福州市社区民主选举改革对策研究——以三坊社区户代表选举为例

本文研究福州市户代表选举方式的实施程序及效果，认为户代表选举方式是居民代表选举方式的进步与发展，但仍存在许多因素阻碍着当前社区选举的民主化进程。对此，文章提出了完善社区民主选举制度以及各项配套措施，以真正发挥社区作为民主“训练场”社会功能的对策方案．     

我国参与式公共服务供给模式研究——理论模型与经验证据

文章采用一般均衡研究方法,通过构建一个参与式公共服务供给模型,从反面证明了我国目前公共服务供给模式低效的基本事实,而且在迁移成本很小或可忽略不计的假设下,居民会通过"用脚投票"自行配置公共服务资源。文章还使用上海某区4个街道的问卷调查数据,运用拉丁方方差分析法检验理论模型的结论,检验结果支持理论模型的结论。文章最后根据我国国情给出提高我国公共服务供给效率和质量的若干建议。     

Battleground states and voter participation in US presidential elections: an empirical test

The winner-take-all method of allocating Electoral College votes (in 48 of the 50 states) in US presidential elections has promoted interesting behaviours by politicians and states that are evident throughout US (economic) history. This analysis explores the impact that being a ‘battleground state’ in presidential elections has on future voter participation rates. After quantifying the degree to which each state is a battleground state, the empirical analysis proffers what it refers to as the ‘battleground voting hypothesis’, which argues that the greater the degree to which a given state is a battleground state, the greater the expected benefits from voting in that state and hence the greater the voter turnout in that state. The empirical results suggest that the top-to-bottom ‘battleground state effect’ generated an average of 7.8 additional percentage points in voter participation in presidential elections over the period 1964–2008 for those states at the top of the scale.     

Mixed equilibria in runoff elections

We demonstrate that the Hotelling–Downs model with runoff voting always admits symmetric mixed strategy equilibria for any (even or odd) number of office-motivated candidates (provided they are at least four). In specific, (a) we show that the game does not admit any symmetric atomless equilibrium, (b) we fully characterize a class of symmetric atomic mixed equilibria which exist for any distribution of the voters' ideal policies and (c) we argue that these equilibria are more robust than pure strategy equilibria to introduction of uncertainty about the voters' preferences.     

Annual Index

The author of this article expands the background theory of voting to incorporate the undergraduate majors of members of Congress. Examining nine votes on trade across the 109th and 110th Congresses reveals that economics majors are the only category of college major to vote in favor of free trade in a predictable way. Controls for a variety of factors including ideology, race, campaign contributions, and the inclusion of votes specifically on Cuba fail to diminish the effect. While economics majors are more likely to take a free trade position, not every vote that presupposes a free trade outcome is supported by economics majors. On the issue of sugar subsidies, being an economics major does not influence the direction of a congressional member's vote.     

Growth and inequality in an endogenous fiscal policy model with taxes on labor and capital

I study an economy where individuals have different initial endowments and fiscal policy is decided by majority voting. Public investment is financed by two flat rate taxes, one on labor income and the other one on capital income. The model shows a positive (negative) correlation between growth and the tax rate on labor (capital) income and a negative (positive) correlation between the tax rate on labor (capital) income and inequality. The results reconcile the theory with empirical evidence.     

The wisdom of demagogues: institutions,corruption and support for authoritarian populists

This article analyses the drivers of support for authoritarian populist parties in Europe. Such parties claim to represent the interests of ordinary people against greedy and out‐of‐touch elites. Simultaneously, they reject conventional constraints on democratic policymaking. In recent years, such parties on the political left and right have been gaining influence in countries across Europe. Using a panel data set from 1980–2016, we use semiparametric Tobit models with country fixed effects to explain support for authoritarian populists. We find that large vote shares of right‐wing – but not left‐wing – authoritarian populists are associated closely to corruption. Other commonly cited explanations such as unemployment, inequality and immigration perform poorly in predicting support for populist political platforms on the political right. While a full theoretical explanation of the link between corruption and right‐wing populism remains beyond the scope of this article, we suggest that the mechanism involves political trust. Corruption weakens trust in political institutions, which populists exploit. Curbing the rise of right‐wing authoritarian populism in Europe will thus require restoring trust in the integrity of politics.     

DPWeVote: differentially private weighted voting protocol for cloud-based decision-making

ABSTRACT

With the advent of Industry 4.0, cloud computing techniques have been increasingly adopted by industry practitioners to achieve better workflows. One important application is cloud-based decision-making, in which multiple enterprise partners need to arrive an agreed decision. Such cooperative decision-making problem is sometimes formed as a weighted voting game, in which enterprise partners express ‘YES/NO’ opinions. Nevertheless, existing cryptographic approaches to Cloud-Based Weighted Voting Game have restricted collusion tolerance and heavily rely on trusted servers, which are not always available. In this work, we consider the more realistic scenarios of having semi-honest cloud server/partners and assuming maximal collusion tolerance. To resolve the privacy issues in such scenarios, the DPWeVote protocol is proposed which incorporates Randomized Response technique and consists the following three phases: the Randomized Weights Collection phase, the Randomized Opinions Collection phase, and the Voting Results Release phase. Experiments on synthetic data have demonstrated that the proposed DPWeVote protocol managed to retain an acceptable utility for decision-making while preserving privacy in semi-honest environment.     

利益集团能主导美国的制造业回归吗

文章在国际贸易政治经济学的理论框架下考察利益集团是否能主导美国制造业回归的问题。以100个参议员为样本,运用完全信息极大似然法(FIML)进行模型估计与分析,定量考察两个美国制造业回归法案(S. Amdt. 523和S. Amdt. 817)投票结果背后蕴含的深层次驱动因素。实证结果显示,不同利益集团政治捐资对制造业回归法案投票的影响是不同的,美国劳工组织的政治捐资显著影响了议员的投票行为,但商业集团和意识形态组织并未对投票结果发挥显著作用。另外,议员的个人特征在一定程度上影响了政治捐资情况,但不影响投票结果。选区经济社会特征对议员投票结果没有显著影响。未来中国需要持续关注美国制造业回归的最新进展并正确评估对中国经济的影响,与美国重要利益集团保持沟通协调,以减少对我国相关产业的负面影响。     

Comparison of Scoring Rules in Poisson Voting Games

Scoring rules are compared by their equilibria in simple voting games with Poisson population uncertainty, using new techniques for computing pivot probabilities. Best-rewarding rules like plurality voting can generate discriminatory equilibria where the voters disregard some candidate as not a serious contender, although he may be universally liked, or may be symmetric to other candidates as in the Condorcet cycle. Such discriminatory equilibria are eliminated by worst-punishing rules like negative voting, but then even a universally disliked candidate may have to be taken seriously. In simple bipolar elections, equilibria are always majoritarian and efficient under approval voting, but not other scoring rules. Journal of Economic Literature Classification: D72.