Instability of collective decisions? Testing for cyclical majorities

The issues of cyclical majorities and instability of collective choices have been in the fore-front in the discussion of social choice mechanisms. Cycling, lack of equilibria, and so called chaos theorems have been prevalent in the public choice literature. Whether cycling actually occurs in processes that are decided by majority rule has been a long-standing question. However, cycling has not been made quantifiable nor has it been clear how one would determine empirically whether majorities are cyclical. In this paper, cycling has been given an empirical meaning. This paper provides a method to test for cyclical majorities and applies it to decisions made in the US Congress. The test results indicate stability and the presence of persistent winners and losers in Congress.     

公共选择理论中互投赞成票的逻辑与模型

公共选择理论中互投赞成票模型的方法论基础是个体主义假设。作为一种方法论的个体主义与作为一种组织社会活动的规范的个人主义是两个根本不同的问题。在互投赞成票的论证逻辑中,包含了几个必要条件:一是必须采取多数表决规则;二是集体选择必须符合连续性假设,也就是说,集体选择是一个持续的独立决策流;三是少数派的偏好比多数派的偏好更为强烈,这暗含了偏好强度的差异性。根据这种逻辑,可以设计一个以公路修缮为主题的简单互投赞成票模型。这个模型的基本结论是:每个个体的理性行动导致了集体的非理性行动,集体的财政开支将超出合理的水平,其根本原因是多数表决规则的采用及由此造成的互投赞成票。通过概括和推广,这个简单互投赞成票模型可以应用于许多现实的集体决策情形中。     

Institutional Arrangements and Logrolling: Evidence from the European Union

This article illustrates how voting rules used to pass a piece of legislation and the structure of the legislation, in terms of whether or not it has single or multiple issue dimensions, influence the frequency and the purpose of position changes in legislative negotiations. Through analysis of data on a set of legislative proposals negotiated in the European Union, I show that position changes are less common under unanimity rule than under majority rule. More importantly, I argue and show that when the negotiated legislation is multidimensional (i.e., contains multiple issues) and the voting rule is unanimity, position changing is a lucrative strategy for legislators. Multidimensional legislation creates opportunities for logrolling, and legislators’ veto power under the unanimity rule enables them to exploit these opportunities. Accordingly, under this scenario, legislators often engage in what I call a within‐legislation logroll and secure favorable legislative outcomes.     

Logrolling under fragmented authoritarianism: theory and evidence from China

This paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of logrolling between interest groups on social welfare in a non-democratic political system. In particular, we focus on China, where bureaucratic interest groups are separate vertical organizations reaching down from Beijing to the provinces and cities. The key question in this paper is: what are the effects of the logrolling of parochial interest groups on state policies and social welfare in autocracies? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. The theory predicts a specific distortion in resource allocation because of logrolling, while the empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction. We find policy outcomes under logrolling are characterized by excessive spending on all the interest groups’ preferred goods and insufficient spending on public goods. We test the existence of logrolling between the Ministry of Civil Affairs and Ministry of Health in China. Our result shows logrolling between the two ministries lead to inefficiencies in social security and health care policies.     

Democracy and countries with Muslim majorities: a reply and update

My empirical results in Potrafke (2012) confirm past conclusions that Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be democratic. Hanusch takes issue with my results—and by inference with all past empirical results on the relation between Islam and democracy. In his comment on my study, Hanusch indicates that he believes I was using the POLITY IV index. He has not realized, as I made most clear, that the purpose of my study was to show results based on new data from Cheibub et al. (2010). Hanusch claims to have reversed the conclusion that having a Muslim majority is associated with having autocratic government. He establishes his conclusion by excluding the heartland of Islam from the estimation sample. For his estimates, Hanusch moreover uses data that do not appear to exist, at least in the claimed sources. I update my estimates to address issues that Hanusch raises. My new results confirm the conclusion that countries with Muslim majorities are less likely to be democracies. In deriving this result, I do not follow the strategy proposed by Hanusch of excluding from the data sample the countries in the heartland of Islam.     

Laffer paradox, Leviathan, and political contest

This paper considers a political contest model wherein self-interested politicians seek rents from the public budget, while general voters make political efforts to protest against politicians’ rent seeking directly (for example, through voting in referendums such as the passage of Proposition?13) or indirectly (for example, through donating money to organized groups such as the National Taxpayer Union). We show that the political contest may ironically lead to the Laffer paradox; that is, rent-seeking politicians may intend to set the tax rate higher than the revenue-maximizing rate. For taming Leviathans, political protests may not be as effective as competition among governments.     

Scoring rules,ballot truncation,and the truncation paradox

Public Choice - A voting rule that permits some voters to favor a candidate by revealing only the initial segment of their sincere rankings is said to be vulnerable to the truncation paradox. In...     

War and peace—cyclical phenomena?

This paper demonstrates how the analysis can differ dramatically between two common static modeling approaches to conflict. The first approach uses a one-period setup and associates positive arms investments with conflict. The second approach has two periods, where arming decisions are taken in the first period, and the decision on whether to go to war is taken separately in the second. Building on the latter approach, I introduce a repeated game protocol with myopic players. Under these circumstances countries may end up in cycles of war and peace. This result offers a novel explanation for a common pattern in history.