Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition: A comment

This comment is concerned with the relation between the basic model of elections and income redistribution in Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) and the model in Coughlin (1986a). Its purpose is to (i) isolate the (small set of) assumptions that separate these closely related models, (ii) identify a special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model where their results immediately provide direct extensions of four of the results in my paper, and (iii) point out that one of the lemmata in my paper identifies the precise location of the equilibrium income distribution for this important special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model. The comment also relates these observations to Lindbeck and Weibull's example of familiar assumptions that satisfy their sufficient conditions for the existence of a political equilibrium.I gratefully acknowledge (i) some helpful comments that Peter Ordeshook made as a discussant for Coughlin (1986a) (when I presented it at the 1986 Public Choice Society Meeting), which got me to start thinking about the issues that are addressed in this comment and (ii) some helpful suggestions provided by Peter Aranson.     

A note on seniority and political competition

Seniority conveys political power to legislators despite the fact that all legislators have equally valuable voting power. What prevents a coalition of junior members from exercising their political power to form a coalition and claim an equal share of the power by eliminating the benefits of seniority? Several models explain how valuable services are supplied by senior members, so the returns to seniority may be looked at as compensation for their services. This still does not explain why the providers of those services should be chosen based on seniority rather than on some other criterion.Seniority is used because it provides benefits to every member of the legislature. Legislators want to be reelected, and regardless of the seniority level of an individual in the legislature, the incumbent will always have more seniority when running for reelection than the challenger. Since voters benefit from being represented by more senior representatives, the seniority system enhances the reelection chances of even the most junior representative.     

Multi-party competition with exit: A comment on Duverger's Law

Contrary to Duverger's Law, there exist multi-party systems in conjunction with simple majority single-ballot systems. At least three exceptions exist to this law. Rae (1971) and Riker (1976; 1982) offer explanations for two of the most prominent exceptions, i.e. Canada and India. I also discuss another exception, Great Britain. In this paper, I use a simple one-dimensional spatial model to show that a multi-party system can be supported under a simple majority single-ballot system. This explanation depends on the way political parties exit the system. If parties decide sequentially whether or not to exit, a multi-party system can not be maintained. If political parties make this decision simultaneously, a multi-party system may be able to sustain itself.I am grateful to Evelyn Fink, Ken Shepsle, and Gordon Tullock for their very helpful comments. I would especially like to thank John Kautsky who introduced me to Duverger's Law.     

Economic performance and U.S. Senate elections: A comment

This paper investigates the issue of economic performance and U.S. Senate elections analyzed by Bennett and Wiseman (1991) in a work published in this journal. Our study analyzes the electoral margins and election outcomes of U.S. Senate elections using state-level data involving only incumbents up for reelection in the 1976–1990 period (212 elections). The ordinary least squares and logit estimation results suggest that the effects of economic performance variables on incumbent senatorial elections are in general overshadowed by other factors known to be important in determining electoral margins and outcomes. In addition, the empirical results of the entire model are in general consistent with prior findings noted in the public choice and political science literature concerning the analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Therefore, we suggest that the findings raised in our study provide enough theoretical and empirical evidence to raise sufficient doubt regarding the robustness of the results suggested by Bennett and Wiseman (1991), and thus call upon other researchers to study further the relationship between economic performance and voting behavior in U.S. Senate elections.     

Correction to: Economic growth and political extremism

Public Choice - We provide the first parcel-level, time-series empirical analysis of municipal annexation behavior. We also exploit a unique natural experiment created by the incorporation and...     

Economic growth and political extremism

Public Choice - We argue that the growth rate, but not the level of aggregate income, affects the support for extreme political parties. In our model, extreme parties offer short-run benefits to...     

Economic policy advice and political preferences

This essay argues that public choice offers an appropriate approach for thinking about economic policy advice. First I discuss the nature of the policy advice that is proffered by economists. Then I specifically suggest that one of the most common modeling features in the public choice literature (viz., the assumption that individuals have political preferences) may be useful in helping us understand the nature of this advice. Finally, I also carry out a tentative exploration of the implications of accepting the perspective that is provided when the suggested modeling feature is used in this context.     

Recessions and social classes: Economic impacts and political opinions

Economic classes represent groupings of individuals in terms of some long-run distribution of economic advantages. Recessions and inflations impose unequal short-run costs which may or may not be congruent with class inequalities. This paper begins with the hypothesis that the class structure channels the personal impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations and helps to explain the opinion formation process which underlies any observed political response. The empirical puzzle involves properly specifying and implementing a test of this hypothesis.I outline two alternative conceptions of social stratification: one emphasizing individualistic competition for places in a continuously rankedstatus system, and the other focusing on patterned inequalities arising in the productive process and resulting in a discontinuous distribution ofclasses. The two are only modestly related empirically.The analysis section of the paper shows that status and class covary in distinctive ways with measures of financial condition and political opinion. The paper suggests that earlier research based on continuous indexes of social status may have erred in concluding that stratification is irrelevant to short-run fluctuations in political opinion.     

Barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking: 1953–1992

Economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents, political parties, and presidents. The broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of “shirking” in congressional voting. The objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time, largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections, thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection. We use a quasi-experimental design that controls for the effects of party, region, electoral safety, presidential control of the White House, and constituency factors, in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll-calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992. We find that “shirking” in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post-1970s phenomenon.     

Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition

This paper models balanced-budget redistribution between socio-economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties. Equilibrium is unique in the present model, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough ‘stochastic heterogeneity’ with respect to party preferences in the electorate. The validity of Hotelling's ‘principle of minimum differentiation’, and of ‘Director's Law’, are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions, and voter's possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties. The policy strategy of expected-plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality. Incomes are fixed and known, so lump-sum taxation is feasible. However, constraints on tax/transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis.