Growth,control and tensions in an open socialist economy

Persistent contradictions among growth, efficiency and equilibrium in East European countries are analysed in our theoretical model. Internal and external tensions are distinguished. Both types of tension diminish the efficiency of investment and of foreign trade, moreover, they modify macrodistributional shares. Competing growth strategies are compared achieving constant internal and/or external tensions. A simple numberical macromodel is constructed to be used in computer simulations.     

Responsiveness without Representation: Evidence from Minimum Wage Laws in U.S. States

How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same scale (U.S. dollars), we can quantify both the association of policy outcomes with preferences across states (responsiveness) and their deviation within states (bias). We demonstrate that while minimum wages respond to corresponding preferences across states, policy outcomes are more conservative than preferences in each state, with the average policy bias amounting to about two dollars. We also show that policy bias is substantially smaller in states with access to direct democratic institutions.     

Identifying the bandwagon effect in two-round elections

Albert Heckscher (1857–1897) was a Danish lawyer. In his dissertation (Bidrag till Grundlæggelse af en Afstemningslære), accepted in 1892 at the University of Copenhagen, Heckscher dealt with numerous issues related to voting, especially those related to vote-aggregation in parliaments, courts and committees. He knew the works of Condorcet and Borda quite well, and analyzed many topics that would nowadays fall into the domain of the theory of social choice. These include Condorcet-cycles, differences between Condorcet-effective rules and the Borda rule, strategic voting, the influence of the voting order under the parliamentary voting rules, the likelihood of single-peaked preference profiles, and the problems created by non-separable preferences. Heckscher’s treatment of the Judgment Aggregation Paradox is especially noteworthy. Although Kornhauser and Sager (Yale Law Journal 96: 82–117, 1986) are usually mentioned as the inventors of this problem, Heckscher’s earlier treatment confirms the suspicion that the problem is not of recent origin. Numerous issues studied in the post-Arrowian theory of voting may already be found in Heckscher’s dissertation; some of them have become subjects of systematic study only in the twenty-first century. It is argued that Albert Heckscher, the unknown nineteenth century Danish lawyer, deserves a place in the pantheon of the theory of social choice alongside his better known contemporaries Charles Dodgson and E. J. Nanson.     

Competition and turnout revisited: The importance of measuring expected closeness accurately

This study aims at contributing to the literature on the effect of political competition on electoral participation. I test the Downsian Closeness Hypothesis (DCH) on data from runoffs in general elections in Hungary. The expected closeness of the runoffs is proxied with first round margins of victory. The findings of the paper are consistent with the DCH: increases in margins between two parties in the first round significantly decrease turnout in the second, even when turnout in the first round is controlled for. This is in line with the theoretical considerations of the DCH but contrary to a large part of the existing empirical literature. The estimates of closeness are substantially greater than in previous papers and suggest that previous studies of the DCH using actual closeness as a proxy for expected closeness encountered a serious measurement error problem.     

The Effect of Distributive Politics on Electoral Participation: Evidence from 70 Million Agricultural Payments

Political Behavior - Policy feedbacks take place when public policies change mass participation and mobilize key constituencies. This can influence future rounds of policymaking and solidify...     

Local Economic Shocks and National Election Outcomes: Evidence from Hungarian Administrative Data

Political Behavior - What are the consequences of unequal economic conditions on national election results? In this study, we use extraordinarily granular economic data measured without sampling...     

Empathy,Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment

Political Behavior - Online perspective-taking experiments have demonstrated great potential in reducing prejudice towards disadvantaged groups such as refugees or Roma. These experiments trigger...     

Centrist by Comparison: Extremism and the Expansion of the Political Spectrum

While it is well understood that policy suggestions outside the range of mainstream debate are prevalent in various policy domains of American politics, their effects remain unexplored. In this paper, we suggest that proposing policies far from the political mainstream can re-structure voter perceptions of where alternatives lie in the ideological space. We provide support for this hypothesis using results from six survey experiments. We find that the introduction of extreme alternatives into the public discourse makes mainstream policies on the same side of the spectrum look more centrist in the public eye, thus increasing support for these moderate alternatives.     

Investment limit cycles in a socialist economy

The present paper generalizes a linear cycle model of the socialist economy studied in Simonovits (1990): the two equations describing the reproduction of the tensions are retained, while the two linear reaction equations are confined to the interval of lower and upper bounds; outside these intervals the decisions are given by the corresponding bounds (cf. Hicks, 1950). The main result is the following: If a certain linear system of equations and inequalities has a solution, then there exists a limit cycle with period 4, the amplitude of which is independent of the initial states.