Vote buying and campaign promises

What explains the wide variation across countries in the use of vote buying and policy promises during election campaigns? We address this question, and account for a number of stylized facts and apparent anomalies regarding vote buying, using a model in which parties cannot fully commit to campaign promises. We find that high vote buying is associated with frequent reneging on campaign promises, strong electoral competition, and high policy rents. Frequent reneging and low party competence reduce campaign promises. If vote buying can be financed out of public resources, incumbents buy more votes and enjoy an electoral advantage, but they also promise more public goods. Vote buying has distributional consequences: voters targeted with vote buying pre-election may receive no government benefits post-election. The results point to obstacles to the democratic transition from clientelist to programmatic forms of electoral competition: parties may not benefit electorally from institutions that increase commitment.     

One Cow,One Vote?

We study investment decisions in a farmers' cooperative. Farmers sell their products through the cooperative. Before production takes place the cooperative has to decide on an investment. We study whether voting on investment leads to efficient investment decisions. The answer depends on how the number of votes and the cost of the investment are distributed among the farmers. It is shown that in a variety of settings, there is no reason to suppose that voting rules favoring large farmers —"one cow, one vote" rules — are more efficient than simple majority rule.     

Rational Abstention and the Congressional Vote Choice

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators' decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.     

The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage Under the Secret Ballot

Throughout much of mankind's experience with elections, vote brokers – local elites who direct the voting decisions of a subset of the electorate – have been able to make or break political careers. In various polities, brokers have thrived in spite of the secret ballot, a surprising outcome given that vote secrecy would ostensibly allow citizens to pocket the inducements offered by such individuals and vote their consciences anyway. To address this puzzle, we develop a framework for understanding the persistence and demise of vote brokerage under the secret ballot. In our model, a broker contracts with voters using an outcome contingent contract: some fixed benefit is promised to all voters sharing one of several observable profiles should the broker's candidate win the election. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the existence of brokerage depends on the size of the electorate contained within the jurisdiction controlled by the broker, with large jurisdiction sizes tending to drive brokerage out of existence. Moreover, we detail the manner in which the strategies employed by brokers depend on their economic power, the size of social groups, and ideological polarization. Empirical evidence from Minas Gerais, Brazil is used to evaluate the performance of the model.     

货币选票与消费悖论

许多年来,庇古理论与帕累托最优一直被作为消费均衡理论的指南。庇古告诉人们,消费者所享受到的效用决定消费者的货币选票分布,每一消费者会由此产生一组特殊的消费偏好排序。综合所有消费者的消费选择,便形成了社会的消费偏好结构(或需求比例结构)。还可以由此确定最佳的生产资料结构和自然就业率。所以,生产者根据消费者的选择来确定生产,消费者的货币选票通过其对生产的内在引导作用间接决定了社会资源配置和经济福利。     

Get Out The Vote: How Encouraging Voting Changes Political Outcomes

How do measures to increase turnout affect election outcomes? I use a novel approach to analyze how these measures influence both voter turnout and the candidates' political positions. In general, lowering the net expense of voting reduces political polarization. If the net expense of voting is made very low, then candidates no longer have an incentive to take partisan positions to motivate turnout and will converge at the median voter's ideal point. For small changes in the net expense of voting, however, decreasing the cost of voting and penalties for not voting (two common measures) can result in drastically different political outcomes. Counter intuitively, measures that make voting cheaper might not increase turnout: since these measures decrease the difference between the candidates' political positions, they also decrease the benefit of voting.     

Where We Now Stand

Only in the last decade have significant attempts been made to evaluate scientifically the methods of instruction in economics. Noting the acceleration in scientific evaluation, Lumsden focuses his attention on where we now stand in the evaluation of two methods of instruction: programmed learning materials and television.     

We start from here

As James Buchanan often asserted, in constitutional design “we start from here” which is to say we design a constitution to fit the institutions, social practices and so forth that we already have. Comparison of the complicated case of the US constitution and the failed attempt at constitutionalism in contemporary Egypt suggest that many societies are not yet ready for serious constitutional design. The English civil wars were about religion; the US constitution ignores religion and thereby avoids the grim conflict of church and state.     

Futures We Are In

The economics literature includes several critiques of the dominant utilitarian position, as respectively offered by Posner (1979), Rawls (1971), Sen (1987) and institutionalist followers of John Dewey. There is also now a rapidly growing literature on the economics of happiness. Another quite distinctive position of social importance on these issues is provided by Joseph Ratzinger, also known as Pope Benedict XVI. It offers an alternative conception of ontology and teleology, and reflects conceptions of freedom, happiness, man and rationality different from those found in orthodox economics, and different too from those found in the above-mentioned critiques. It intersects with recent writings of Lawson (2003), Nelson (2010) and Tilman (2008).

In order to promote critical scrutiny of the a priori positions embedded in contending schools of economic thought, it follows that the implications of this Ratzinger critique should be consciously confronted by economists, including institutionalists, with whom various starting points are shared.     

Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research in the United States

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself.     

我们还需要乡村建设

所有不同意见背后其实都有一定的意识形态的制约,如果我们完全超脱意识形态,不谈主义,只谈问题,我们会发现:现代化是无法复制的;未来的中长期中国仍然是小农经济;由于农业商品化率的大幅度提高,被工商业资本、金融资本剥夺的小农将成为农村解体、社会不稳定的重要原因;政府是经济主体,首先为自己追求利润最大化服务, 不可能承担调控和守夜人的责任。于是,必然地,新时期还需要做的,就是上世纪二三十年代开始的乡村建设。     

Japan's Lost Decade: What Have We Learned and Where Are We Heading?*

The lost decade has provided us a number of lessons. One of them is the limit of standard macroeconomics. This paper attempts to show that uncertainty plays a much more important role in the macroeconomy than most economists recognize. Once the economy is caught in an uncertainty trap, the effectiveness of standard policy necessarily weakens. The zero‐interest rate may well be a consequence of an uncertainty trap. In fact, whether or not the economy is caught in such an uncertainty trap distinguishes “depression” from the normal cyclical “recession.” The significance of demand‐creating innovation is another point I emphasize in this paper. In my view, a lack of demand‐creating innovation is a part of explanation of the lost decade. At the same time, this paper offers prospects for the future of the Japanese economy.     

我们能做什么?

所谓内在于我们历史与现实的真问题,应该是在包括政治、经济、文化在内的整个社会实践的历史展开过程中产生的,它们是社会结构内部不平衡发展所导致的种种错裂、扭曲、冲突的产物,而在思想、知识生产上暴露的种种弊端其实也是这些问题的症侯之一?可以肯定的是,这些问题着不能得到真正面对,受到伤害的将不仅仅是思想和知识的生产,也可能是整个社会的稳定、良性的运行和发展。     

美国人民在多大程度上信任政府？

本文详细剖析了西方发达国家(尤其是美国)政府公信力下降的一系列原因.并指出,尽管发达国家政府的公信力在下降,但是其公民仍会把民族国家视为保证他们安全、身份和繁荣的源泉.政府依然是非常重要的,民族国家的未来不是消亡而是将逐渐发生转变.     

我们不敢荒废光阴--主编致辞

夜深了,四周悄无声息,静默使我的心情,由兴奋变为凝重,由凝重变为泰然。站在这一年之巅,面对过去的2005年,欣慰的是我们圆满完成了出版任务。然而,面对未来,更多的则是责任与深深的思考。2005年,神六飞天,神州愈显雄健;十六届五中全会的召开,祖国愈显腴润。当光阴不分昼夜阅尽千古,我们的记者、编辑纵然不能有所作为,有所建树,但“技术经济与管理研究”毕竟历尽沧桑。当中国选择了改革开放,我们的记者、编辑欣欣然,伴随着中国改革的征程已跋涉了26载。不仅如此,“技术经济与管理研究”始终站在开放的最前沿。1991年,开设“国际市长论坛”,15…