STRATEGIC CANDIDACY AND SINGLE‐PEAKEDNESS*

In elections, the voting outcomes are affected by strategic entries of candidates. We study a class of voting rules immune to strategic candidacy. Dutta et al. (2001 ) show that such rules satisfying unanimity are dictatorial if all orderings of candidates are admissible for voters’ preferences. When voters’ preferences are single‐peaked over a political spectrum, there exist non‐dictatorial rules immune to strategic candidacy. An example is the rule selecting the m‐th peak from the left among the peaks of voters’ preferences, where m is any natural number no more than the number of voters. We show that immunity from strategic candidacy with basic axioms fully characterizes the family of the m‐th leftmost peak rules.     

An equilibrium voting model of federal standards with externalities

This paper proposes a framework for studying policy making in a federal system in the presence of spillover externalities. Local jurisdictions choose local policies by majority rule subject to standards that are set by majority rule at the federal level. We characterize the induced preferences of voters for federal policies, prove existence of local majority rule equilibrium, provide an example of non-existence of global majority rule equilibrium, and explore the welfare properties of federal standards in the presence of spillovers.     

Redistribution under general decision rules

We study the political economy of redistribution over a broad class of decision rules. We suggest a simple and elegant procedure to select a robust equilibrium from the multiplicity in the core. Equilibrium policy depends on the full income profile, and, importantly, the preferences of two decisive voters. We show that the effect of increasing inequality depends on the decision rule and the shape of the income distribution; redistribution will increase if both decisive voters are “relatively poor,” and decrease if at least one is sufficiently “rich.” Additionally, redistribution decreases as the polity adopts increasingly stringent super-majority rules.     

Existence of a Condorcet Winner When Voters Have Other‐Regarding Preferences

In standard political economy models, voters are “self‐interested” that is, care only about “own” utility. However, the emerging evidence indicates that voters often have “other‐regarding preferences” (ORP), that is, in deciding among alternative policies voters care about their payoffs relative to others. We extend a widely used general equilibrium framework in political economy to allow for voters with ORP, as in Fehr and Schmidt (1999) . In line with the evidence, these preferences allow voters to exhibit “envy” and “altruism,” in addition to the standard concern for “own utility.” We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a Condorcet winner when voters have ORP. This could open the way for an incorporation of ORP in a variety of political economy models. Furthermore, as a corollary, we give more general conditions for the existence of a Condorcet winner when voters have purely selfish preferences.     

Intergovernmental transfers and political competition measured by pivotal probability - Evidence from Hungary

I estimate the effects of political competition on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers to Hungarian municipalities between 1998 and 2006. The intergovernmental transfers were intended to finance schooling, elder care, and administrative needs in municipalities. Rather than use closeness of the dominant blocks' vote share, which is the standard measure of political competition, I instead employ (Myerson, 2000)'s pivotal probabilities, calculated at the municipality level. As a result, the number of voters, in addition to the vote difference, is taken into account when describing political competition at the municipal level. I argue that under mixed-member proportional systems, as well as under proportional systems in general, pivotal probability reflects the political reality better than closeness can. I find evidence that swing municipalities in villages are targeted and, ceteris paribus, that poorer regions receive larger transfer amounts than other areas.     

Mapping the theory of political representation to the empirics: An investigation for proportional and majoritarian rules

We combine roll call votes and referendum decisions on identically worded legislative proposals to identify the effect of electoral rules on the way Swiss Members of Parliament (MPs) represent their constituents’ preferences. We exploit the fact that MPs in both Houses of Parliament are elected in the same electoral districts (the cantons). Yet, in the Lower House, MPs are elected using a proportional rule, while in the Upper House they are elected employing a majoritarian rule. We find that electoral rules matter strongly for political representation. The voting patterns of MPs are fully in line with three theoretical predictions regarding the influence of electoral rules on representation of constituents’ preferences: 1) The probability that a proportional-elected MP accepts a legislative proposal closely follows the share of voters that accept the proposal in the referendum. 2) In contrast, for majority-elected MPs the probability of acceptance is strongly increasing in the share of voter acceptance if the latter is close to the 50% threshold. 3) The estimated probability that an Upper House MP votes “yes” as a function of the share of voters voting “yes” in the referendum has an S-shape form with an inflection point close to 50%.     

Are voters rationally ignorant? An empirical study of Portuguese local elections

The application of the rational choice postulate to a political context invariably leads to the conclusion that most voters are ill informed when making the decision on whom to vote for. In this paper, the authors conduct an empirical evaluation of the rational ignorance theory, based on the model developed by (Rogoff and Sibert Rev Econ Stud LV:1–16, (1988) and by considering that better informed voters reward political candidates who show better performances. The levels of performance are established through the construction of an empirical frontier using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. According to our results, based on the 1997 Portuguese local elections, even though swing voters do not necessarily behave as rationally ignorant voters, a large majority of voters are rationally ignorant.

The effects of bureaucracy on political accountability and electoral selection

This paper examines how bureaucracy affects political accountability and electoral selection, using a three-tier political agency model consisting of voters, politicians and bureaucrats. In the model’s hierarchy, politicians are constrained by elections while bureaucrats are controlled by budgets. If voters and bureaucrats prefer different types of politicians (i.e. they have a conflict of interests), incumbents pass oversized budgets to prevent bureaucrats from engaging in strategic behaviours that damage incumbents’ reputations. If, instead, voters and bureaucrats prefer the same type of politicians (i.e. they have an alignment of interests), bureaucrats cannot obtain a concession from politicians. In the latter case, however, bureaucrats send voters a credible signal regarding an incumbent’s type, which improves electoral selection. This paper also shows that political appointment systems improve political accountability in the conflict-of-interests case while they weaken electoral selection in the alignment-of-interests case.     

Local representation and strategic voting: Evidence from electoral boundary reforms

We analyze whether voters value local political representation by exploiting municipal mergers, which increase the number of candidates available to voters and intensify political competition. In the Finnish open-list proportional representation system, voters rank the candidates within parties, and thus, concentrating votes to local candidates increases the extent of local representation. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the vote distributions become more concentrated in municipalities less likely to gain local representation after the mergers. Moreover, the effect is much larger in municipalities where the benefits of local representation to voters are large. The latter result disentangles voters' responses from the responses of other political actors. The results are important also for designing local government mergers, which are an important policy tool in many countries. They highlight that concerns over deteriorating local democracy due to mergers have merit, because voters have preferences for local representation. At the same time, the vote concentration patterns we find alleviate these concerns.     

Budget Deficits and Redistributive Politics

This paper proposes a new view of the forces in the political process thatcause governments to accumulate debt. The analysis builds on a model of redistributive politics that, contrary to median voter models, does not restrict the set of policies that politicians can propose. I show that deficits occur even in an environment where voters (and periods) are homogeneous. This is an environment where previous political theories of debt would predict budget balance. In the model deficits are a way for candidates to better target promises to voters and are therefore used as tools of redistributive politics. The main contribution of the analysis is to show that the same forces that push candidates to redistribute resources across voters to pursue political advantage are forces that generate budget deficits.