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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Ján Palguta; Levínský, René; Škoda, Samuel |
| Abstract: | Elections define representative democracies, but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to electoral rooms. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic which biannually renews mandates in 1/3 of Senate constituencies rotating according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9-10), new COVID-19 infections grow significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily-related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration is not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration is absent in population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks. |
| Keywords: | election,COVID-19,natural experiment,event study |
| JEL: | D70 D72 H0 H12 H75 I10 I18 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:891&r= |
| By: | Dhillon, Amrita; Kotsialou, Grammateia; Xefteris, Dimitris |
| Abstract: | Recent developments in blockchain technology have made possible greater progress on secure electronic voting, opening the way to better ways of democratic decision making. In this paper we formalise the features of ``liquid democracy'' which allows voters to delegate their votes to other voters, and we explore whether it improves information aggregation as compared to direct voting. We consider a two-alternative setup with truth-seeking voters (informed and uninformed) and partisan ones (leftists and rightists), and we show that delegation improves information aggregation in finite elections. We also propose a mechanism that further improves the information aggregation properties of delegation in private information settings, by guaranteeing that all vote transfers are from uninformed to informed truth-seeking voters. Delegation offers effective ways for truth-seeking uninformed voters to boost the vote-share of the alternative that matches the state of the world in all considered setups and hence deserves policy makers' attention. |
| Date: | 2021–01–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:ubk7p&r= |
| By: | Calderon, Alvaro (Stanford University); Fouka, Vasiliki (Stanford University); Tabellini, Marco (Harvard Business School) |
| Abstract: | Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This paper shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged pro-civil rights activism in northern and western counties. These effects were not only driven by Black voters, but also by progressive and working class segments of the white population. We identify the salience of conditions prevailing in the South, measured through increased reporting of southern lynchings in northern newspapers, as a possible channel through which the Great Migration increased whites' support for civil rights. Mirroring the changes in the electorate, non-southern Congress members became more likely to promote civil rights legislation, but also grew increasingly polarized along party lines on racial issues. |
| Keywords: | race, diversity, civil rights, Great Migration |
| JEL: | D72 J15 N92 |
| Date: | 2021–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14488&r= |
| By: | Stephan Geschwind; Felix Roesel |
| Abstract: | Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences, RD and event study estimates consistently show that direct democracy comes with sizable but selective tax cuts. Property tax rates, which apply to all residents, decrease by some 10 to 15% under direct democracy. We do not find that business tax rates change. Direct democracy allows citizens to design tax policies more individually than voting for a high-tax or low-tax party in elections. |
| Keywords: | direct democracy, town meeting, popular assembly, constitution, public finance, taxation |
| JEL: | D71 D72 H71 R51 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9166&r= |
| By: | Alvaro Calderon; Vasiliki Fouka; Marco Tabellini |
| Abstract: | Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination. This paper shows that the Great Migration and support for civil rights are causally linked. Predicting Black inflows with a shift-share instrument, we find that the Great Migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged pro-civil rights activism in northern and western counties. These effects were not only driven by Black voters, but also by progressive and working class segments of the white population. We identify the salience of conditions prevailing in the South, measured through increased reporting of southern lynchings in northern newspapers, as a possible channel through which the Great Migration increased whites’ support for civil rights. Mirroring the changes in the electorate, non-southern Congress members became more likely to promote civil rights legislation, but also grew increasingly polarized along party lines on racial issues. |
| JEL: | D72 J15 N92 |
| Date: | 2021–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28965&r= |
| By: | Brewer, Paul J; Moberly, Raymond |
| Abstract: | Emergent behavior in repeated collective decisions of minimally intelligent agents -- who at each step in time invoke majority rule to choose between a status quo and a random challenge -- can manifest through the long-term stationary probability distributions of a Markov Chain. We use this known technique to compare two kinds of voting agendas: a zero-intelligence agenda that chooses the challenger uniformly at random, and a minimally-intelligent agenda that chooses the challenger from the union of the status quo and the set of winning challengers. We use Google Co-Lab's GPU accelerated computing environment, with code we have hosted on Github, to compute stationary distributions for some simple examples from spatial-voting and budget-allocation scenarios. We find that the voting model using the zero-intelligence agenda converges more slowly, but in some cases to better outcomes. |
| Date: | 2021–06–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:ajfdb&r= |
| By: | Mikhail Pakhnin |
| Abstract: | This paper reviews recent research on the aggregation of heterogeneous time preferences. Main results are illustrated in simple Ramsey models with two or three agents who differ in their discount factors. We employ an intertemporal view on these models and argue that preferences of a decision maker should be represented by a sequence of utility functions. This allows us to clarify the issue of dynamic inconsistency and relate it to simple properties of discounting. We distinguish between private and common consumption cases. In the private consumption case, we discuss the properties of sequences of Paretian social welfare functions and explain why the notion of Pareto optimality under heterogeneous time preferences becomes problematic. In the common consumption case, we focus on the problem of collective choice under heterogeneous time preferences, discuss the difficulties with dynamic voting procedures and review some ways to overcome them. We conclude by highlighting the implications of our discussion for the problem of choosing an appropriate social discount rate. |
| Keywords: | collective decisions, social welfare function, heterogeneous agents, time consistency, voting, social discount rate |
| JEL: | D15 D71 H43 O40 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9141&r= |
| By: | Nikolas Schöll; Thomas Kurer |
| Abstract: | This paper challenges the common perception that automation and digitalization generally reduce employment and primarily result in political discontent. Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from West Germany and shift-share instruments combined with two-way fixed-effect panel models, we study how technological change affects regional electorates. We show that the expected decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or higher investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was in fact more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the electorate has important political implications as workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values. Consequentially, local advances in technology are associated with higher vote shares for progressive parties. This finding adds important nuance to the popular narrative that technological change fuels radical right voting. |
| Keywords: | technological change, automation, robots, political preferences, Voters, occupational determinants of plitical preferences |
| JEL: | P16 D72 O33 J31 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1269&r= |
| By: | Bremer, Björn; Di Carlo, Donato; Wansleben, Leon |
| Abstract: | Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel dataset to investigate the effects of structural constraints and partisanship on German districts' investment spending from 1995 to 2018. We find that the lack of fiscal and administrative capacity significantly influences local investment patterns. Yet, within these constraints, partisanship matters. Conservative politicians tend to prioritize public investment more than the left. This is especially the case when revenues from local taxes are low. As the fiscal conditions improve, left-wing politicians increase investment more strongly and hence the difference between the left and the right disappears. Our findings are indicative of how regional economic divergence can emerge even within cooperative federalist systems and show that, despite rigid fiscal rules, partisanship matters when parties face trade-offs over discretionary spending. |
| Keywords: | constrained partisanship,fiscal federalism,Germany,local politics,public investment,Deutschland,Fiskalföderalismus,Lokalpolitik,öffentliche Investitionen,politische Parteien |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:214&r= |