How useful to decision-makers is contingent valuation of the environment?

Contingent valuation, as a method that attempts to estimate monetary values for public goods, excites passionate advocacy or resistance. This article summarizes and examines some of the criticisms of contingent valuation and concludes that its approach is essentially the same as any policy analytic method. It is argued that the language of contingent valuation needs radical reform for it to be readily accessible to practitioners, yet it does offer one escape from the lack of rigour of much of the environmental debate. Whatever the faults of contingent valuation methods, they do involve the public in a dialogue with ‘experts’. Any means that gives voice to the public in an age of public policy-making by managers, consultants, professional politicians, large firms and interest group leaders is at least an antidote to environmental managerialism.     

Political cheating

This paper shows that how a politician votes is unrelated to whether he faces re-election. This contradicts the universal agreement by economists that political behavior is constrained by the threat of re-election. Contrary to the existing work on ideology, I show that ideology can prevent rather than cause opportunistic behavior. My discussion of ideology can explain why the last period does not affect how a politician votes but only how often he votes. Besides providing an explanation for how politicians can internalize the long-run returns to investments through ideology, my results show that political parties have no effect on how retiring congressmen vote. Finally, I shall try to argue that politicians are search and not experience goods.     

Preferences,beliefs, and values in negotiations concerning aid to Nicaragua

The paper argues that in the context of public choice for non-market goods, two assumptions of the simple model of the rational economic actor may not hold. The assumptions are that there is a direct connection between choice and outcome, and that preferences are not affected by the act of making a choice. Consequently, to understand people's preferences for public goods, it is important to measure their beliefs and values separately rather than simply to observe their choice behavior or to ask them what they would be willing to pay for the public good. In an example study, people's preferences for U.S. policies toward Nicaragua were measured and further analyzed into their beliefs about the effects of those policies on Nicaraguan outcomes, and their evaluations of the Nicaraguan outcomes. It was shown that the process of making a two-person choice changed the preferences, and that the separate measures or beliefs and values gave insight into the process of the change that would not have been available had only the preferences been measured. Implications for the contingent valuation method are explored and an alternative approach is proposed.     

Eliciting the Public's Budgetary Preferences: Insights from Contingent Valuation

Contingent valuation studies can provide useful insights for designers and users of surveys eliciting the public's comprehensive budgetary preferences. Such studies attempt to elicit the public's monetary valuations of specific nontraded goods to support decisions of managers in the public sector. Although controversial, these surveys provide much useful methodological analysis and evidence relevant to avoiding bias and unreliability of surveys intended to elicit more general budgetary preferences. Significantly refined over the past several decades, the underlying methodology shows substantial promise for further development. Collaboration of specialists knowledgeable about public budgeting and finance with specialists in economics, survey methods, and market research could contribute greatly to designing, implementing, and evaluating surveys of the citizenry's public budgetary preferences.     

Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity

In theory, flexible list systems are a compromise between closed-list and open-list proportional representation. A party's list of candidates can be reordered by voters if the number of votes cast for an individual candidate exceeds some quota. Because these barriers to reordering are rarely overcome, these systems are often characterized as basically closed-list systems. Paradoxically, in many cases, candidates are increasingly earning individual-level preference votes. Using data from Slovakia, we show that incumbents cultivate personal reputations because parties reward preference vote earning candidates with better pre-election list positions in the future. Ironically, the party's vote-earning strategy comes at a price, as incumbents use voting against the party on the chamber floor to generate the reputations that garner preference votes.     

Advancing E-Government: Financing Challenges and Opportunities

As e-government evolves into the transactions stage, governments must grapple with how to finance the development of e-transactions. The authors argue that the externalities effects of electronic transactions suggest they are appropriately financed by some combination of public investment and user charges. We propose a self-financing model adhering to two basic requirements. A flexible pricing framework is the core of the self-financing model, as it embodies both the firm's and the government's perspectives. We assess basic assumptions of the pricing framework using contingent valuation methodology and a statewide survey of more than 400 firms. The empirical estimates we develop of the willingness to pay for e-transactions with state government and the theoretical discussion about the self-financing model form the basis for prescribing policy recommendations.     

Valuing environmental losses: What promise does the right measure hold?

This paper is concerned with the implications of a disparity between payment- and compensation-based measures of economic loss, examined in the context of contingent valuation survey methods. We first argue that a measure based on individuals' compensation demanded (CD), rather than their willingness to pay (WTP), is appropriate when losses are proposed and that disparities between WTP and CD measures often are real rather than artifactual. We then point out some of the problems involved in estimating CD measures, relate these to several hypotheses about people's behavior, and conclude that they present a formidable challenge to the accurate estimation of welfare losses. Finally, several guidelines are proposed regarding the use and further development of compensation-based measures of economic value.     

Constituents’ Responses to Congressional Roll‐Call Voting

Do citizens hold their representatives accountable for policy decisions, as commonly assumed in theories of legislative politics? Previous research has failed to yield clear evidence on this question for two reasons: measurement error arising from noncomparable indicators of legislators’ and constituents’ preferences and potential simultaneity between constituents’ beliefs about and approval of their representatives. Two new national surveys address the measurement problem directly by asking respondents how they would vote and how they think their representatives voted on key roll‐call votes. Using the actual votes, we can, in turn, construct instrumental variables that correct for simultaneity. We find that the American electorate responds strongly to substantive representation. (1) Nearly all respondents have preferences over important bills before Congress. (2) Most constituents hold beliefs about their legislators’ roll‐call votes that reflect both the legislators’ actual behavior and the parties’ policy reputations. (3) Constituents use those beliefs to hold their legislators accountable.     

Centralized vote-trading

This paper presents a model of centralized vote-trading in a legislature. In this model, legislators trade only with party leaders, who set prices at which they will buy needed vote-changes and sell promises to pass or defeat particular bills. Each legislator trades away votes on bills of little concern to him and of high concern to leaders, and purchases promises from the leaders to pass (or defeat) particular bills of high concern to the legislator, relative to the price the leguslator must pay. This model is intended as a formal representation of an ‘efficient’ and possibly desirable legislature; modifications are needed to make it useful in describing actual legislatures. However, some evidence is cited to show that this model better accords with reality than previous vote-trading models.     

Ideological mavericks or party herd? The effect of candidates’ ideological positions on intra-party success

Political candidates' ideological positions have been used to explain success in inter-party competition, but little is known about how they impact success in intra-party competition. Here, candidates' positions on the Left–Right and GAL–TAN dimensions are analysed in three Finnish parliamentary elections (2011, 2015, 2019). Candidates' ideological positions are measured in terms of their ideological distance from their own party's median candidate. Absolute ideological distances between candidates and their party's median candidate decrease candidates' preference votes. Furthermore, the effects are contingent on the general ideological position of the candidate's party. However, these interactions do not follow any clear pattern, as more rightist candidates in right-wing parties and more green-alternative-libertarian candidates in traditional-authoritarian-nationalist parties all experience a decrease in their preference votes. This effect is large enough to be a decisive factor in intra-party competition between the last candidate that was elected and the first one that was not.     

Bribing Voters

We present a model of influence over collective decisions made through voting. We show how an outside party offering incentives to a committee can manipulate the committee's decisions at no cost and induce inefficient outcomes. A key condition is that the outsider be able to reward decisive votes differently. Inefficiency results from voting externalities. We relax all initial assumptions to investigate how to insulate committees. We study different information settings, credibility assumptions, payoff structures (voters caring about the collective decision and about their own votes), and incentive schemes (offers contingent on pivotal votes, individual votes, vote shares, and the collective decision). We analyze when voting should be made secret; we elucidate the role of individual accountability and various political institutions in preventing vote buying. We discuss implications for lobbying, for clientelism, for decisions in legislatures, boards, and central banks, and for the efficiency of democracy .     

Everything to Everyone: The Electoral Consequences of the Broad‐Appeal Strategy in Europe

Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual‐level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies.     

Re-examining the evidence on the electoral impact of terrorist attacks: The Spanish election of 2004

This paper re-examines the electoral effect of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid. Previous research has focused on post-electoral surveys to construct counterfactuals for the evaluation of the electoral impact of the attack. Bali (Electoral Studies, 2007) claims that the terrorists attacks had an important electoral impact while Lago and Montero (2005) claim the opposite. In this paper I propose to re-examine the evidence using a methodological approach based on actual votes instead of opinions revealed by surveys, and the difference-in-differences estimator. The calculations under the counterfactual of “no terrorist attack” support the forecasts of the polls taken prior to the terrorist attack and the results of Bali (2007). The incumbent (conservative) party would have won the election with between 42% and the 45% of the votes, while the socialist party would have obtained 37% of the votes.     

Lin Ostrom’s Contribution to Economics: A Personal Evaluation

Lin Ostrom’s work constitutes a great step forward in the analysis of social governance. Instead of focusing on the technical characteristics of goods she studies what types of institutions have emerged and how they affect individual motivation and behavior in public goods and commons situations. Her approach represents a careful analysis of institutions often emerging from below. Unorthodox impacts of institutions on individual motivation and behavior as well as the possible creation of new institutions must be taken into account. The constitution must ensure that the involved individuals can establish adequate institutions regardless of possible opposition by politicians and bureaucrats.     

An Opposing View of Scotland's Ballot Paper Problem: Arbuthnott and the Government had the Right Idea

The May 2007 Scottish Parliament election used a different ballot format from the one used in the previous elections, one that combined the regional and constituency votes onto one ballot paper (two separate papers were used before). Because there were many more invalid votes in 2007, the problem was blamed on the two‐vote ballot paper, which was recommended by the Arbuthnott Commission to prevent misunderstandings about what the two votes were for. Other places that use the mixed‐member proportional (MMP) electoral system tend to use a two‐vote ballot paper, with Germany and New Zealand seeing low levels of invalid votes. While the decision to revert to two separate papers in future Scottish Parliament elections might reduce the number of invalid votes, the price could be more confusion about the proportional nature of the electoral system unless public education improves significantly.     

Bargaining Power of Smaller States in Germany's Länderfinanzausgleich 1979–90

In this paper we explore the impact of politicalfactors on redistribution across the states in theGerman Länderfinanzausgleich. From a public choiceperspective the smaller states are supposed to have ahigher influence on decisions in the secondlegislative chamber due to a lower shadow price oftheir votes, which implies a higher bargaining power.As the federal government's policy depends on amajority in the second chamber there is an incentiveto buy smaller states' votes. Controlling for GDP percapita, we find statistically significant support forour hypotheses.     

Increasing the transparency of stated choice studies for policy analysis: Designing experiments to produce raw response graphs

We believe a lack of transparency undermines both the credibility of, and interest in, stated choice studies among policy makers. Unlike articles reporting the results of contingent valuation studies, papers in the stated choice literature rarely present simple tabulations of raw response data (that is, a table or graph showing the percentage of respondents agreeing to purchase a good or service, or vote for a proposed management plan as a function of price). We describe an approach for adding “policy” tasks to a standard orthogonal‐in‐attribute‐levels research design that allows the researcher to plot raw responses as a function of changes in only one characteristic of the offered good or service. We demonstrate this approach using data from a stated choice study of private demand for cholera and typhoid vaccines in Kolkata, India, carried out in the summer of 2004. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

National parliamentary control and voting in the Council of the European Union

This article explores the different ways governments express dissent in the Council of the European Union (EU) through ‘No’ votes, abstentions and recorded negative statements. A game-theoretical model is presented that studies voting behaviour and analyses how the national parliaments’ levels of control over their governments’ EU policies affect it. It is concluded that governments that are strongly controlled by their parliaments are not more likely to express dissent. However, when they do express dissent, they vote ‘No’ more often. Parliamentary control depends on the presence of formal oversight institutions as well as the motivation of parliamentarians to hold their governments accountable. Empirical support is found in an analysis of votes on 1,387 legislative proposals that represent more than a decade of Council decision making in the period 2004–2014. This article contributes to the discussion on the involvement of national parliaments in EU affairs, and clearly distinguishes the different forms of dissent in Council decision making.     

On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes”

Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity undermine the comparison. Three survey experiments show that providing partisan and nonpartisan information readily available to legislators materially changes respondents' expressed preferences on roll‐call votes. With information, expressed policy positions are both less centrist and more closely matched to legislator behavior in their preferred party. Respondents also appear aware of their own lack of knowledge in evaluating roll‐call policy votes. The treatment effect of information decreases in confidence judging policy in that area. We show similar patterns for respondent opinions on Supreme Court decisions.     

More than wishful thinking: Causes and consequences of voters’ electoral expectations about parties and coalitions

Accurate expectations about the outcome of elections play a central role in psychological and economic theories of voting. In the paper, three questions about voters’ expectations are investigated. First, we identify and test several factors that influence the overall accuracy or quality of voters’ expectations. Second, the phenomenon of “wishful thinking” is tested and confirmed for expectations about the electoral performance of individual parties and coalitions. Finally, two mechanisms how expectations might influence voting behavior are identified and tested. Based on surveys from Austria and Germany, the results suggest that voters not only rely on expectations to avoid casting “wasted” votes for parties without electoral chances, but that they are able to engage in fairly sophisticated strategic coalition voting.