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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Felix Bierbrauer; Aleh Tsyvinski; Nicolas D. Werquin |
| Abstract: | We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turnout and endogenous platforms. Parties face a trade-off between maximizing their base and getting their supporters out to vote. We study the implications of this framework for non-linear income taxation. In equilibrium, both parties propose the same tax policy. This equilibrium policy is a weighted combination of two terms, one reflecting the parties’ payoff from mobilizing their own supporters, one reflecting the payoff from demobilizing the supporters of the other party. The key determinant of the equilibrium policy is the distribution of the voters’ party attachments rather than their propensity to swing vote. Our analysis also provides a novel explanation for why even left-leaning parties may not propose high taxes on the rich. |
| JEL: | D72 D82 H21 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24123&r=pol |
| By: | Nunn, Nathan; Qian, Nancy; Wen, Jaya |
| Abstract: | We present findings that document one way in which a society's culture can affect political outcomes. Examining an annual panel of democratic countries over six decades, we show that severe economic downturns are more likely to cause political turnover in countries that have lower levels of generalized trust. The relationship is only found among democracies and for regular leader turnover, which suggests that the underlying mechanism works through leader accountability and the electoral process. Moreover, we find that the effects of trust on turnover are greatest during years with regularly-scheduled elections, and within democracies with a parliamentary system, a fully free media, and greater stability. The estimates suggest that generalized trust affects political institutions by influencing the extent to which citizens attribute economic downturns to the mistakes of politicians. |
| Keywords: | Political Turnover; Recession; Trust |
| JEL: | D72 P16 P17 P51 |
| Date: | 2018–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12555&r=pol |
| By: | Yiran Chen; Hanming Fang |
| Abstract: | About two thirds of the political committees registered with the Federal Election Commission do not self identify their party affiliations. In this paper we propose and implement a novel Bayesian approach to infer about the ideological affiliations of political committees based on the network of the financial contributions among them. In Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that our estimation algorithm achieves very high accuracy in recovering their latent ideological affiliations when the pairwise difference in ideology groups' connection patterns satisfy a condition known as the Chernoff-Hellinger divergence criterion. We illustrate our approach using the campaign finance record in 2003-2004 election cycle. Using the posterior mode to categorize the ideological affiliations of the political committees, our estimates match the self reported ideology for 94.36% of those committees who self-reported to be Democratic and 89.49% of those committees who self reported to be Republican. |
| JEL: | D72 D85 P16 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24130&r=pol |
| By: | Bazzi, Samuel; Gudgeon, Matthew |
| Abstract: | Policymakers in diverse countries face the persistent challenge of managing ethnic divisions. We argue that redrawing subnational political boundaries can fundamentally reshape these divisions. We use a natural policy experiment in Indonesia to show that changes in the political relevance of ethnic divisions have significant effects on conflict in the short- to medium-run. While redistricting along group lines can increase social stability, these gains are undone and even reversed in newly polarized units. Electoral democracy further amplifies these effects given the large returns to initial control of newly created local governments in settings with ethnic favoritism. Overall, our findings show that the ethnic divisions underlying widely-used diversity measures are neither fixed nor exogenous and instead depend on the political boundaries within which groups are organized. These results illustrate the promise and pitfalls of redistricting policy in diverse countries where it is not feasible for each group to have its own administrative unit. |
| Keywords: | conflict; Decentralization; Ethnic Divisions; Polarization; Political Boundaries |
| JEL: | D72 D74 H41 H77 O13 Q34 |
| Date: | 2018–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12552&r=pol |
| By: | Didier Laussel (Aix-Marseille Univ., CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Marseille, AMSE) |
| Abstract: | We study the optimal delegation problem which arises between the median voter (writer of the constitution) and the (future) incumbent politician when not only the state of the world and but also the politician’s type (preferred policy) are the policy-maker’s private information. We show that it is optimal to tie the hands of the politician by imposing him/her both a policy floor and a policy cap and delegating him/her the policy choice only in between. The delegation interval is shown to be the smaller the greater is the uncertainty about the politician’s type. These results apply outside the specific problem to which our model is applied here. |
| Keywords: | representative democracy, optimal delegation, political uncertainty |
| JEL: | D82 H10 |
| Date: | 2018–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1803&r=pol |
| By: | Eric Guerci (GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis - UCA - Université Côte d'Azur - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UCA - Université Côte d'Azur); Nobuyuki Hanaki (GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis - UCA - Université Côte d'Azur - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UCA - Université Côte d'Azur); Naoki Watanabe (Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba - University of Tsukuba) |
| Abstract: | By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: (1) subjects' learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; and (2) the transfer of acquired learning from one committee choice problem to a similar but different problem. In the experiment, subjects choose to join one of two committees (weighted voting games) and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: (i) subjects learned to choose the committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; and (ii) there was statistically significant evidence of ``meaningful learning'' (transfer of learning) only for the treatment with no payoff-related feedback. This finding calls for re-thinking existing models of learning to incorporate some type of introspection. |
| Keywords: | experiment,voting game,learning,two-armed bandit problem |
| Date: | 2017–02–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01216244&r=pol |
| By: | NESTEROV, Yurii, (CORE, Université catholique de Louvain) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we suggest a new technique for soft clustering of multidimensional data. It is based on a new convex voting model, where each voter chooses a party with certain probability depending on the divergence between his/her preferences and the position of the party. The parties can react on the results of polls by changing their positions. We prove that under some natural assumptions this system has a unique fixed point, providing a unique solution for soft clustering. The solution of our model can be found either by imitation of the sequential elections, or by direct minimization of a convex potential function. In both cases, the methods converge linearly to the solution. We provide our methods with worst-case complexity bounds. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first polynomial-time complexity results in this field. |
| Keywords: | soft clustering, fuzzy clustering, C-means, polynomial-time complexity bounds, electoral models |
| Date: | 2018–01–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cor:louvco:2018001&r=pol |