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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Salvador Barberà; Anke Gerber |
| Abstract: | Two candidates competing for election may raise some issues for debate during the electoral campaign, while avoiding others. We present a model in which the decision to introduce an issue, or to reply to the opponent’s position on one that she raised, may result in further additions to the list of topics that end up being discussed. Candidates’ strategic decisions are driven by their appraisal of their expected vote share at the end of the campaign. Our analysis appeals to a protocol-free equilibrium concept, and predicts the list of topics that will be touched upon by each candidate, and the order in which they might be addressed. We show that important phenomena observed during campaigns, like the convergence of the parties to address the same issues, or else their diverging choice on which ones to treat, or the relevance of issue ownership can be explained within our stark basic model. |
| Keywords: | electoral campaigns, issues, equilibrium sets of continuation, campaigns, issue convergence, issue divergence, issue ownership |
| JEL: | D72 P16 |
| Date: | 2022–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1353&r= |
| By: | Jante Parlevliet; Massimo Giuliodori; Matthijs Rooduijn |
| Abstract: | It is well documented that the public is often poorly informed about economic facts and mechanisms. In the domain of fiscal policy, this may make voters susceptible to favour spending, while underestimating its costs (fiscal illusion). While politicians typically have a comparative advantage in economic policymaking, voters may be less inclined to rely on proposals for prudent fiscal policy if they do not believe that these politicians act in their best interest – an idea that in recent decades has become more prevalent. Using a novel dataset from the Netherlands, this paper assesses whether people with strong populist ideas also report significantly more expansionary fiscal preferences, and whether populist attitudes reinforce the risk of fiscal illusion. We find that (i) populist attitudes indeed come with more expansionary preferences, (ii) literacy and information provision – which have the potential to alleviate the occurrence of fiscal illusion – contribute to less expansionary fiscal preferences and (iii) the effect of literacy is conditional on the level of populist sentiment. In particular, we find that poorly literate respondents report significantly higher support for tax relief only when they hold strong populist attitudes, but not when they have more favourable attitudes towards the elite. |
| Keywords: | fiscal preferences; literacy; information; fiscal illusion; populism |
| JEL: | D72 D74 D83 E62 F52 G53 H23 H31 |
| Date: | 2021–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dnb:dnbwpp:731&r= |
| By: | Mario Gilli (Department of Economics, Management and Statistics and Center for European Studies, University of Milano-Bicocca); Filippo Giorgini (Department of Economics, Management and Statistics and Center for European Studies, University of Milano-Bicocca) |
| Abstract: | Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens’ protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing different degree of transparency in public information. Also the social characteristics of a country, such as citizens’ diversity and radicalization, matter for citizens political participation. The aim of this paper is to analyze causes and consequences of citizens’ protests, focusing on how private and public information affect citizens’ opinion and political behavior, and on how they depend on sociopolitical factors as well as on the political regime. In Regime Change and Revolutionary Entrepreneurs, Bueno de Mesquita proposed a seminal model to study why revolutionary vanguards might use violence to mobilize citizens against a regime. We claim that the model can be used more generally to investigate citizens’ protest. We refer to his model to understand citizens’ political behavior, studying the relationship between the model’s structural parameters and the causes and consequences of citizens’protests, adopting a partially different approach and extending his results. |
| Keywords: | protests, political regimes, sociopolitical variables |
| JEL: | C72 D74 P48 |
| Date: | 2022–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2022.26&r= |
| By: | Abbey Steele; Michael Weintraub |
| Abstract: | Rebels, militias, and criminal groups all govern civilians. Governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civil war likely influence citizens' post-conflict political participation, with consequences for democratic politics. We theorize that an armed group's position relative to the state (anti-state or pro-state) and governing ideology (sharing governing responsibilities with local institutions or destroying them to govern centrally) interact to influence citizens' later choices about political participation. |
| Keywords: | Armed conflict, Governance, Wartime governance, Political participation, Civil conflict, Colombia, Household survey |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2022-98&r= |
| By: | Zhiying Ren; Andrew M. Carton; Eugen Dimant; Maurice E. Schweitzer |
| Abstract: | Although many virtuous leaders are guided by the ideal of prioritizing the need and welfare of their subordinates, others advance their self-interest at the expense of the people they purport to serve. In this article, we discuss the relationship between leadership and the spread of conspiracy theories. We propose that leaders spread conspiracy theories in service of four primary goals: 1) to attack opponents; 2) to increase support from their ingroup members; 3) to shift blame and responsibility; and 4) to undermine institution that threaten their power. We argue that populist and conservative leaders are most likely to spread conspiracy theories during periods of instability. |
| Keywords: | conspiracy theories sharing, leadership, authoritarian leaders |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9951&r= |
| By: | Federico Boffa; Francisco Cavalcanti; Christian Fons-Rosen; Amedeo Piolatto |
| Abstract: | We analyse partisan biases in the allocation of central discretionary transfers in a federal country. We study drought aid-relief in Brazil, where presidential and municipal elections alternate every two years, to identify a novel pattern of distributive politics, determined by the sequence of central and local elections. In particular, we show that alignment advantage materialises only in the period before municipal elections, while it disappears in the period before presidential elections. Furthermore, we show that even before mayoral elections partisanship only counts for districts with intermediate levels of aridity, where being aligned causes an increase by a factor of almost two (equivalent to +18.1 p.p.) in the chances of receiving aid-relief. We rationalise this pattern in a model with office-motivated politicians and rational voters. |
| Keywords: | federalism, distributive politics, partisan alignment, presidential elections, aridity, Brazil |
| JEL: | D72 H11 H7 |
| Date: | 2022–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1337&r= |
| By: | Adam Graham-Squire; David McCune |
| Abstract: | The August 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House contained many interesting features from the perspective of social choice theory. This election used instant runoff voting (often referred to as ranked choice voting) to elect a winner, and many of the weaknesses of this voting method were on display in this election. For example, the Condorcet winner is different from the instant runoff winner, and the election demonstrated a monotonicity paradox. The election also demonstrated a no show paradox; as far as we are aware, this election represents the first document American ranked choice election to demonstrate this paradox. |
| Date: | 2022–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2209.04764&r= |
| By: | Alex Centeno; Leidy Garc\'ia |
| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to identify and analyze the response actions of a set of partially rational players embedded in sub-networks in the context of social interaction and learning. We characterize strategic network formation as a static game of interactions with incomplete information, where players maximize their utility depending on the connections they establish and multiple interdependent actions that permit group-specific parameters of players. It is challenging to apply this type of model to real-life scenarios for two reasons: The computation of the Bayesian Nash Equilibrium is highly demanding and the identification of social influence requires the use of excluded variables that are oftentimes unavailable. Based on the theoretical proposal, we propose a set of simulant equations and discuss the identification of the social interaction effect employing multi-modal network autoregressive. |
| Date: | 2022–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2209.08380&r= |