A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy

Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents have policy preferences that may be opposed to the principal's, and furthermore may choose their policy or effort levels. Among the results are that redundancy can help a principal achieve her policy goals when her preferences are not aligned with the agents'. But redundancy is less helpful if even a single agent has preferences relatively close to the principal's. In this environment collective action problems may cause multiple agents to be less effective than a single agent. Redundancy can also be unnecessary to the principal if the agent's jurisdiction can be terminated.     

Who has standing in cost-benefit analysis?

The issues involved in deciding whose preferences are to be counted in cost-benefit analysis are often misunderstood or controversial. This paper attempts to resolve the issues in a number of particular cases by looking to the fundamental value assumptions underlying cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis is useful only to the extent that there exists a general consensus that the value assumptions are legitimate. Certain implications of the value assumptions prove useful in deciding what preferences have standing.     

Keeping the other candidate guessing: Electoral competition when preferences are private information

We analyze a, model of two candidate competition in which candidate and voter preferences are private information. If candidates simultaneously commit to policy platforms the uncertainty about candidate preferences reinforces the incentive for platform divergence. After a candidate observes the other candidate’s stance but before she learns about voter preferences she may face regret about her choice. This ex post irrationality suggests that a 1 period model may not capture the relevant incentives. In a multi-period proposal game in which candidates first make non-binding public proposals and then they make binding public proposals (similar to Ledyard, 1989) we find that candidates are uninformative during the first stage, as they have a disincentive to reveal their preferences to the opposing candidate. This finding offers an explanation for candidate ambiguity or inconsistency early in an election which does not involve efforts to deceive voters. Candidates may be trying to keep their opponent guessing. With a strong pre-election commitment technology, candidates can only be deterred from this type of behavior if they anticipate that a sizeable number of voters (more than a majority) will vote contrary to their preferences over policy.     

Divergent preferences and legislative speeches on Brexit

ABSTRACT

How do legislators deal with having preferences that go against those of the principals that they represent in parliament? This article analyzes the debate in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in the House of Commons to explore the relationship between divergent preferences and legislative speeches. It finds that legislators who defy the will of their country or constituency are rather communicative, and their speeches reveal higher levels of negativity. In contrast, those defying their party refrain from speaking in parliament, but if they speak, they use a significantly less negative language. These findings suggest that legislators behave strategically in deciding whether and how to justify their positions publicly when in conflict with their various principals.     

Assessing preferences in cost-benefit analysis: Reflections on rural water supply evaluation in haiti

This article examines an area of cost-benefit methodology which has come under increasing philosophical scrutiny in recent years: the appropriate treatment of individuals' preferences. We illustrate some of the difficulties involved in assessing preferences in the context of a concrete example: the evaluation of a rural water supply project in southern Haiti. Four problems in the application of cost-benefit principles are discussed: (1) how to count the social value of private water taps connected to homes if they are preferred for prestige reasons, (2) how to assess husbands' preferences concerning the time savings by wives who previously carried water from more distant sources, (3) how to count preferences based on a respondent's desire to support general community welfare, and (4) how to evaluate a water project when people's preferences may change after the new water system is installed. We argue that policy analysis will be improved by presenting philosophical arguments as to why some preferences should be included in the evaluation and others ignored.     

Game tree analysis of international crises

Conflicts among nations can often be understood as games in which players (nations) possessing strategies (the sets of actions they may take) face alternative consequences (loss or gain of territory or prestige) determined by their choices of action. Amenable to this type of analysis is the recent Falkland Islands crisis involving Argentina and Great Britain. The events in this case provide an illustration of the way “three-stage, two-person sequential game tree models” can explain the outcome of a crisis situation, whether the parties involved possess perfect information regarding the likely actions of their opponents or are subject to misperceptions about them. When misperceptions occur, the effects can be severely detrimental to both players. Under certain conditions a single misperception by a player of an opponent's preferences can lead to conflict even though both players would have preferred another outcome, one that would in fact have resulted if the error in perception had not occurred. Thus, the outcome of such a “game” is highly sensitive not only to the players' actual preferences but to mutual perceptions of those preferences.     

Recognition as if sovereigns? A procedural understanding of indigenous self-determination

In the last two decades we have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights – manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – challenging the traditional nation-state-centred understanding of political rights and democracy. In this paper, the author argues that indigenous self-determination is to be understood as a way to level the balance of power between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they live. Without a solid legal foundation for indigenous peoples to define self-determination in their own languages and to negotiate the conditions of their relation with the nation-states on their own terms, the colonial past (and present) of violent conquest and domination might continue. Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination ought in this perspective to imply recognition of indigenous peoples as having a standing equal to nation-states, i.e. as if they were sovereigns. What self-determination means in political practice would thus be the outcome of negotiations between two (or more) equal political entities. In this way, the right to self-determination has to be interpreted procedurally rather than substantially.     

On the nature of voters’ coalition preferences

An expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters’ coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of preferences for coalitions as political object. We find that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations; but additional non-ideological factors, such as party and leader preferences, also play a fundamental role. We also find that coalitions enjoy a certain degree of independence from other objects of vote choice and they do not always represent a simple average score on the feeling thermometer of the constituent parties. There are, however, substantial differences among voters, with party identifiers and those with extreme ideology being less likely to consider coalitions as separate entities from their component parties.     

Authoritarianism,Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror

In the years following 9/11, surveys have revealed high levels of public support for policies related to the war on terror that, many argue, contravene long‐standing American ideals. Extant research would suggest that such preferences result from the activation of authoritarianism. That is, the terrorist attacks caused those predisposed toward intolerance and aggression to become even more intolerant and aggressive. However, using data from two national surveys, we find that those who score high in authoritarianism do not become more hawkish or less supportive of civil liberties in response to perceived threat from terrorism; they tend to have such preferences even in the absence of threat. Instead, those who are less authoritarian adopt more restrictive and aggressive policy stands when they perceive threat from terrorism. In other words, many average Americans become susceptible to “authoritarian thinking” when they perceive a grave threat to their safety.     

Preferences,beliefs, and values in negotiations concerning aid to Nicaragua

The paper argues that in the context of public choice for non-market goods, two assumptions of the simple model of the rational economic actor may not hold. The assumptions are that there is a direct connection between choice and outcome, and that preferences are not affected by the act of making a choice. Consequently, to understand people's preferences for public goods, it is important to measure their beliefs and values separately rather than simply to observe their choice behavior or to ask them what they would be willing to pay for the public good. In an example study, people's preferences for U.S. policies toward Nicaragua were measured and further analyzed into their beliefs about the effects of those policies on Nicaraguan outcomes, and their evaluations of the Nicaraguan outcomes. It was shown that the process of making a two-person choice changed the preferences, and that the separate measures or beliefs and values gave insight into the process of the change that would not have been available had only the preferences been measured. Implications for the contingent valuation method are explored and an alternative approach is proposed.     

Technical progress in bureaucracies

In this paper we raise the question whether in bureaucracies incentives are existing to implement technical progress into public goods production as it may be observed in the private sector. Therefore the well-known models of the theory of bureaucracy will be enhanced by technical progress modelled as process innovations. Depending on bureaucrats' preferences two results can be obtained: (a) If bureaucrats maximize their budget or if output or the classical production factors enter their utility function, R&D will be used efficiently due to cost reductions increasing the bureaucrats' budget or utility; (b) if bureaucrats prefer R&D as an end itself, they will use this factor like other factors by more than the efficient amount. In both cases an allocative inefficient output of the public good is produced. As a consequence society cannot benefit from gains by technical progress since net social welfare is appropriated totally by bureaucrats, even if it is increased by R&D-efforts.     

Efficient use of reference group cues in a single dimension

If there are groups whose endorsements voters can use as positive (or negative) cues, we demonstrate that voters do not need to know anything directly about candidate positions to be able to identify the candidate whose issue positions and performance is likely to be closest to the voter's own preferences. In one dimension we show that, given certain simplifying assumptions, voters are best off adopting the choice recommended by the single reference group to which they are closest. We also show that even a decision by reference groups not to endorse any candidate may be informative to voters.     

The rights of (future) humans qua humans

Human rights are rights held “simply in virtue of humanity.” In unpacking this claim, we find that theories of human rights disclose (1) something about what we understand a minimally decent human life to be and (2) who we consider to belong within a community of rights-bearers. In this article, I address two interrelated questions: When and why do future persons have standing as rights-bearing members of a shared moral community? Are the rights held by future generations best expressed in the “greening” of existing rights or in a new distinctly environmental right? I argue that human rights theorists miss an important element of the human qua human if they take ecological embeddedness to be contingently rather than necessarily relevant to human rights. I therefore argue that there are reasons to favor a new distinctly environmental human right.     

Which Side Are You On? Bias,Credibility, and Mediation

Mediators are often thought to be more effective if they are unbiased or have no preferences over the issue in dispute. This article presents a game theoretic model of mediation drawing on the theory of "cheap talk" which highlights a contrary logic. Conflict arises in bargaining games because of uncertainty about the resolve of the parties. A mediator can reduce the likelihood of conflict by providing information on this score. For a mediator to be effective, however, the parties must believe that the mediator is telling the truth, especially if the mediator counsels one side to make a concession because their opponent has high resolve and will fight. An unbiased mediator who is simply interested in minimizing the probability of conflict will have a strong incentive to make such statements even if they are not true, hence the parties will not find the mediator credible. Only mediators who are effectively "on your side" will be believed if they counsel restraint.     

Economic voting in Hungary, 1998–2008

This study investigates retrospective voting and issue voting, and their change over time in a transitioning country. Sociotropic, as well as egocentric economic evaluations, and policy issues of parties are expected to play an increasing role in party preferences of citizens over time. Data consist of 41 Hungarian cross-sectional surveys, between 1998 and 2008. Results of conditional logistic regression models reveal that voters reward incumbent parties when they see improvements in their personal or the national economic situation, and punish them if the economy deteriorates. Distance from a given party on the left–right scale also decreases the chance of voting for that party. Voting behavior is changing during transition. The evaluations of the national economy and personal situation have an increasing impact on party preferences over time. We found educational heterogeneity in the extent of economic voting.     

Ideocracy and Totalitarianism: A Formal Analysis Incorporating Ideology

In the present paper it is shown how totalitarianregimes can arise or be averted depending on theconditions described by the parameters and the initialvalues of the system. The main reason for theevolution of totalitarian regimes is the presence ofbelievers who are convinced that others have to beconverted to the supreme values of their ideology fortheir well-being and, possibly, that there existinconvertible enemies of their creed whose presence isobnoxious to them and to the absolute truths of theirideology. Believers are thus prepared to spendresources on winning new converts and to win thesecular power of the state. Whether they succeed inthis endeavour depends on the costs of converting newbelievers and on the amount of resources they areprepared to spend for this purpose, given theiravailable incomes and their propensity to consume.Their chances to succeed are greater if a crisisoccurs, an event which is usually outside of theircontrol. Once secular power has been secured, theresources of the state can be used to win moreconverts, to drive into exile or to killinconvertibles and to try to reach the imperialisticaims implied by the ideology. If the latter is not thecase, the regime may turn into a mature ideocracyafter having reached its domestic aims. This would forinstance be the case, if all inconvertibles had beenremoved and all the other population been converted. Inthis case no further terror and (or) repressionscharacteristic of totalitarian regimes are required. If the ideology implies ambitious imperialistic aims,for instance the conversion of all people on earth(except for inconvertibles) or the domination of thewhole globe by the believers, it is highly probablethat these aims cannot be reached. As a consequenceeither a war is lost and leads to the removal of thetotalitarian regime, or the ends have to be adapted tomaintain the credibility of the ideology. But then thetotalitarian state may again turn into a matureideocracy, if the ideology has been reinterpreted toremove its unrealistic imperialistic aims. Or thechange of the ideology weakens the regime in a waythat it loses its proselytizing character altogether,and turns into an ordinary autocratic regime.     

Offsetting Uncertainty: Reassurance with Two-Sided Incomplete Information

Conventional models of bargaining and reassurance under incomplete information assume that actors' behavioral signals are objectively cooperative or noncooperative. Even if actors are uncertain of each other's preferences, they know what types of actions the other will view as cooperative. Yet on many real-world issues, cooperation is subjective, and what constitutes a cooperative action is conditional on the receiver's preferences. We present a formal model showing that in these cases, two-sided incomplete information actually incentivizes honest behavior and facilitates credible signaling. Because uncertain senders do not know whether a particular action will be interpreted as cooperative, they have little incentive to misrepresent, and instead honestly pursue their true goals. Thus, where cooperation is subjective, mutual uncertainty is “offsetting,” such that credible signals allow actors to quickly and accurately update their beliefs. We illustrate this logic through a case study of the Sino–Soviet split, and highlight the model's implications for contemporary U.S.–China relations.     

What do we really know? The effect of reporting thresholds on inferences using environmental right‐to‐know data

Environmental right‐to‐know regulations require regulated entities to publicly disclose measures of environmental performance but exempt entities from these disclosure requirements if they manufacture, process, or use a chemical below some threshold level. Environmental right‐to‐know data are widely used to assess environmental performance by academics, regulators, non‐profit organizations, and the public. This paper uses data from Massachusetts to estimate the effect of reporting thresholds in environmental right‐to‐know programs on the validity of inferences using data from these programs. The analysis indicates that errors in inference introduced by reporting thresholds may be significant. Up to 40% of the observed decline in reported toxic releases in Massachusetts may be attributed to non‐reporting due to the reporting thresholds. In addition, quartile rankings of facilities may be in error up to 45% of the time when behavior around the reporting thresholds is not taken into account.     

Do politicians anticipate voter control? A comparative study of representatives’ accountability beliefs

Representation literature is rife with the assumption that politicians are responsive to voter preferences because their re-election is contingent upon the approval of those voters, approval that can be won by furthering their desires or, similarly, that can be threatened by ignoring their wishes. Hence, scholars argue that the anticipation of electoral accountability by politicians constitutes a crucial guarantor of (policy) responsiveness; as long as politicians believe that voters are aware of what they do and will take it into account on election day, they are expected to work hard at keeping these voters satisfied. If, on the other hand, politicians were to think what they say and do is inconsequential for citizens’ voting behaviour, they may see leeway to ignore their preferences. In this study, we therefore examine whether politicians anticipate electoral accountability in the first place. In particular, we ask 782 Members of Parliament in Belgium, Germany, Canada and Switzerland in a face-to-face survey about the anticipation of voter control; whether they believe that voters are aware of their behaviour in parliament and their personal policy positions, are able to evaluate the outcomes of their political work, and, finally, whether this knowledge affects their vote choice. We find that a sizable number of MPs believe that voters are aware of what they do and say and take that into account at the ballot box. Still, this general image of rather strong anticipation of voter control hides considerable variation; politicians in party-centred systems (in Belgium and some politicians in Germany that are elected on closed party lists), anticipate less voter control compared to politicians in more candidate-centred systems (Canada and Switzerland). Within these countries, we find that populist politicians are more convinced that voters know about their political actions and take this knowledge into account in elections; it seems that politicians who take pride in being close to voters (and their preferences), also feel more monitored by these voters. Finally, we show that politicians’ views of voter control do not reflect the likelihood that they might be held to account; politicians whose behaviour is more visible and whose policy profile should therefore be better known to voters do not feel the weight of voter control more strongly.