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。     

Do Individuals Value Distributional Fairness? How Inequality Affects Majority Decisions

The so-called chaos theorems imply that, under most preference configurations, majority voting in n-dimensional policy spaces is theoretically unrestricted. Empirical research, however, shows an apparent stability of democratic decisions. Recent theoretical developments have emphasized social preferences as a possible explanation for overcoming majority rule’s instability problem. Hence, it is assumed that individuals not only maximize their own well-being, but also value distributional fairness. However, there is little experimental research into the influence of social preferences on majority decisions. This article presents findings from laboratory experiments on majority decisions in two-dimensional policy spaces with a systematic variation of the fairness properties of the incentive structures. The results show that distributional fairness is an important motivational factor in democratic decisions.     

Election campaigns, agenda setting and electoral outcomes

Framing effects and bounded rationality imply that election campaigns may be an important determinant of election outcomes. This paper uses a two-party setting and simple game theoretic models to analyse the strategic interaction between the parties' campaign decisions. Alternations of power emerge naturally, even if both electoral preferences and party positions remain constant.     

Is Rule by Majorities Special?

One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue-by-issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy-proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue-by-issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered.     

Strategy-proofness of a class of Borda rules

We formalize a class of ‘positional’ systems, and examine the problem of strategic misrevelation of preferences under these systems. The positional systems we consider include a wide class of ranking or point systems, which are variants of the Borda Procedure. We show that all of these systems afford scope for manipulation of social decisions through misrevelation.     

Optimal voting rules under uncertainty

The theory of ‘constitutional’ choice of voting rules developed by Buchanan and Tullock is an extended to an explicit decision-theoretic form. Voters in the ‘constitutional’ position choose what they believe will be their optimal share or majority rule for making social decisions, by maximizing their individual expected utility from the anticipated social decisions, under conditions of uncertainty. The rule that maximizes expected social benefits depends upon (1) the expected distribution and intensity of preferences on future issues, and (2) the decisionmaking procedures and costs. ‘Decisionmaking’ and ‘external’ costs are shown to be interrelated. Following this analysis, failure to pass laws imposes ‘external’ costs in the same way that passing them does, so that the optimal majority may be lower when desirable laws are viewed as changing over time. Decisionmaking costs depend upon the way in which voters are persuaded to support or oppose bills, upon the distribution of preferences on bills, and on vote-trading possibilities. If vote-trading is almost costless, a wide range of decision rules has nearly equal social benefits. Finally, the model is used to discuss optimal voting rules for several decisionmaking bodies.     

Insincere voting under the successive procedure

Most European parliaments use the successive procedure to reach decisions. This means that a parliament votes feasible alternatives one-by-one in a pre-determined order until one of them obtains a majority of votes. The paper has two objectives. First, I sketch a simple method making it easy to uncover instances of successful insincere voting under the successive procedure. Second, by focusing on data from one national assembly consistently using this procedure, I demonstrate that insincere or strategic voting is very rare. The finding does not indicate that politicians necessarily behave in a non-strategic or unsophisticated manner. It means only that strategic maneuvers may take place at earlier stages of the decision-making process, for example, in designing the voting agenda.     

Taking Others into Account: Self‐Interest and Fairness in Majority Decision Making

Research on the formal properties of democratic aggregation mechanisms has a long tradition in political science. Recent theoretical developments, however, show that in the discussion of normative contents of democratic decisions, the actual shape of preferences deserves just as much attention. However, our knowledge about the concrete motivations of individual behavior in democratic decisions is incomplete. Using laboratory experiments, this article examines the existence of social preferences in majority decisions. Contrary to earlier experiments of committee decision making, we develop a design that controls for the conditions of communication and the level of information between subjects. This allows us to comparatively test the predictive power of several theories. We find strong evidence that self‐interest and fairness motivate human behavior in majority decisions.     

An impossibility theorem for spatial models

This paper examines the implications for social welfare functions of restricting the domain of individual preferences to type-one preferences. Type-one preferences assume that each person has a most preferred alternative in a euclidean space and that alternatives are ranked according to their euclidean distance from this point. The result is that if we impose Arrow's conditions of collective rationality, IIA, and the Pareto principle on the social welfare function, then it must be dictatorial. This result may not seem surprising, but it stands in marked contrast to the problem considered by Gibbard and Satterthwaite of finding a social-choice function. With unrestricted domain, under the Gibbard-Satterthwaite hypotheses, choices must be dictatorial. With type-one preferences this result has been previously shown not to be true. This finding identifies a significant difference between the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite problems.     

Inequity and risk aversion in sequential public good games

Behavioral hypotheses have recently been introduced into public-choice theory (Ostrom in American Political Science Review 92:1–22, 1998). Nevertheless, the individual intrinsic preferences which drive decisions in social dilemmas have not yet been empirically identified. This paper asks whether risk and inequity preferences are behind agents’ behavior in a sequential public good game. The experimental results show that risk aversion is negatively correlated with the contribution decision of first movers. Second movers who are averse to advantageous inequity free-ride less and reciprocate more than do others. Our results emphasize the importance of strategic uncertainty for the correct understanding of which preferences influence cooperation in social dilemmas.     

Politicians' Opinions on Tax Reform

This paper examines politicians' stated preferences on tax reforms which aim to bring about a given change in revenue. The paper starts from a simple framework inwhich politicians are vote maximisers, analyses how disequilibria may affect tax choices and considers possible asymmetries in decisions. The empirical examination of the problem uses the stated preferences of 637 Flemish local politicians for both raising and lowering taxes by the same amount. Using multinomial logit estimation, symmetric and asymmetric effects are found and so the symmetry assumption underlying the standard approach is questioned in the analyses of tax choices.     

Collective Resistance under Authoritarianism: Elite–Mass Strategies in an Experimental Game

We create a collective resistance game in which elites control the distribution of resources if the masses are compliant. However, if the masses unanimously protest elite allocations, they can capture a greater share of resources for themselves. We study how Chinese villagers, randomly assigned to the role of elites and masses, play this game in repeated interactions under varying information conditions. We find significant variation in the extent to which participants gave weight in their decisions to (1) the amount of the elite allocation and (2) their beliefs about the likely choices of fellow group members. Many individuals made their decisions based primarily on the size of the elite allocation, choosing to protest if the elite offer fell below some threshold level. Only a small proportion of the respondents were attuned consistently to the behavioral intentions of fellow group members in deciding whether to protest the elite allocation. This heterogeneity of preferences among participants has significant implications for their prospects of achieving and sustaining collective action. Knowledge of the amount of resources controlled by elites at the start of the game affected mass calculations of the fairness of distributions and increased the frequency of mass protests. However, the elites exploited the decision rule of many mass members by buying off those individuals with the lowest thresholds, thus preempting or dissolving collective action. This research sheds light on elite–mass interactions under authoritarianism, and in particular on contentious politics in contemporary China.     

Strategic Considerations and Judicial Review: The Case of Workers' Compensation Laws in the American States

Whether state supreme court justices votesincerely or strategically depends upon:(1) justices' sincere preferences; (2)ideological differences between a justiceand other state actors, which affect the willingness of actors tosanction justices; and (3) institutionalrules and political settings, which affect the ability of otheractors to retaliate against justices forobjectionable decisions. Since institutional rules do notvary for the U.S. Supreme Court but do forthe 50 states, state supreme court cases are thebest site for testing conditions underwhich justices are likely to vote strategically. Moreover,amendment of state constitutions isrelatively easy, which permits systematic examination of theextent to which strategic behavior manifests in judicialreview cases. Using data on docketing anddecisions on workers' compensation laws for1970–1993, this research offers a broaderunderstanding of strategic behavior byjudges.     

A general constitutional possibility theorem

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that there exist no transitive social preferences in nonoligarchic societies for all possible profiles of individual preference orderings. Similarly, a generalization of Sen's Theorem of the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal implies under the same conditions that non-Pareto-optimal outcomes may be present in the resulting cyclical preference relations. This essay changes the customary perspective. It demonstrates that, for any profile of individual preferences, we can always find a nonoligarchic assignment of rights to different subsets of society, to decide between pairs of outcomes, together with adequate decision rules, which escapes these problems. This assignment of rights can be a purely liberal one even for each profile, but not one in which everybody participates in all decisions and which uses simple or qualified-majority voting (Total Direct Democracy). The adequate purely liberal constitution, on the other hand, may imply an oligarchy if too few outcomes are present.     

POLICY RESPONSES TO CITIZEN ATTITUDES

Though many studies have provided only limited support for the idea of policymaker "responsiveness," the present study indicates that constituents do have some impact on public policy decisions, though not directly. With the aid of data on decisionmaking of country property appraisers in Florida, I was able to demonstrate that constituency preferences affect policy decisions indirectly through the effect of decisionmaker attitudes, thus suggesting an intervening model of decisionmaking.
Specifically, I found that constituency tax preferences impacted on property appraiser tax attitude and through it on the property assessment ratio. More importantly, I was able to isolate some of the potential factors which accentuate those relationships posited by an intervening model of decisionmaking. In particular, I found that the more policymakers (the property appraisers) were immersed into their social and political context or engaged in "social interaction" activities the more likely they and their own attitudes were to be influenced by prevailing constituency tax sentiment.     

Manipulation and Single‐Peakedness: A General Result

This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single‐peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy‐proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is necessarily prone to the strategic misrepresentation of preferences by an individual or a group. Moreover, we prove in this environment that for any nondictatorial institution, the truthful revelation of preferences can never be a dominant strategy equilibrium. Accordingly, an incentive to behave insincerely is inherent to the vast majority of real‐world lawmaking systems, even when the policy space is unidimensional and the core is nonempty.     

Robert D. Tollison and the economics of politics

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.     

Social Capital and Endogenous Preferences

In this paper we analyze whether social capital can emerge endogenously from a process of preference evolution. We define social capital as preferences that promote voluntary cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We investigate how the endogenous preferences depend on the amount of information individuals have about each other’s preferences. When there is sufficiently much information, maximal social capital emerges. In general, the level of social capital varies positively with the amount of information. Our results may add to an understanding of the factors that determine a society’s ability to generate cooperative outcomes.     

A Conditional Defense of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem in a Restricted Informational Environment

May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited in support of majority rule, it has never been extended beyond decisions based on pairwise comparisons of options. We generalize May's theorem to many-option decisions where voters each cast one vote. Surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. This suggests a conditional defense of plurality rule: If a society's balloting procedure collects only a single vote from each voter, then plurality rule is the uniquely compelling electoral procedure. To illustrate the conditional nature of this claim, we also identify a richer informational environment in which approval voting, not plurality rule, is supported by a May-style argument.     

Social choice and economic growth

Optimal economic growth deals with the problem of how societies make tradeoffs between current and future consumption, or equivalently, how societies make decisions about investment rates. Until now, theorists have simply assumed that there is some societal utility function which planners can maximize. Social choice theorists have thrown doubt upon the concept of a societal utility function. We treat optimal economic growth as a problem in social choice theory. Assume that citizens have preferences over the various growth plans. Under what conditions will a majority rule equilibrium exist? We show that such an equilibrium can exist for a Ramsey type problem. We then briefly consider social choice in the so-called “labor surplus” economy.