Rational Ignorance,Rational Voter Expectations,and Public Policy: A Discrete Informational Foundation for Fiscal Illusion

This paper demonstrates that rational ignorance, properly defined, allows the possibility that fiscal illusion affects policies in a democracy. The implications of rational ignorance are examined in a setting where voters are assumed to completely understand the fiscal environment and make perfect use of any information that they possess. In this setting, it is demonstrated that ignorance may be rational, manipulated, and generate biased expectations over fiscal parameters. The analysis suggests that the electoral impact of voter ignorance is reduced, but not eliminated by electoral competition. Candidate positions only affect the electoral choices of individuals who are at least partially informed about those positions. Consequently electoral competition tends to generate policies that advance the interests of relatively informed voters. This implies that election based public policies are based upon better information than one would expect based on the widespread fiscal ignorance reported in surveys. However, even in this setting, the votes cast and the policies adopted are affected by the estimated marginal rates of substitution between private and governmental services which can not be unbiased if areas of ignorance remain — even if voters make the very best use of information in their possession. The existence of rational ignorance, once carefully defined, is sufficient to generate policy relevant fiscal illusion.     

Optimal contest design, closeness and the contest success function

This paper considers the optimal design of an asymmetric two-player contest when the designer’s payoff depends not only on performance of the contestants, but also on the closeness of the contest measured by the difference in winning probabilities. In contrast to previous studies, the impact of closeness on the optimal prize depends on the shape of the contest success function. Furthermore, including closeness in the designer’s objective may induce the designer to uniformly increase the contestants’ effort costs. A similar result is obtained in case the designer may handicap the stronger contestant, but an even contest is never optimal.     

Taxation and the Veil of Ignorance – A Real Effort Experiment on the Laffer Curve

In this paper we address the role of theveil of ignorance on work incentives andtax rates in a two-person real effortexperiment. We find that effort levelsdecrease with a rise in tax rates. Taxrevenues peak at intermediate tax rates of50% to 65%, supporting the existence of aLaffer curve in taxation. Tax authoritiesdo not exploit their power to tax in full,which is compatible both with revenuemaximizing but also fair behavior. Behindthe veil of ignorance, subjects care morefor efficiency and restrict the power totax more than in case their position(taxpayer or tax authority) is fixed inadvance.     

Conflict and rent-seeking success functions: Ratio vs. difference models of relative success

The rent-seeking competitions studied by economists fall within a much broader category of conflict interactions that also includes military combats, election campaigns, industrial disputes, lawsuits, and sibling rivalries. In the rent-seeking literature, each party's success p_i (which can be interpreted either as the probability of victory or as the proportion of the prize won) has usually been taken to be a function of the ratio of the respective resource commitments. Alternatively, however, p_i may instead be a function of the difference between the parties' commitments to the contest. The Contest Success Function (CSF) for the difference from is a logistic curve in which, as is consistent with military experience, increasing returns apply up to an inflection point at equal resource commitments. A crucial flaw of the traditional ratio model is that neither onesided submission nor two-sided peace between the parties can ever occur as a Cournot equilibrium. In contrast, both of these outcomes are entirely consistent with a model in which success is a function of the difference between the parties' resource commitments.In preparing successive drafts of this paper I have benefited from suggestions and comments from Michele Boldrin, Avinash Dixit, Arye L. Hillman, David Hirshleifer, Eric S. Maskin, David Levine, Eric Rasmusen, John G. Riley, Russell Roberts, and Leo K. Simon.     

Ignorance Is Bias: The Effect of Latino Losers on Models of Latino Representation

Nearly every aggregate study of minority legislative representation has observed outcomes of elections (officeholders), rather than the supply of minority candidates. Because of this, scholars have left a large amount of important data, the election losers, out of their models of minority representation. The evidence presented in this article demonstrates that voters in the United States cannot choose minority officeholders because there are rarely minority candidates on the ballot. I use state legislative candidate data from Carsey et al. ( 2008 ) and Klarner et al. ( 2012 ) to test models of Latino representation that correct for first‐stage selection bias. Once candidate self‐selection is taken into account, the probability of electing a Latino increases enormously. I then use data from 2010 to make out‐of‐sample predictions, which clearly favor the conditional model. Thus, our current understanding of Latino representation is significantly biased by ignoring the first stage of an election, a candidate's decision to run.     

公共行政伦理:范式批判中的演进、反思与拓展

范式理论为近代社会科学提供了全新的方法论视角,其基于学科基质理论而完成的共同范例属性为公共行政伦理的历史主义考察提供了一种批判的分析框架。这种批判性首先表现在范式视阈下公共行政伦理能够在公共行政理论和应用伦理理论之外构建一个基于其自身难题和危机解决需要的核心价值体系。由此,能够发现公共行政伦理在范式解释中的语言、逻辑和实践性的不连贯,即无法实现连贯性的历史发展与非积累性的范式变迁的有机结合。在对于公共行政伦理范式的批判之批判的过程中,公共行政伦理逐渐从设计范式到纲领内核的破茧,在公共行政伦理两种维度的视阈下,一个完整的公共行政伦理可以被证明为一个以主体性解释为硬核,民主与效率统一于"效率伦理"而动态的体现"正面助长性"与"负面助长性"的均衡交替拓展的框架。     

网络经济与政府治理创新

网络经济的迅猛发展和深度扩张,无疑将对我国经济和社会的发展产生重大影响。我国要想抓住机遇,摆脱困境,惟一的出路就在于创新。只有通过改进政府治理,广泛开展创新行动,我们才能在新一轮网络经济的竞争与发展中获得相应的收益和位置,才有可能赢得后来居上的竞争利益和发展前景。     

Political opportunity structures and right-wing extremist party success

West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.     

Candidate ideology and electoral success in congressional elections

In examining the factors that contribute to electoral success in congressional elections, legislative scholars often consider the actions of elected representatives; however, other research suggests that one must consider what challengers are (or are not) doing as well. For instance, inexperience and poor funding can significantly inhibit challenger success. We expand this list of potential shortcomings by arguing that ideological congruence with a constituency may be another factor in explaining challenger defeat. Using ideology measures derived from campaign contributions, we find that unsuccessful challengers in the U.S. House are generally more extreme than those who win, but ideological extremity is not a disadvantage to those seeking to represent an extreme constituency. More importantly, our existing political institutions may actually serve to mitigate the already high levels of partisan polarization in Congress.     

Alternative measures of economic success among TANF participants: Avoiding poverty,hardship, and dependence on public assistance

Current debates about the success of TANF reforms have been obscured by the use of inconsistent indicators of success, as well as by measurement difficulties associated with alternative indicators. This paper considers conceptual and measurement issues associated with three different indicators of economic well‐being: independence from public assistance, having income above the poverty threshold, and freedom from material hardship. Survey and administrative data from a sample of TANF participants illustrate the sensitivity of conclusions to alternative ways of measuring each indicator. Also considered is the extent to which dependence, poverty, and hardship coincide, or capture important differences in outcomes. The principles underlying TANF reforms have implications for appropriate measures of economic well‐being, as the empirical importance of these implications demonstrates. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.