend heavily on the start values and are implausible. Fixing the ideological dimension leads to a stable and meaningful equilibrium configuration in which large parties move to more central positions and smaller parties move to more peripheral positions in the policy space.
We study deterrence in sequential move conflicts, modeled as a contest. We bias the model in favor of peace by assuming that under complete information deterrence is achieved and peace prevails. We show that under incomplete information about states’ types (resolve) the chances of deterrence decrease rapidly. Studying a uniform type distribution, we show that the finer the type space becomes the more resolve a defending state must have to support deterrence in equilibrium. In the limit, as types occur on a continuum, deterrence is possible only under relatively extreme conditions.
This article presents experiments that analyze the strategic behavior of voters under three voting systems: plurality rule, approval voting, and the Borda count. Applying a level-k reasoning model approach, strategic behavior is found to be significantly different under each treatment (voting system). Plurality rule leads voters to play in the most sophisticated (i.e. best response), but not necessarily insincere, manner. Thus, this voting system displays at the same time the highest incidence of best responses and of sincere votes. The opposite holds for the Borda count games, where voters depart from their sincere strategy the most, without playing the best response strategy. Approval voting shows intermediate levels of sophistication and sincere behavior.
On the basis of a static general equilibrium analysis premised on frictionless exchange conditions in competitive markets, John Roemer’s General Theory of Exploitation and Class challenges the canonical Marxian account of capitalist exploitation by arguing that unequal distribution of economically scarce productive assets suffices to enable the exploitation of labor by capital. Marxian critics have dismissed Roemer’s characterization partly on the presumption that capitalist exploitation requires direct capitalist control of the labor process, but offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical basis for this categorical claim. This paper seeks to advance the debate by considering conditions enabling equilibrium exploitation in capital–labor transactions for which workers control the production process and, as a consequence, capital suppliers cannot directly observe either labor effort or the product of that effort. The formal argument of the paper is animated by reference to the historical literature on proto-industrial forms such as the Kauf (artisanal) and Verlag (putting-out) systems of production, as well as Marx’s own analysis of pre-industrial capital relations in drafts of Capital preceding his publication of Volume I.
This paper proposes four concepts of exploitation that encapsulate common uses of the word in social interactions: unfair advantage, unequal exchange, using persons as means, and free-riding. It briefly discusses how these concepts appear in the literature (the first two are prominent in Roemer’s classical work), and then examines how these forms of exploitation are related and how they can occur.
We consider the behavior of an incumbent that can deploy local public goods and private goods to buy votes, and is unable to verify vote choice but capable of monitoring voter turnout, a common scenario in secret-ballot polities. As advanced by recent literature, the ability to monitor turnout rather than vote choice implies that politicians should use targetable private goods to mobilize voters. However, politicians also deploy non-excludable local public goods, which have low mobilization potential because of free-rider incentives. We argue that vote-buying politicians reserve local public goods for loyal constituencies (where they enjoy support from most voters that bother to turn out) and provide private goods in other constituencies where they gain from motivating less committed supporters to turn out. We test aggregate-level implications of our theory on Venezuela’s social programs.
We investigate the problem of motivating terrorist operatives for suicide missions and conventional terrorist attacks when operatives have either self-interested or social preferences that are not observable by the terrorist organization. We characterize the screening mechanism for selecting operatives according to their social preferences and determine under what conditions a terrorist group will prefer to utilize suicide versus conventional tactics. For example, when operatives are intrinsically motivated and likely to be represented in the pool of potential recruits, a terrorist organization will be more likely to employ suicide attacks as its sole tactic of choice.
How do polls influence strategic voting under proportional representation? This paper derives a strategic calculus of voting for coalitions that generates testable predictions about the effects of polls on strategic voting in elections involving four or more parties. Incentives of leftist voters to vote for a centrist over a noncentrist party are shown to increase with the difference in expected seats between the prospective right-wing and left-wing coalitions (and vice versa for rightist voters). Centrist voters’ incentives to vote for a center-left vs a center-right party are also shown to depend on the relative strengths of the right-wing and left-wing coalitions. Importantly, the strategic voting incentives studied here do not depend on the presence of electoral thresholds or other features of the electoral system. The predictions are tested with survey data from parliamentary elections in Austria and Germany.
Tough anti-terrorism policies are often defended by focusing on a fixed minority of dangerous people who prefer violent outcomes, and arguing that toughness reduces the risk of terrorism from this group. This reasoning implicitly assumes that tough policies do not increase the group of ‘potential terrorists’, i.e. of people with violent preferences. Preferences and their level of violence are treated as stable, exogenously fixed features. To avoid this unrealistic assumption, I formulate a model in which policies can ‘brutalise’ or ‘appease’ someone’s personality, i.e. his preferences. This follows the endogenous preferences approach, popular elsewhere in political science and economics. I formally decompose the effect of toughness into a (desirable) deterrence effect and an (undesirable) provocation effect. Whether toughness is overall efficient depends on which effect overweighs. I show that neglecting provocation typically leads to toughness exaggeration. This suggests that some tough anti-terrorism policies observable in the present and past can be explained by a neglect of provocation.
While there are many formal models that generate predictions about polarization, only a handful address the question of how, with no change in electoral rules, levels of polarization can dramatically vary over time, as they have in the US House during 150 years of two-party competition. We propose a model that emphasizes national party constraints on district candidates’ ability to locate at positions far from the national party stance. The model predicts a close relation between tight tethers maintained by the national parties and congressional polarization, suggests implications for political competition, and generates the empirically accurate prediction that partisan polarization and within-party differentiation are negatively correlated. When the tethers of the two parties are not equally strong, the model suggests modifications to the conditional party governance approach and helps explain ideological shift/drift affecting both parties, with the party with the tighter tether moving the other party toward its ideological wake.
A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judicial ‘minimalism’ holds that judges should rule narrowly because they lack the knowledge required to make general rules to govern unknown future circumstances. In this paper, we challenge this argument. Our argument focuses on the fact that, by shaping the legal landscape, judicial decisions affect the policies that are adopted, and that may therefore subsequently be challenged before the court. Using a simple model, we demonstrate that in such a dynamic setting, in which current decisions shape future cases, judges with limited knowledge confront incentives to rule broadly precisely because they are ignorant.
I examine the impact of depth and rigidity in international trade agreements. Increasing the depth of required cooperation lowers the likelihood of full compliance and the stability of a trade regime. In contrast, increasing the rigidity of an agreement raises the likelihood of full compliance and lowers stability. Both depth and rigidity can lower tariffs if a state does not defect from its treaty obligations. I argue that if we control for the benefits of trade liberalization, then observable treaties will have a negative relationship between depth and rigidity. Deep agreements will be flexible, while shallow agreements will be rigid.
We formulate a game-theoretical model of closed rule legislation in the presence of informational asymmetries. In the model an agenda setter with private information proposes a policy to a legislature. The legislature appoints an oversight committee to monitor the agenda setter. We study the rationale for this appointment, and analyze the equilibrium oversight committee member choices for the legislators. We conclude that it is optimal for the legislators to appoint oversight committee members who are as far from them as is the agenda setter, but in the opposite direction, rather than do the monitoring themselves. The appointment of such oversight committee members represents a credible means for the legislators to commit to reject proposals that they only marginally prefer to the status quo.
The use of neuroscience in political science inquiry has steadily increased over the last decade, yet many remain skeptical regarding its usefulness in explaining outcomes and solving puzzles. In this article we develop ramifications of the neuroscientific paradigm of the ‘social brain’ and critically assess its utility for political science. We argue that this model has promise in three distinct areas of research: challenging assumptions, clarifying conceptions, and specifying conditions. We then apply this theoretical framework to a specific puzzle in political science that transcends sub-field distinctions: social norm compliance. We argue that utilizing the social brain paradigm allows us to clarify precisely what social norms are at a physical level, challenge the underlying assumptions of current social norm research, and specify precise and testable conditions of compliance and non-compliance behavior. Ultimately we suggest that the social brain specifically and neuroscience generally offer much promise for political scientists, although scholars must be critical and careful in their justification and application of neuroscientific data.
Begging is a phenomenon that has largely been ignored by scholars of the welfare state. This is surprising because the presence of beggars in a society tends to be interpreted as the welfare state’s failure to adequately provide for its citizens. This paper examines the conditions under which we expect donors to actually give money to beggars at the street level. In particular, it offers a systematic theoretical framework for analyzing interactions between beggars and potential donors. We develop a game theoretic model where potential donors and beggars interact with one another in the context of a broader political environment. The contribution of our approach is twofold. First, it offers equilibria results on the strategic considerations that motivate begging practices. Second, it explains how social welfare policies at the macro-level can indirectly shape the parameters that structure these street-level equilibria.
This paper develops a game-theoretic model for assessing the relationship between ideological divisions in a society and prospects for good governance. Synthesizing the insights of the literature on political career concerns with those from the literature on issue framing, the model emphasizes that ideological balance—rough equality in the ideological component of utility the median voter derives from government and opposition—is the key to good governance. Polities which are ideologically balanced are ruled by elites who attempt to impress their merit upon the electorate through the provision of public goods. Ideologically imbalanced polities are ruled by elites who use public resources for their own consumption and who court voters through socially unproductive issue framing. The cases of pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-apartheid South Africa, and post-Pinochet Chile are used to illustrate the crucial importance of ideological balance for good governance.
This paper contributes to our understanding of legislative behaviour in mixed-member electoral systems through a simple game-theoretic model. It argues that legislators seeking re-election in mixed-member electoral systems need to take into account the interests of two distinct selectorates rather than an electorate in order to maximize the probability of regaining a legislative mandate. Assuming that the policy interests of list and district selectorates systematically differ, legislators may face diverging demands from two principals whose relative capability to sanction incumbents crucially hinges upon the reward they may offer. Such reward, I argue, is best understood as the strength of the nomination, which refers to the probability of subsequent election. A simple game-theoretic model then shows how variation in the relative strength of both selectorates induces three different scenarios with distinct equilibrium outcomes and thus effectively impacts patterns of representation.
Numerous studies examine voting behavior based on the formal theoretical predictions of the spatial utility model. These studies model individual utility from the election of a preferred party or candidate as decreasing as the alternative deviates from one’s ideal point, but differ as to whether this loss should be modeled linearly or quadratically. After advancing a theoretical argument for linear loss, this paper uses a wealth of data across 20 countries to empirically examine the predictive power of these two loss functions in terms of both voter choice and voter turnout. Results indicate that the linear loss function outperforms the quadratic loss function. The findings have important implications for theoretical scholars seeking to model voter behavior, for observational scholars, who must assign utility values across parties to individuals under study, and for experimental researchers, who must entice individuals with particular utility loss functions.
When the difference between winning and losing elections is large, elites have incentives to use ethnicity to control access to spoils, mobilizing some citizens and excluding others. This paper presents a new electoral mechanism, the turn-taking institution, that could move states away from ethnically mediated patron–client politics. With this mechanism, the whole executive term goes to a sufficiently inclusive supermajority coalition; if no coalition qualifies, major coalitions take short, alternating turns several times before the next election. A decision-theoretic model shows how the turn-taking institution would make it easier for mass-level actors to coordinate on socially productive policy and policy-making processes. We argue this institution would raise the price elites would pay to deploy and enforce exclusive ethnic markers.
Wealth redistribution in a society is related to the social planner’s beliefs about social justice. In this paper, the social planner’s preferences are described by a Choquet integral, which is a convex combination of a weighted utilitarian social welfare function and an egalitarian social welfare function. By spending resources on lobbying, interest groups can change the social planner’s preferences, by shifting the weights of the utilitarian part, or by shifting more or less weight to the egalitarian part. We use a model of a two-player lobbying game and obtain the conditions for a pure strategy Nash equilibrium of the game.
We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of independent agents, where moves do not reveal private information. The generalized model we develop, the Correlated Agent Model, relies on a parameter, , which denotes the correlation between two agents’ private information, i.e. the extent to which a player knows the future private component of her preferences. The independent agent and single agent models are special cases, where =0 and =1, respectively. The model also allows 0 < < 1, a class of games which have not yet been considered. We apply the model to crisis bargaining and demonstrate how to estimate , as well as parameters associated with utilities.
The concept of exploitation is central in social and political theory, but there is no precise, widely accepted definition. This paper analyses John Roemer’s seminal theory, which construes exploitation as a distributive injustice arising from asset inequalities, with no reference to notions of power or dominance. Firstly, an intertemporal generalisation of Roemer’s static economies is set up and several doubts are raised on the claim that exploitation theory can be reduced to a kind of resource egalitarianism. Then, Roemer’s philosophical arguments that exploitation should be defined as a merely distributive concept are also questioned and it is argued that a notion of power, or dominance, is an essential part of the definition of exploitation.
Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-à-vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size.
Traditional interpretations of politics among nuclear-weapons states—as epitomized by Schelling’s theory of deterrence through mutually-assured destruction—are less useful in today’s proliferation environment than they were during the Cold War’s superpower rivalry. As regionally-important states begin to pursue nuclear weapons, they do so in an environment that is shaped by the preferences and behaviors of the great powers. Using an elaboration on Powell’s bargaining model of conflict, this article shows that nuclear proliferation radically alters the future distribution of power, introducing a commitment problem vis-à-vis conventionally-stronger neighbors. This explains the occurrence of preemptive war in cases of attempted nuclearization, although the empirical paucity of such bargaining failures requires the shadow of great-power intervention in understanding the relations of second-tier states.
Representative democracy translates the preferences of the electorate into policy outcomes. Individual voters do not directly vote on policy; rather, their elected representatives create and establish policy. How well do the institutions of representative democracy translate the preferences of the electorate into policy? Is there any systematic bias in a representative democracy system? After formulating a series of computational models it appears that the degree to which legislative districts are ‘gerrymandered’ with respect to preferences about the policy is a source of policy bias. To illustrate the phenomenon, household income is used as a proxy for voters’ preferences with respect to redistribution. Even when the majority of voters are in favor of redistribution, if districts are constructed with a sufficient level of conservative gerrymandering, the policy outcome under representative democracy will favor far less redistribution than the policy outcome under direct democracy.