Party Formation and Policy Outcomes under Different Electoral Systems

I introduce a model of representative democracy with strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters and multiple districts. If policy preferences are similar across districts and not too concentrated within districts, then the number of effective parties is larger under proportional representation (PR) than under plurality, and both electoral systems determine the median voter's preferred policy. However, for more asymmetric distributions of preferences the Duvergerian predictions can be reversed , and the policy outcome with PR is more moderate than the one with plurality. Sincere voting induces more party formation, and strategic voting can be observed more often under PR.     

Testing Social Preferences for an Economic “Bad”: An Artefactual Field Experiment*

We test for social preferences over a commodity in an artefactual field experiment using the random price voting mechanism. Subjects are university staff members, and the commodity is water “contaminated” by a sterilized cockroach. Our results suggest that social preferences exist with respect to commodities and “bads”, supporting a more general utility framework for social preferences. Our empirical test allows for the coexistence of three social‐preference models; our results support the models of Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and Charness and Rabin (2002), but not the model of Bolton and Ockenfels (2000). Also, we find that incorporating social preferences improves the efficiency of majority‐rules voting.     

Committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility

A fundamental problem for government is how to combine commitment to certain policies with the flexibility required to adjust them when needed. Rogoff (1985) [Rogoff, K., 1985. The optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target, Q. J. Econ. 100(4) 1169–1189] showed that a way to strike the right balance is to appoint an optimally “conservative” policy-maker. In real life, however, policy-makers also have power over decisions where optimal plans are time-consistent, so delegating to a conservative person could be undesirable. A flexible delegation device can be found in a large committee of randomly appointed members voting over policy after observing a shock. When facing dynamic inconsistency, under a single-crossing property, there exists a supermajority rule that implements the population median's optimally conservative policy-maker with certainty. Another single-crossing property guarantees that if simple majority voting is used to select the voting rule that will govern policy choice, the supermajority preferred by the median is chosen. For problems where dynamic inconsistency vanishes, the committee will choose to make decisions by simple majority, implementing median outcomes. An application to monetary policy is developed. We show that the optimal supermajority is higher when dynamic inconsistency is more severe, when preferences are more homogeneous, and when the economy is less volatile.     

Voting in small committees

We analyze the voting behavior of a small committee that has to approve or reject a project proposal whose return is uncertain. Members have diverse preferences: some of them want to maximize the expected value, while others have a bias towards project approval and ignore their information on the project value. We focus on the most efficient use of scarce information when members cannot communicate prior to voting, and we provide insights on the optimal composition of the committee. Our main result is that the presence of biased members can improve the voting outcome, by simplifying the strategies of unbiased members. Thus, committees with diverse members perform as well as homogeneous committees, and even better in some cases. In particular, when value-maximizing members outnumber biased members by one vote, the optimal equilibrium becomes unique.     

ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF IMMIGRATION AND INCOME REDISTRIBUTION*

In this article, we analyze an economy in which agents vote over immigration policy and redistributive tax policy. We show that natives' preferences over immigration are influenced by the prospect that immigrants will be voting over future tax policy. We also show that changes in the degree of international capital mobility, the distribution of initial capital among natives, the wealth or poverty of the immigrant pool, and the future voting rights and entitlements of immigrants can have dramatic effects on equilibrium immigration and tax policies. Finally, we provide some empirical support for the model's predictions.     

What does IT Take for Congress to Enact Good Policies? an Analysis of Roll Call Voting in the US Congress

We study the conditions under which members of Congress incorporate policy‐specific considerations in their decisions. To do this, we estimate a model that accounts for the influence of private information about legislation quality on voting patterns in the House and Senate. We find that minority party members are more likely to evaluate proposals on their merits than majority members, but institutional and electoral considerations significantly attenuate these partisan differences. In particular, seniority, electoral safety, and constituents' political knowledge have a balancing effect on partisan predispositions to rely on policy‐relevant information, making minority (majority) members less (more) likely to vote informatively.     

VOTING TRANSPARENCY, CONFLICTING INTERESTS, AND THE APPOINTMENT OF CENTRAL BANKERS

We examine whether the publication of the individual voting records of central-bank council members is socially desirable when the preferences of the central bankers differ. We identify two positive effects of transparency. First, central bankers whose preferences differ from those of society may act in the interest of society in order to increase their re-appointment chances. Second, transparency enhances the efficiency of the appointment process since the government can align the preferences of the central-bank council with those of the public over time. In a monetary union, our findings about the desirability of transparency may be reversed.     

Approval voting with endogenous candidates

We present a formal model of political competition under approval voting which allows for endogenous candidate entry. Our analysis yields a number of novel insights. First, we develop a notion of sincere voting behavior under approval voting, called relative sincerity. We then show that the relatively sincere voting behavior is consistent with the strategic calculus of voting. Second, we show that in a one-dimensional model with distance preferences, equilibria in relatively sincere strategies and without spoiler candidates always generate outcomes close to the median voter. Moreover, approval voting satisfies Duverger's Law in the sense that there are at most two winning positions! Finally, we extend our analysis to arbitrary policy spaces. In the general setting, approval voting is shown to be susceptible to the same kinds of problems as the plurality rule, such as the possibility of non-majoritarian outcomes, failure to elect the Condorcet winner and existence of spoiler candidates.     

Voting for Redistribution under Desert‐Sensitive Altruism*

We endow individuals who differ in skills and tastes for working, with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert‐sensitive (i.e., when there is a reluctance to redistribute from the hard‐working to the lazy), we show that lower levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium. We provide empirical evidence that preferences for redistribution are not purely selfish, and that desert‐sensitive motivations play a significant role. We estimate that preferences for redistribution are significantly more desert‐sensitive in the US than in Europe.     

Pandering and electoral competition

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates. We explore under which conditions candidates always propose the voters' optimal policy. The model is extended to include strategic voting, policy-motivated candidates, imperfectly informed candidates, and heterogeneous preferences.     

Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.     

Does Party Matter? An Historical Test Using Senate Tariff Votes in Three Institutional Settings

This article investigates the historical impact of party andconstituency preferences on tariff votes from the U.S. Senateover the period 1883–1930. We find that the estimatedeffect of party grows during periods in which legislative institutionsfavored strong parties. We conclude that party has a causaleffect on policy. If party serves solely as a proxy for unmeasuredcomponents of personal ideology or constituency preferences,then the estimated effect of party on policy outcomes shouldnot vary contemporaneously with changes in legislative institutions.But if party has an independent causal impact on policy outcomes,then changes in institutions favoring strong parties shouldlead to a greater effect of party on voting behavior, holdingconstituency preferences constant. Although our findings arelimited to votes over tariffs in the 19th and early 20th centuries,they suggest that further research into the mechanism by whichparty affects political decision making is important.     

Asymmetric expectation effects of regime shifts in monetary policy

This paper addresses two substantive issues: (1) Does the magnitude of the expectation effect of regime switching in monetary policy depend on a particular policy regime? (2) Under which regime is the expectation effect quantitatively important? Using two canonical DSGE models, we show that there exists asymmetry in the expectation effect across regimes. The expectation effect under the dovish policy regime is quantitatively more important than that under the hawkish regime. These results suggest that the possibility of regime shifts in monetary policy can have important effects on rational agents' expectation formation and on equilibrium dynamics. They offer a theoretical explanation for the empirical possibility that a policy shift from the dovish regime to the hawkish regime may not be the main source of substantial reductions in the volatilities of inflation and output.     

Would letting people vote for multiple candidates yield policy moderation?

We investigate whether letting people vote for multiple candidates would yield policy moderation. We do so in a setting that takes three key features of elections into account, namely, strategic voting, endogenous candidacy and policy motivation on the part of the candidates. We consider two classes of voting rules. One class consists of the voting rules where each voter casts several equally-weighed votes for the different candidates. The other class consists of the voting rules where each voter rank-orders the candidates. We identify conditions under which these voting rules yield policy moderation. We also show that these voting rules may yield policy extremism instead of policy moderation if one (or several) of the conditions is not satisfied! Finally, we find that amongst these voting rules the extent of policy moderation is maximal under the Borda Count if we consider only equilibria where all candidates are serious contenders. However, this result does not carry over to spoiler equilibria, where Approval Voting can yield more moderate policy outcomes than the Borda Count.     

The political economy of naturalization

This paper presents a political economy model in which self‐interested natives decide when citizenship and/or voting rights should be granted to foreign‐born workers. Native voters know that immigrants hold different ‘political’ preferences and would thus tend to postpone their enfranchisement as much as possible. They also consider, however, that a more restrictive naturalization policy may reduce the gains from immigration. We find that the optimal timing of naturalization depends on the quantity, quality (productivity), and preferences of potential immigrants, the political composition and the age structure of the native population, as well as the sensitivity of migration choices to the citizenship issue.     

Transfers in a polarized country: bridging the gap between efficiency and stability

We consider a political economy model of country whose citizens have heterogeneous preferences for a national policy and some regions may contemplate a threat of secession. The country is efficient if its breakup into smaller countries leads to an aggregate utility loss. We show that in an efficient country whose citizens' preferences exhibit a high degree of polarization, a threat of secession cannot be eliminated without inter-regional transfers. We also demonstrate that if majority voting is used to determine the redistribution schemes within the country, then a high degree of polarization yields the full-compensation scheme as the unique political equilibrium.     

The company you keep: Satisfaction with life,economic freedom,and preference-policy mismatch

We examine the interaction between individual preferences for markets and state-level economic freedom as it relates to Satisfaction with Life (SWL). Fundamental tenets of economic freedom assert that societies free of excessive government involvement are wealthier and, ultimately, happier; individuals who are allowed to pursue self-interest are argued to be more motivated and more productive, and so society as a whole is better off. Though there is substantial empirical evidence that freer societies are wealthier, the evidence connecting economic freedom and happiness is less clear. We explore the relationship between economic freedom and SWL at the individual level. We examine differences between personal preferences for free markets and state policy and how this ‘preference-policy mismatch’ is related to SWL. We then briefly examine the relationship between preference-policy mismatches and individual self-reported voting behavior, including implications for Tiebout sorting. This study is the first to focus on individual economic ideology, i.e. individual level of support for free markets, and SWL in the United States. Combining individual and state level data we offer improvements to prior studies in a number of areas including an enhanced measure of life satisfaction, a richer basis for examining left-right differences than simple political identification, and an examination of the effect of preference-policy mismatches on satisfaction with life. We find significant relationships between SWL and individual support for markets, state-level economic freedom, and preference-policy mismatch. Further, preference-policy mismatch is positively associated with self-reported voting frequency. We find little support for Tiebout sorting.     

The influence of group size on distributional fairness under voting by veto

Voting by Veto [VBV], developed by Dennis C. Mueller, is a two-stage voting mechanism for committee decision making. In the first stage, every member of the committee makes a proposal. The proposals are joined with the current status quo (or another fallback option). For the second stage, a random mechanism determines the order of voting and the committee members sequentially eliminate one alternative each. After every committee member has exercised her veto, a single winning alternative remains. Game theory predicts that the equality of the resulting distribution under VBV varies with group size. Hence, decisions in two-member groups should result in highly unequal distributions of benefits. With increasing group size, however, VBV should generate more equally distributed outcomes. We examine the effect of group size under VBV in a series of laboratory experiments where groups with a varying number of members play a ‘divide the dollar game’. Our results confirm that larger groups choose more equal distributions than smaller groups. However, we also find deviations from the model's predictions. Some committees in our experiment do not select Pareto-optimal alternatives. An exploratory analysis of possible explanations suggests that individual behavior is most likely motivated by a combination of material self-interest and social preferences such as reciprocity and fairness.     

Voting by veto

This paper describes a voting procedure for revealing preferences for public goods. The procedure consists of two steps: a proposal by each committee member to be added along with the status quo to form the issue set, and then, subsequent to a random determination of voting order, the elimination of one proposal from the issue set by each committee member. For any set of proposals and a given order of voting the procedure determines a unique, winning proposal. Under the procedure's incentives, the winning proposal tends to contain an equal sharing of the potential gains from collective action among the committee members.