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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Yukihiro Nishimura (Corresponding author. Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University); Kimiko Terai (Faculty of Economics, Keio University) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the political process of tax competition among asymmetric countries, highlighting the role of the commitment to the electoral promises. The median voters deliberately elect a delegate whose preferences di?er from their own (strategic delegation), which is self-enforcing under symmetric countries. We ?rst show that the outcome of strategic delegation is replicated when the candidates do not make binding campaign promises in both countries, and the opposite scenario of the binding commitments to the platforms leads to the self-representation by the median voters. We then amplify the model by adding the pre-election stage where the citizens choose whether the credibility of election promises is critical, through subscription numbers of newspapers and social media which determine the cost of betrayal of the proposed platforms (or the lack of the proposal). We then show that, depending on the type of asymmetries under consideration, su?cient asymmetry or su?ciently equal income distribution generate the commitment to the election campaign promises as the equilibrium outcome. |
| Keywords: | Capital-tax competition; Election campaign promises; Asymmetric countries; Voting |
| JEL: | C72 D72 D78 H23 H87 |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osk:wpaper:2021&r=all |
| By: | Berliant, Marcus; Gouveia, Miguel |
| Abstract: | The literatures dealing with voting, optimal income taxation, implementation, and pure public goods are integrated here to address the problem of voting over income taxes and public goods. In contrast with previous articles, general nonlinear income taxes that affect the labor-leisure decisions of consumers who work and vote are allowed. Uncertainty plays an important role in that the government does not know the true realizations of the abilities of consumers drawn from a known distribution, but must meet the realization-dependent budget. Even though the space of alternatives is infinite dimensional, conditions on primitives are found to assure existence of a majority rule equilibrium when agents vote over both a public good and income taxes to finance it. |
| Keywords: | Voting; Income taxation; Public good |
| JEL: | D72 D82 H21 H41 |
| Date: | 2021–02–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:106138&r=all |
| By: | Niclas Boehmer; Markus Brill; Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin |
| Abstract: | Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding $k$ matchings fairly representing everyone's preferences. We model the problem as an approval-based multiwinner election where the set of candidates consists of all possible matchings and agents' preferences over each other are lifted to preferences over matchings. Due to the exponential number of candidates in such elections, standard algorithms for classical sequential voting rules (such as those proposed by Thiele and Phragm\'en) are rendered inefficient. We show that the computational tractability of these rules can be regained by exploiting the structure of the approval preferences. Moreover, we establish algorithmic results and axiomatic guarantees that go beyond those obtainable in the general multiwinner setting. Assuming that approvals are symmetric, we show that proportional approval voting (PAV), a well-established but computationally intractable voting rule, becomes polynomial-time computable, and its sequential variant (seq-PAV), which does not provide any proportionality guarantees in general, fulfills a rather strong guarantee known as extended justified representation. Some of our positive computational results extend to other types of compactly representable elections with an exponential candidate space. |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2102.07441&r=all |
| By: | Carla Peyper (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Reneé Van Eyden (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Sansia Blackmore (African Tax Institute, University of Pretoria) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the role of human empowerment and state capacity in forging political institutions that are progressive and democratic. The education-democracy nexus has been thoroughly examined in the literature, but the empirical literature on the effect of the right kind and quality of education remains sparse. Generalised method of moments and probit methodology are employed for a sample of 105 countries over the period 1981 to 2015 to address these shortcomings. The results indicate that education is a necessary condition for democracy, but by itself, not sufficient. The analyses show that education of the right kind and quality, one that fosters emancipative mindsets and critical-liberal orientations, is a strong driver of progressive or democratic political institutions in a society. Trade openness (as a sub-index of formal rules), that signals societies' openness to outside influence, also seems to matter, but when a more encompassing measure of regime-independent formal rules is used, formal institutions become an insignificant determinant of liberal democracy. Other avenues that are explored include an investigation into the role of geography and spatial democracy in political institutions. The evidence suggests that geographical and biological factors do not matter, but that spatial democracy does. This study, furthermore, finds that the probability of a more democratic regime outcome increases with increased levels of human empowerment and trade openness. A parliamentary democracy is the most probable when a society has high levels of human empowerment and openness. |
| Keywords: | Liberal democracy, emancipative value system, human empowerment |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pre:wpaper:202110&r=all |
| By: | Neugart, Michael; Rode, Johannes |
| Abstract: | We explore whether retrospective voting is related to voters' democratic experience. To this end, we compare the voting behavior in West Germany to the voting behavior in the formerly non-democratic East Germany after a disaster relief program addressing a flood in 2013. Our analysis reveals a 2.2 (or 0.9 percentage points) increase in the vote share for the incumbent party in the flooded municipalities in the East compared to the West. Analyzing an earlier flood, variation of democratic experience within East Germany, and a panel survey provides further evidence that less democratically experienced voters are easier prey to pre-election policies. |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dar:wpaper:125114&r=all |
| By: | Hans Gersbach; Akaki Mamageishvili; Manvir Schneider |
| Abstract: | We study vote delegation with "well-behaving" and "misbehaving" agents and compare it with conventional voting. Typical examples are validation or governance tasks on blockchains. There is a majority of well-behaving agents, but since voting is costly, they may want to abstain or delegate their vote to other agents. Misbehaving agents always vote. We compare conventional voting allowing for abstention with vote delegation. Preferences of voters are private information and a positive outcome is achieved if well-behaving voters win. We provide three insights: First, if the number of misbehaving voters, denoted by #X, is high, both voting methods fail to deliver a positive outcome. Second, if #X is moderate, conventional voting delivers a positive outcome, while vote delegation fails with probability one. Third, if #X is low, delegation delivers a positive outcome with a higher probability than conventional voting. Finally, our results allow us assessing the performance of vote delegation which is known as "liquid democracy". |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2102.08823&r=all |
| By: | Clara Martínez-Toledano (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Alice Sodano (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab) |
| Abstract: | This paper draws on a rich set of electoral surveys to explore the changing relationship between party support and electoral socioeconomic cleavages in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden from the mid-twentieth century until the present. All five countries have experienced a progressive decline in their strong class cleavages, which coincides with the emergence of multi-elite party systems, in line with most Western democracies. While in the 1950s-1960s the lowest-educated and lowest-income voters were more leftwing, since the 1970s-1980s the vote for the left has gradually become associated with the highest-educated voters, who have drifted apart from the more right-wing economic elites. We also investigate how this transformation relates to the success of populism and nationalism over the recent decades among the lowest-educated and lowest-income earners. Despite historical, cultural, and political links, the transition of Nordic countries towards a multi-elite party system has happened at different speeds, offering interesting insights on the specificities of the national trajectories. |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wilwps:halshs-03135013&r=all |
| By: | Clara Martínez-Toledano (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Alice Sodano (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab) |
| Abstract: | This paper draws on a rich set of electoral surveys to explore the changing relationship between party support and electoral socioeconomic cleavages in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden from the mid-twentieth century until the present. All five countries have experienced a progressive decline in their strong class cleavages, which coincides with the emergence of multi-elite party systems, in line with most Western democracies. While in the 1950s-1960s the lowest-educated and lowest-income voters were more leftwing, since the 1970s-1980s the vote for the left has gradually become associated with the highest-educated voters, who have drifted apart from the more right-wing economic elites. We also investigate how this transformation relates to the success of populism and nationalism over the recent decades among the lowest-educated and lowest-income earners. Despite historical, cultural, and political links, the transition of Nordic countries towards a multi-elite party system has happened at different speeds, offering interesting insights on the specificities of the national trajectories. |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03135013&r=all |
| By: | Fischer, Agneta; Brands, Charlotte; Abadi, David (University of Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | When it comes to political communication on social media, Facebook has arisen as one of the most important platforms. Recent research on populist discourses provides evidence for populist ideology fragments emerging across Facebook posts. Moreover, the level of populist language styles and the adoption of typical populist rhetoric appears to be ‘endemic' across political actors across the whole political spectrum, even among non-populist ones. In total, 51 posts from Geert Wilders were analyzed before and 71 in the period after the 2019 Dutch elections (N = 122). This study tackles the use of the founding elements of populist communication strategies: references to the people, references to the elites, and references to the others. For a populist leader, Wilders’ Facebook posts do not contain many references to the people. Instead, he focuses on the elites (e.g., the EU) and on the others (e.g., Muslims or asylum seekers). The clearest difference between the pre- and post-election period seems to be that Wilders gradually changes his populist communication strategies from a focus on the elites, to a focus on the others. In doing so, he uses more references to religion and blaming the others. He also refers more to people within the country (asylum seekers and immigrants) in the post-election period (36,6%) than in the pre-election period (23,5%). His posts show clear examples of populist nativism, while he paints a picture of a battle between the Netherlands and the EU (the elites), Muslims or asylum seekers (the others). |
| Date: | 2019–11–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:35puf&r=all |
| By: | Bhaumik, Sumon K. (University of Sheffield); Frensch, Richard (University of Regensburg); Huber, Stephan (Hochschule Fresenius Köln) |
| Abstract: | The paper extends the literature on the political economy of labour market institutions by developing a framework in which owners of capital can benefit from both greater labour market flexibility and better rule of law. Their choice of location of manufacturing centres can, therefore, by influenced both by reduction in expropriation that is associated with better rule of law and greater bargaining power vis-à-vis workers by way of greater labour market flexibility. It follows that where owners of capital are better placed to influence government choices of these institutions, labour market flexibility is influenced by both labour market institutions intensity of exports and as well as rule of law intensity of exports. These predictions are borne out by a cross-country empirical analysis. |
| Keywords: | labour market institutions, political economy, globalisation |
| JEL: | D72 J41 |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14121&r=all |
| By: | Luis Bauluz (University of Bonn); Amory Gethin, (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab); Clara Martinez-Toledano (Imperial College London); Marc Morgan (PSE - Paris School of Economics - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, WIL - World Inequality Lab) |
| Abstract: | This paper combines post-electoral surveys to analyze the transformation of the structure of political cleavages in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland over the last decades. Although all four countries were late industrializers and were heavily impacted by the 2008 global recession, leading to a profound reconfiguration and transformation of their party systems, socioeconomic cleavages have not followed the exact same patterns. We document a progressive decline of class cleavages in Italy and Spain and an exacerbation of class divisions in Portugal and Ireland over the last decade. In Italy and Spain, despite their strong religious and regional divisions, we find growing support for social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties among highest-educated voters, while top-income earners have remained more supportive of conservative forces, leading to the emergence of "multi-elite party systems" comparable to that found in other Western democracies. Portugal and Ireland have instead remained with their "single-elite party systems", marked by the polarization of mainstream parties after the onset of the financial crisis in Portugal, the rise of Sinn Féin supported by low-income and lower-educated voters in Ireland, and the exceptional absence of strong farright parties capturing the lower classes in both countries. |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03131155&r=all |
| By: | Hans Gersbach; Akaki Mamageishvili; Manvir Schneider |
| Abstract: | We examine vote delegation when delegators do not know the preferences of representatives. We show that free delegation favors minorities, that is, alternatives that have a lower chance of winning ex-ante. The same--but to a lesser degree--occurs if the number of voting rights actual voters can have is capped. However, when the fraction of delegators increases, the probability that the ex-ante minority wins under free and capped delegation converges to the one under conventional voting--albeit non-monotonically. Finally, when the total number of voters is converging to infinity with a fixed fraction of the majority, all three probabilities converge to one, no matter the number of delegators. Therefore, vote delegation is safe on a large scale. |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2102.08835&r=all |
| By: | Simplice A. Asongu (Yaounde, Cameroon); Omang O. Messono (Dschang, Cameroon); Keyanfe T. J. Guttemberg (Yaoundé, Cameroon) |
| Abstract: | The objective of this article is to analyze the effect of the political empowerment of women on vulnerability to climate change in 169 countries for the period 1995-2017. The empirical evidence which is based on panel fixed effects regressions shows that: i) the political empowerment of women as well as its components (i.e. civil liberties of women, participation of women in civil society and participation of women in political debates) reduce vulnerability to climate change. ii) The underlying effect is most pronounced in upper middle income, Latin American, small and fragile countries. iii) Public spending on education, the effectiveness of governance and education are the real transmission channels through which vulnerability to climate change is affected by women’s political empowerment. The findings are robust to alternative estimation methods such as the Tobit, the dynamic fixed effects, and the generalized method of moments regressions. Policy implications are discussed, inter alia, the need for sampled countries to encourage women's political empowerment in order to reduce risks linked to climate change. |
| Keywords: | climate change; vulnerability; political empowerment |
| JEL: | Q50 Q54 Q58 |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exs:wpaper:21/010&r=all |