Health insurance in a democracy: Why is it public and why are premiums income related?

Many democracies have public health insurance systems which combine redistribution from the rich to the poor and from the healthy to the sick. This paper shows that such systems can be in the interest of the poor and the rich from a constitutional perspective. Necessary conditions are that insurance markets are incomplete and that income inequality is neither too low nor too high. Then even the rich can prefer a public health insurance system financed by income-dependent contributions compared to a system financed by a flat fee or a private health insurance system.     

Mathias Kifmann on “health insurance in a democracy: Why is it public and why are premiums income related?”

Many democracies have public health insurance systems that are tax-financed or in which contributions are linked to income. In a recent issue of this journal, Mathias Kifmann provides a model designed to explain this intriguing observation. This comment argues that the suggested explanation is not really convincing.     

Why so few, and why so late? Green parties and the question of governmental participation

Abstract.  Green parties have been represented in the parliaments of European Union countries since 1981, but it was not until recently that a few have entered national governments. Using a data set comprised of 51 government formation opportunities (where the Greens were represented in parliament), the authors of this article show that the parties involved in these bargaining situations are more office-oriented than earlier studies had found. As Green parties are seen to be less office-seeking than other parties, this general tendency for office-seeking behaviour in government formation may partly account for the scarcity of Greens in government. Furthermore, a number of hypotheses derived from theories that account for the specific nature of Green parties in terms of their office-, policy- and vote-seeking orientations are tested. It is found that Greens participate in government when they have lost votes in at least one election, when the main party of the left identifies them as a clear electoral threat and when the policy distance between the Greens and either the formateur party or the main left party is small (the latter condition must be accompanied by a substantial proportion of seats for the Green party in parliament). As most of these simultaneous conditions only materialized recently, and in a few countries, it is argued that this analysis, which is the first comparative and multivariate test focused on this question, explains the scarcity and the delay of Green governmental participation.     

我国NGO参与社会福利为何困难重重——体制层面的分析

对于当今中国公众而言,NGO一词并不陌生。改革开放以来的三十余年中,我国各类NGO活跃在社会福利、公共服务、慈善事业等领域,成为社会福利社会化过程中的重要参与主体,也成了社会公众和媒体关注的焦点。然而,同国外相比,我国的NGO发展尚不成熟,其赖以生存制度环境依旧不稳定。我国NGO管理体制上的瓶颈在很大程度上限制了我国NGO的进一步发展。主要从体制层面分析我国NGO参与社会福利过程中的阻力,并寻求解决途径。     

Why so much stability? An optimistic view of the possibility of rational legislative decisionmaking

Recent formal models of legislatures have proved that equilibrium outcomes are extremely unlikely without either (1) extreme restrictions upon preferences or (2) constraints upon the agenda. The implication is that constant instability or dictatorial manipulation is the norm in politics. This paper argues to the contrary, that legislatures (and other political processes) are characterized by some regularities, and that equilibrium models are the appropriate technique to use in describing these regularities. Examples from economic theory are used to illustrate this principle. The assumption of equilibrium is methodological, committing the researcher to develop models that have specific empirical implications. Using analogies from the economic theories of general equilibrium, oligopoly, and demand revealing processes, some potentially fruitful means of developing equilibrium political models are described. Assuming that legislators may freely make binding contracts has both empirical and normative advantages. Finally, institutional restrictions on legislative agendas may assure equilibrium. These include ‘constitutional’ rules, agreements to share ‘pork barrel’ projects evenly, limitation of committees to specific policy arenas, and the election of leaders who then determine the voting agenda.     

If people vote because they like to, then why do so many of them lie?

Of those eligible, about 40% do not vote in presidential elections. When asked, about a quarter of those nonvoters will lie to the survey takers and claim that they did. Increases in education are associated with higher voting rates and lower rates of lying overall, but with increased rates of lying conditional on not voting. This paper proposes a model of voter turnout in which people who claim to vote get praise from other citizens. Those who lie must bear the cost of lying. The model has a stable equilibrium with positive rates of voting, honest non-voting, and lying. Reasonable parameter changes produce changes in these proportions in the same direction as the changes actually observed across education levels. I argue that a model where people vote because they want to be known as voters provides a better explanation for observed voting behavior than does a model where people vote because they want to vote.     

Modeling the interaction of parties, activists and voters: Why is the political center so empty?

Abstract.  The formal stochastic model of voting should be the theoretical benchmark against which empirical models can be gauged. A standard result in the formal model is the 'mean voter theorem' stating that parties converge to the electoral center. Empirical analysis based on the vote-maximizing premise, however, invalidates this convergence result. We consider both empirical and formal models that incorporate exogeneous valence terms for the parties. Valence can be regarded as an electorally perceived attribute of each party leader that is independent of the policy position of the party. We show that the mean voter theorem is valid for empirical multinomial logit and probit models of a number of elections in the Netherlands and Britain. To account for the non-centrist policy positions of parties, we consider a more general formal model where valence is also affected by the behavior of party activists. The results suggest that non-convergent policy choice by party leaders can be understood as rational, vote-maximizing calculation by leaders in response to electoral and activist motivations.     

Why triggers fail (and what to do about it): An examination of the unemployment insurance extended benefits program

During periods of high unemployment, many workers exhaust their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before regaining employment. To help alleviate this problem, Congress created the extended benefits (EB) program, expanding the number of weeks of benefits available to UI recipients in high unemployment states. The EB program operates by “triggering on” additional weeks of benefits in states where unemployment and UI benefit receipt are above federally established thresholds. We analyze the performance of the EB program by creating a series of policy simulations using weekly UI claims and unemployment data from the program's inception in 1970 through the most recent economic expansion in 2005. Overall, we find that EB triggers, as currently constructed, fail as a policy tool for extending UI benefits. Minor adjustments to the triggers are unlikely to be effective. We develop an alternative set of “fix point” triggers that allow the EB program to trigger on and off in a more timely fashion. These triggers outperform all previously legislated triggers as well as other commonly proposed triggering mechanisms on criteria of timeliness, breadth, and duration. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management