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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Martin J. Osborne |
| Abstract: | The members of a finite set of office-motivated politicians choose sequentially whether to become candidates in an electoral competition. Each candidate chooses a position from a set X that is a (possibly strict) subset of the set of all positions. I show that if X is a subset of a one-dimensional interval, a tie is possible only among candidates who choose the same position, and a candidate wins if her vote share exceeds 1/2 and only if it is at least as large as any other candidate's vote share, then in every subgame perfect equilibrium the first and last politicians to move enter at one of the members of X closest to the median of the citizens' favorite positions and the remaining politicians do not enter. The assumption about ties is satisfied if the winner of the election is chosen from among the candidates with the highest vote shares by a mediator with strict preferences over positions or if the set X does not admit ties at distinct positions. |
| Keywords: | Electoral competition, sequential entry |
| JEL: | P0 |
| Date: | 2024–09–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-786 |
| By: | Clinton Gubong Gassi (Université de Franche-Comté, CRESE, UR3190, F-25000 Besançon, France); Frank Steffen (Faculty of Law, Business and Economics, University of Bayreuth, Germany) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to identify the multi-winner voting rules that can be con- sidered as extension of the Plurality rule. Multi-winner voting addresses the problem of selecting a fixed-size subset of candidates, called a committee, from a larger set of available candidates based on the voters’ preferences. In the single-winner setting, where each voter provides a strict ranking of the candidates and the goal is to select a unique candidate, Yeh (2008) characterized the Plurality rule as the only voting rule satisfying five independent axioms: anonymity, neutrality, consistency, efficiency, and top-only. In this paper, we demonstrate that a natural extension of these axioms to the multi-winner framework allows us to identify a class of top-k counting rules as multi-winner analogous to the Plurality rule. |
| Keywords: | Multi-winner, voting rules, axioms, Plurality rule, top-k counting rules. |
| JEL: | D71 D72 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crb:wpaper:2024-18 |
| By: | Naomi R. Lamoreaux; John Joseph Wallis |
| Abstract: | We usually consider it progress when a country begins to shift from an autocratic to a democratic form of government. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the incentives for those in power to manipulate the economy for political ends and thus often negatively affects economic growth. We argue that the key to getting beyond these pernicious effects—to reconciling democracy and capitalism—is to move to a governance structure based on impersonal rules that apply in the same way to everyone (or at least to broad categories of everyone). We lay out the theoretical basis for this argument and illustrate it with evidence about how the transformation worked (or not) in the case of the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. |
| JEL: | H10 K10 N41 N43 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32930 |
| By: | Field, Lottie |
| Abstract: | This paper produces the first cross-country comparable, scalable method of categorising organisations as political or bureaucratic. I use this method to construct new data on the politicisation of organisations designing industrial policy in 116 countries. Thus, this paper produces the first systematic global analysis of the politicisation of industrial development organisations. I produce the following four stylised facts. First, industrial policymaking is predominantly political. Over 60% of the industrial policy organisations in my data are run by politicians. Second, lower-income countries use a higher proportion of political organisations to do their industrial policy. Third, there is great variation in the proportion of political organisations in each policy area. Politicians run 30% of Export-Import and Central banks. Politicians run 60% of organisations focused on primary commodities. Fourth, the proportion of organisations run by bureaucrats is positively and statistically significantly correlated with several measures of bureaucratic quality. This relationship is robust to controlling for the number of industrial policy organisations and GDP per capita. |
| Date: | 2024–09–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:a4ker |
| By: | Matthew S. Jaremski; David C. Wheelock |
| Abstract: | The Federal Reserve Act was the outcome of compromises among competing economic and political interests. Numerous studies examine how the act came together but largely take the makeup of Congress and the Administration as given rather than considering the unique circumstances that led to that political distribution. This paper examines how the election of 1912 changed the makeup of Congress and increased the likelihood of central banking legislation and shaped the act. The decision of Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressives to run as third-party candidates split the Republican Party and enabled Democrats to capture the White House and Congress. We show that the election produced a less polarized Congress and that newly-elected members were more likely to vote for the act. Absent their interparty split, Republicans would likely have held the White House and Congress, and any legislation to establish a central bank almost certainly would have been quite different. |
| JEL: | G28 N42 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32987 |
| By: | Bright A. Gyamfi (Bhatewar- Udaipur, India); Divine Q. Agozie (University of Ghana, Ghana); Ernest B. Ali (University of Ghana, Ghana); Festus V. Bekun (, Istanbul, Turkey); Simplice A. Asongu (Johannesburg, South Africa) |
| Abstract: | As the environmental sustainability effectiveness of various political systems is taken into consideration, it is doubtful as to whether the presumption of the overall efficiency of democracy can be sustained in global governance architecture. The effectiveness of autocracies and democracies (i.e., governance indicators are compared in the present study) with reference to strengths and weaknesses in environmental objectives. This analysis explores the effect of autocracy, democracy, as well as the trend of globalization on CO2 emissions for open and closed economies from 1990 to 2020. Crucial indicators such as economic growth, renewable energy and non-renewable energy are controlled for while examining the roles of economic expansion on the disaggregated energy consumption portfolios for both open and closed economies. The empirical analysis revealed some insightful results. First, for the open economies, with the expectation of non-renewable energy which show a positive significant impact on emissions, all variables show a negative effect on emissions. Furthermore, the closed economies result indicate that, apart from renewable energy which has a negative relationship with emissions, all the variables including the interaction terms have a positive relation with emissions. However, an inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis was validated for both economies. |
| Keywords: | Open economies, closed economies, democracy, autocracy, Environmental Kuznets Curve, globalization index, environmental sustainability |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exs:wpaper:24/005 |
| By: | Désiré Avom (Yaoundé, Cameroon); Itchoko M. M. Mwa Ndjokou (Maroua, Cameroon); Pierre C. Tsopmo (Yaoundé, Cameroon); Cherif Abdramane (Yaoundé, Cameroon); Simplice A. Asongu (Johannesburg, South Africa) |
| Abstract: | This article examines the effect of leader longevity in power on world happiness. To make the assessment, a sample composed of 135 countries observed over the period 2006 to 2018 was constituted. The results obtained from OLS estimates show that longevity in power reduces individual happiness. Furthermore, the negative effect is more amplified in democratic countries. Quantile regression reveals variability in the effect over the different intervals. These results are robust to the use of alternative estimation techniques. We also identify the quality of institutions and public spending as two potential transmission channels through which longevity in power influences well-being. These results invite political authorities to respect constitutional limits or implement constitutional reforms with the aim of limiting the duration of the mandate of the executive in order to reduce the harmful effect of an extension of the latter on individuals' well-being. |
| Keywords: | longevity in power, happiness, quality of institutions, public spending, quantile regression |
| JEL: | D72 H31 H52 I31 |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agd:wpaper:24/033 |
| By: | Hirseland, Aline-Sophia |
| Abstract: | Differently to large parts of the scholarship assessing the impact of religion on the integration of Muslim minorities in Europe, the case selection employed in the present study allows for controlling relevant sociodemographic variables, namely migration background or rather generation and nationality or rather ethnicity. In contrast to the findings of a number of previous studies, this article's results increase doubts regarding the explanatory power here of "Islamic faith" and largely suggest a null finding hereon. Its findings show that alternative variables have significant effects on Muslim integration, such as generation, ethnicity, religiosity, gender, education, and age. Hence, adherence to the Islam turns out to be a weak predictor here. However, it is to be noted that significant effects for adherence to the Islamic faith were found for individual items composing the index on democratic values, though these findings don't appear to follow a homogenous pattern. |
| Keywords: | Guyana, Suriname, political integration, Muslim integration, Muslim minorities |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:gigawp:303034 |
| By: | Kunal Sen |
| Abstract: | An important stylized fact about African economic development is the phenomenon of urbanization without structural transformation. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the lack of structural transformation in African cities, drawing on the Deals and Development framework. |
| Keywords: | Structural transformation, Deals & Development, Political economy, Africa, Urbanization |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2024-50 |