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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Thomas Buser (University of Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that "adversarial" preferences – competitiveness, negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness – are strong predictors of right-wing and populist political preferences. Their explanatory power is similar to that of a rich set of socioeconomic status indicators – including income, education and occupation – and robust to non-parametrically controlling for them. I replicate previously studied associations between classic personality traits and political preferences, and show that adversarial preferences predict voting independently from these traits – and often with larger effect sizes. The complex Dutch party landscape allows me to go further than simple left-right comparisons to differentiate parties along an economic left-right axis, a social progressive-conservative axis, and a populism axis. Competitiveness predicts voting for economically right-wing parties, whereas negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness are stronger predictors of voting for socially conservative and populist parties. |
| Keywords: | voting, political preferences, personality, competitiveness, reciprocity |
| JEL: | D72 D9 J16 |
| Date: | 2024–11–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20240001 |
| By: | L. Elisa Celis; Amit Kumar; Nisheeth K. Vishnoi; Andrew Xu |
| Abstract: | This paper considers the scenario in which there are multiple institutions, each with a limited capacity for candidates, and candidates, each with preferences over the institutions. A central entity evaluates the utility of each candidate to the institutions, and the goal is to select candidates for each institution in a way that maximizes utility while also considering the candidates' preferences. The paper focuses on the setting in which candidates are divided into multiple groups and the observed utilities of candidates in some groups are biased--systematically lower than their true utilities. The first result is that, in these biased settings, prior algorithms can lead to selections with sub-optimal true utility and significant discrepancies in the fraction of candidates from each group that get their preferred choices. Subsequently, an algorithm is presented along with proof that it produces selections that achieve near-optimal group fairness with respect to preferences while also nearly maximizing the true utility under distributional assumptions. Further, extensive empirical validation of these results in real-world and synthetic settings, in which the distributional assumptions may not hold, are presented. |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2409.04897 |
| By: | Yongquan Cao; Ms. Era Dabla-Norris; Enrico Di Gregorio |
| Abstract: | We study the supply of fiscal ideas leveraging thousands of electoral platforms from 65 countries in the Manifesto Project to link how political parties discuss fiscal policy with fiscal outcomes. We provide three sets of results. First, fiscal discourse has become increasingly favourable to higher government spending since at least the 1990s in advanced and emerging economies and across the political spectrum. This pattern does not track survey trends in voter preferences, suggesting that parties have played a role in shifting the focus of political campaigns to fiscal issues to win over voters. Second, fiscal discourse turns conservative under more adverse fiscal conditions, including in the aftermath of debt surges and after the adoption of fiscal rules, but only to a limited extent. Third, over the medium-run, relative discourse changes in favor of government expansion and away from fiscal restraint are followed by higher fiscal deficits. Together, our results suggest that adverse shifts in the supply of fiscal ideas could add to fiscal pressures over time. |
| Keywords: | Fiscal Discourse; Fiscal Policy; Elections; Manifesto |
| Date: | 2024–09–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2024/194 |
| By: | Helm, Carsten; Neugart, Michael |
| Abstract: | With ideological parties being better informed about the state of the world than voters, the true motivation of policy proposals is hard to judge for the electorate. However, if reform proposals have to be agreed upon by government members with heterogeneous policy preferences, it may become possible for the government to signal to the voters its private information about the necessity of reforms. This provides a rationale why coalition governments may find it easier to implement reforms than single-party governments, why oversized coalitions are formed, and why governments sometimes have cabinet members from opposing parties. |
| Date: | 2024–09–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dar:wpaper:149718 |
| By: | Ewan McGaughey |
| Abstract: | How has our economic constitutional order developed, and which laws make our economy democratic? Democracy in politics is familiar and starts with ‘one person, one vote’, but economic democracy is less familiar. In its ideal, it means ‘three stakeholders, one voice’. Workers, investors, and service-users make different contribution types in the economy, so rules to give them voice differ and are still evolving. This paper gives a brief history of how economic democracy developed, the evolving theories, and practices for democratic workplaces, capital, and public enterprise. It then unpacks the laws that make it. First, a board of directors will answer to an enterprise’s stakeholders, not simply appointing itself via so called ‘independent’ directors. Second, workers elect at least one-third or properly one-half of a board of directors, rather than shareholders monopolising all votes, and worker cooperatives are encouraged. Third, all capital fund directors, whether pensions or mutuals, are majority-elected by beneficiaries, and they set the shareholder voting policies, not allowing asset managers or banks to vote on other people’s money in what they deem to be the interests of the ultimate investor. Fourth, in public enterprises, where private competition fails and consumers cannot truly ‘vote with their feet’, service-users hold voting rights for representatives on the board, rather than appointments being monopolised by the state or board incumbents. These norms are spreading, and overcoming evidence-free theories that excuse illegitimate corporate power. |
| Keywords: | Economy, democracy, labour, capital, public services, enterprise, vote |
| JEL: | K0 K11 H40 K22 K23 K31 J01 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbr:cbrwps:wp539 |
| By: | Jeffrey Clemens; Julia A. Payson; Stan Veuger |
| Abstract: | The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented levels of federal transfers to state governments. Did this funding increase benefit incumbent politicians electorally? Identifying the effect of revenue windfalls on voting is challenging because whatever conditions led to the influx of cash might also benefit or harm incumbents for other reasons. We develop an instrument that allows us to predict allocations to states based on variation in congressional representation. We find that incumbents in state-wide races in 2020, 2021, and 2022 performed significantly better in states that received more relief funding due to their overrepresentation in Congress. These results are robust across specifications and after adjusting for a variety of economic and political controls. We consistently find that the pandemic-period electoral advantage of incumbent politicians in states receiving more aid substantially exceeds the more modest advantage politicians in these states enjoyed before the pandemic. This paper contributes to our understanding of economic voting and the incumbency advantage during times of crisis as well as the downstream electoral consequences of both the COVID-19 pandemic and of unequal political representation at the federal level. |
| JEL: | H7 H77 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32962 |
| By: | Jin, Shuxian; Spadaro, Giuliana (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Balliet, Daniel |
| Abstract: | Cooperation underlies the ability of groups to realize collective benefits (e.g., creation of public goods). Yet, cooperation can be difficult to achieve when people face situations with conflicting interests between what is best for individuals versus the collective (i.e., social dilemmas). To address this challenge, groups can implement rules about structural changes in a situation. But what institutional rules can best facilitate cooperation? Theoretically, rules can be made to affect structural features of a social dilemma, such as the possible actions, outcomes, and people involved. We derived 13 pre-registered hypotheses from existing work and collected six decades of empirical research to test how nine structural features influence cooperation within prisoner’s dilemmas and public goods dilemmas. We do this by meta-analyzing mean levels of cooperation across studies (Study 1, k = 2, 340, N = 229, 528), and also examining how manipulations of these structural features in social dilemmas affect cooperation within studies (Study 2, k = 909). Results indicated that lower conflict of interests was associated with higher cooperation, and that (1) the implementation of sanctions (i.e., reward and punishment of behaviors) and (2) allowing for communication most strongly enhanced cooperation. However, we found inconsistent support for the hypotheses that group size and matching design affect cooperation. Other structural features (e.g., symmetry of dilemmas, sequential decision making, payment) were not associated with cooperation. Overall, these findings inform institutions that can (or not) facilitate cooperation. |
| Date: | 2024–09–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9r2qb |
| By: | Alvaro Aguirre |
| Abstract: | This paper builds a model of heterogenous agents, incomplete markets and idiosyncratic shocks extended with a political mechanism that allows for realistic party competition. Higher inequality leads to more disperse policy preferences, to which parties respond endogenously distancing themselves from median voter preferences. The polarization of party proposals leads to greater uncertainty before elections, as well as greater policy switches after them, with significant macroeconomic effects. Results are in line with previous empirical evidence linking inequality, polarization and macroeconomic performance. The model is solved introducing political quasi-aggregation, and can be extended to analyze different economic policies and alternative political institutions. |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chb:bcchwp:1011 |