Maximizing models of legislative choice

A number of recent studies have reported estimates of single equation and simultaneous equations models of the decisions of state legislatures. These investigations have been ‘economic’ ones, in the sense that considerations of the relative costs and benefits to some self-interested person or group capable of affecting legislative outcomes have motivated the choice of explanatory variables. Thus, perhaps implicitly, these studies have assumed utility maximization by some critical agent(s) in the political marketplace. This essay draws attention to the implications of this maximizing assumption for the proper specification and estimation of the associated empirical models.     

The Condorcet-Jefferson connection and the origins of social choice theory

This paper explores the relationship between Condorcet and Jefferson to gain insight into the early development of social choice theory. Jefferson does not seem to have read or understood Condorcet's theoretical work, but studying the relationship leads to the identification of intellectual intermediaries and a different perspective on the creation of social choice theory in the French Academy of Sciences.     

Empirical social choice: an introduction

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.     

Insuring legislative wealth transfers: theory and evidence

Authorities rely on reports from private citizens to detect and enforce more than a trivial portion of effective law-breaking. The present article is the first to study the cultural aspect of peer reporting experimentally. By collecting data in a post-Soviet country (Moldova), we focus in particular on how the Soviet legacy of using citizens as private informants may have a long-lasting effect on their willingness to cooperate with state authorities. We then contrast those effects with peer reporting behavior in France, a Western society. Our results suggest that participants in Moldova view cooperation with authorities as less socially acceptable than their counterparts in France. Our results also suggest that participants in Moldova engage less frequently in peer reporting than individuals in France. However, we also find that less peer reporting does not necessarily imply less tax compliance. Participants in both countries exhibit very similar tax compliance rates. We explain the effect of peer reporting on tax compliance in Moldova using the country's past experience during the Soviet era, when being reported to authorities was common and carried grave consequences.

     

State institutions, political power and social policy choices: Reconstructing the origins of Nordic models of social policy

Abstract.  The origins of the Nordic social policy model(s) need to be viewed broadly and historically from its late nineteenth-century initiation to the immediate postwar period (1940s to the early 1960s), when a social democratic model began to consolidate. In reference to the alternate social policy traditions of British poor relief and German occupational insurance, this article analyzes the sociopolitical contexts that finally prevented Scandinavian states from developing similarly, instead enabling development of universalistic social policy. The historical narratives are arranged with respect to four analytical aspects: policy development; the configuration of state institutions; the strength of liberal, conservative and leftist power blocs; and intra-Nordic divergence in all these respects. Such an approach integrates state-centred and power-resources-focused analyses of Nordic welfare.     

The effect of misperception on strategic behavior in legislative settings: Social psychology meets rational choice

This paper is about the conditions under which simple social psychological processes can affect collective decisions. In rational choice theory, social psychological effects are said to cancel out, be randomized, or be corrected by communication. Yet as Janis and Mann (1977) argued, there are generally recurring conditions in which such factors influence individual decisions. The question is, Under what conditions can we expect these factors to affect collective decisions? This paper suggests a general approach to identifying the effects of strategic misperception, illustrates it with an example of a social psychological process that affects player perceptions, and describes the preference distributions in which this simple process would change majority voting outcomes. The general conclusion is that strategic misperception may affect majority decisions under so many distributions of preferences that decisions cannot be predicted from knowledge of actors' preferences alone.     

Toward a positive theory of coalition formation and endogenous instrumental choice in global pollution control

The paper analyzes the coalition formation process in a global emission game with asymmetric countries where the number of signatories, the abatement target and the policy instrument are chosen simultaneously. Exemplarily, a uniform emission reduction quota and an effluent charge are considered. Stability is analyzed in a supergame framework by applying the concept of coalition-proofness. The analysis also considers the impact of impatient agents, restricted and simple punishment profiles. Two main results may be mentioned: First, paradoxically, IEAs achieve only little (if signed at all) if the externality problem is distinct. Second, our model helps to explain the frequent appearance of emission quotas in international pollution control despite the recommendations by economists to use market-based instruments like effluent charges.     

The empirical application of the spatial theory of voting in multiparty systems with random utility models

Spatial models of voting predominate in the formalization of political decisions and continue to be a growth industry in political science. But strict empirical applications of this theory have been rare. Only recently, conditional discrete choice models have been proposed to fill the gap between formal and empirical models and to predict the individual voting decision in multi-candidate/multiparty contests on the basis of the spatial model. This article highlights several flexible features of these models that are well known in transportation economics and applied marketing science but not yet discussed in the electoral studies community. Empirical illustrations are provided on the basis of (nested) multinomial logit.     

Democracy and the quality of economic institutions: theory and evidence

Public Choice - We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across...     

Conceptualizing voter choice for directional and discounting models of two-candidate spatial competition in terms of shadow candidates

In contrast to the traditional modeling of voter choice based on proximity, under directional models, selection of candidates is based on the direction and/or intensity of change from a status quo or neutral point. Voter choice can also be modeled as representing both approaches, e.g., as a directional model with proximity restraint, or alternatively, in terms of proximity to discounted positions. We provide a unified perspective for these seemingly disparate models in terms of what we call “shadow” positions. We demonstrate that voter choice in a variety of spatial models including directional components can be viewed as proximity-based choices. Voters choose the candidate whose shadow is nearer, where shadow locations are defined by a simple transformation. We apply this approach to equilibrium analysis, showing that results for a discounted proximity model can be carried over – via shadows – to a variety of directional models.