Pub Date : 2022-06-28DOI: 10.1177/09516298221102972
Rush T. Stewart
In many assessment problems—aptitude testing, hiring decisions, appraisals of the risk of recidivism, evaluation of the credibility of testimonial sources, and so on—the fair treatment of different groups of individuals is an important goal. But individuals can be legitimately grouped in many different ways. Using a framework and fairness constraints explored in research on algorithmic fairness, I show that eliminating certain forms of bias across groups for one way of classifying individuals can make it impossible to eliminate such bias across groups for another way of dividing people up. And this point generalizes if we require merely that assessments be approximately bias-free. Moreover, even if the fairness constraints are satisfied for some given partitions of the population, the constraints can fail for the coarsest common refinement, that is, the partition generated by taking intersections of the elements of these coarser partitions. This shows that these prominent fairness constraints admit the possibility of forms of intersectional bias.
{"title":"Identity and the limits of fair assessment","authors":"Rush T. Stewart","doi":"10.1177/09516298221102972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221102972","url":null,"abstract":"In many assessment problems—aptitude testing, hiring decisions, appraisals of the risk of recidivism, evaluation of the credibility of testimonial sources, and so on—the fair treatment of different groups of individuals is an important goal. But individuals can be legitimately grouped in many different ways. Using a framework and fairness constraints explored in research on algorithmic fairness, I show that eliminating certain forms of bias across groups for one way of classifying individuals can make it impossible to eliminate such bias across groups for another way of dividing people up. And this point generalizes if we require merely that assessments be approximately bias-free. Moreover, even if the fairness constraints are satisfied for some given partitions of the population, the constraints can fail for the coarsest common refinement, that is, the partition generated by taking intersections of the elements of these coarser partitions. This shows that these prominent fairness constraints admit the possibility of forms of intersectional bias.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"415 - 442"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47020215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1177/09516298221108343
Christopher Schwarz
Over the past 30 years empirical international relations has discovered a number of conflict patterns which are variously considered to be competing, contradictory, or emanating from unique processes. I present a simplified and corrected selectorate model of war which unifies four such lines of research: the autocratic, democratic, and capitalist peaces with diversionary war. It is shown that domestic political competition, as understood within the selectorate approach, contains microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war. This novel mechanism, in turn, coherently explains the main findings from these various areas of enquiry. And so the discoveries of these four lines of enquiry can be understood not as apparently accidental or competing patterns but as aspects of the same mechanism operating under different empirical contexts.
{"title":"Explaining patterns in the onset of interstate war","authors":"Christopher Schwarz","doi":"10.1177/09516298221108343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221108343","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past 30 years empirical international relations has discovered a number of conflict patterns which are variously considered to be competing, contradictory, or emanating from unique processes. I present a simplified and corrected selectorate model of war which unifies four such lines of research: the autocratic, democratic, and capitalist peaces with diversionary war. It is shown that domestic political competition, as understood within the selectorate approach, contains microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war. This novel mechanism, in turn, coherently explains the main findings from these various areas of enquiry. And so the discoveries of these four lines of enquiry can be understood not as apparently accidental or competing patterns but as aspects of the same mechanism operating under different empirical contexts.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"333 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43635003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298221081807
F. Bohn, Xue Wang
Trump and Bolsonaro are perceived as erratic presidents, but they may actually be quite rational. We explore two channels of manipulation in a polarized society. One relates to swing voters and their perception of a president’s competence. The other one captures the effort by a president to appeal and mobilize her base voters. We model erraticism in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but our model could also be applied to other realms of political manipulation. We find that erratic freedom propaganda directed against state-administered lockdowns may help a president in her re-election bid. Paradoxically, if the challenger gains popular support or increases voter mobilization against the president, it is optimal for the president to further increase erratic propaganda in order to increase the mobilization of her own supporters. Our predicted surge in voter mobilization is actually a main outcome of the 2020 US elections.
{"title":"Rational erraticism","authors":"F. Bohn, Xue Wang","doi":"10.1177/09516298221081807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221081807","url":null,"abstract":"Trump and Bolsonaro are perceived as erratic presidents, but they may actually be quite rational. We explore two channels of manipulation in a polarized society. One relates to swing voters and their perception of a president’s competence. The other one captures the effort by a president to appeal and mobilize her base voters. We model erraticism in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but our model could also be applied to other realms of political manipulation. We find that erratic freedom propaganda directed against state-administered lockdowns may help a president in her re-election bid. Paradoxically, if the challenger gains popular support or increases voter mobilization against the president, it is optimal for the president to further increase erratic propaganda in order to increase the mobilization of her own supporters. Our predicted surge in voter mobilization is actually a main outcome of the 2020 US elections.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"219 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48681911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298221081809
Lindsey Gailmard
Much research contends that candidate competence brings technical or political skill, such that selecting against such attributes seems irrational. However, if special interest coalitions are sufficiently strong, a majority may expect that political expertise will be used to select policies that generate rents for narrow constituencies at the expense of its own welfare. I develop a model in which a majority prefers to elect the less competent politician in order to undermine the incumbent’s ability to pursue the special interest agenda and derive the implications for accountability in this setting. The results demonstrate that the majority’s attempts to reassert control over policy through its retention decisions impede social welfare maximizing reform and distort aggregate welfare by either encouraging ( i ) inefficient policy selection or ( i i ) inefficient candidate selection. Even if politicians choose policies that maximize social welfare doing so may only worsen aggregate welfare by providing voters with more information about candidate competence, which enables the majority to better select inept politicians.
{"title":"Electoral accountability and political competence","authors":"Lindsey Gailmard","doi":"10.1177/09516298221081809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221081809","url":null,"abstract":"Much research contends that candidate competence brings technical or political skill, such that selecting against such attributes seems irrational. However, if special interest coalitions are sufficiently strong, a majority may expect that political expertise will be used to select policies that generate rents for narrow constituencies at the expense of its own welfare. I develop a model in which a majority prefers to elect the less competent politician in order to undermine the incumbent’s ability to pursue the special interest agenda and derive the implications for accountability in this setting. The results demonstrate that the majority’s attempts to reassert control over policy through its retention decisions impede social welfare maximizing reform and distort aggregate welfare by either encouraging ( i ) inefficient policy selection or ( i i ) inefficient candidate selection. Even if politicians choose policies that maximize social welfare doing so may only worsen aggregate welfare by providing voters with more information about candidate competence, which enables the majority to better select inept politicians.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"236 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44971055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-14DOI: 10.1177/09516298221085973
Ole-Andreas Elvik Naess
This paper constructs a two-period electoral model where the future is uncertain and the policy in each period is decided by majority rule. The voters’ optimal future policy takes into account all possible future realizations, while the future pivotal median voter only cares about the median value of the future distribution. This dynamic conflict of interest implies that the electoral outcome may be strictly Pareto-dominated by other policies even in cases where all voters are identical and have the same beliefs for the future. I apply the model to analyze the dynamic incentives for redistribution.
{"title":"Inefficient voting with identical voters","authors":"Ole-Andreas Elvik Naess","doi":"10.1177/09516298221085973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221085973","url":null,"abstract":"This paper constructs a two-period electoral model where the future is uncertain and the policy in each period is decided by majority rule. The voters’ optimal future policy takes into account all possible future realizations, while the future pivotal median voter only cares about the median value of the future distribution. This dynamic conflict of interest implies that the electoral outcome may be strictly Pareto-dominated by other policies even in cases where all voters are identical and have the same beliefs for the future. I apply the model to analyze the dynamic incentives for redistribution.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"175 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49051948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-21DOI: 10.1177/09516298221081810
William Bosworth,
This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society.
{"title":"Social Power and Non-cooperative Game Theory","authors":"William Bosworth,","doi":"10.1177/09516298221081810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221081810","url":null,"abstract":"This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"262 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41532580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-18DOI: 10.1177/09516298211061157
T. Yu
Should accountability be introduced to organizations that are learning about the right policies to achieve their goals? I develop an agency model focusing on the interactions between accountability and an agent’s intrinsic motivation. More effort by the agent leads to more informative policy outcomes and thereby better policy learning. Holding the agent accountable for the policy outcomes motivates the agent and thus improves policy learning. However, by removing the agent from office upon policy failure and thereby taking away his benefit from learning through failure, accountability also discourages the agent. This negative effect is more substantial when the intrinsic motivation is higher. The principal, therefore, refrains from using accountability on the agent who is more intrinsically motivated.
{"title":"Accountability and learning with motivated agents","authors":"T. Yu","doi":"10.1177/09516298211061157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211061157","url":null,"abstract":"Should accountability be introduced to organizations that are learning about the right policies to achieve their goals? I develop an agency model focusing on the interactions between accountability and an agent’s intrinsic motivation. More effort by the agent leads to more informative policy outcomes and thereby better policy learning. Holding the agent accountable for the policy outcomes motivates the agent and thus improves policy learning. However, by removing the agent from office upon policy failure and thereby taking away his benefit from learning through failure, accountability also discourages the agent. This negative effect is more substantial when the intrinsic motivation is higher. The principal, therefore, refrains from using accountability on the agent who is more intrinsically motivated.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"313 - 329"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44792417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298211061516
Austin Bussing, Michael Pomirchy
Legislative oversight allows Congress to investigate potential wrongdoing by executive branch actors. We present a model in which an incumbent exercises oversight and chooses to take corrective action against the executive before going up for reelection. We show that partisan types who prefer to take corrective action regardless of the probability of wrongdoing will always conduct oversight, but sincere types who only want to correct legitimate wrongdoing will exercise restraint to avoid appearing too partisan and losing reelection. The model also shows that oversight is increasing in the probability that the incumbent is partisan and the probability that the challenger is sincere. Finally, we present two case studies, the Elián González custody case and the attack on the Benghazi embassy, to illustrate our theory.
{"title":"Congressional oversight and electoral accountability","authors":"Austin Bussing, Michael Pomirchy","doi":"10.1177/09516298211061516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211061516","url":null,"abstract":"Legislative oversight allows Congress to investigate potential wrongdoing by executive branch actors. We present a model in which an incumbent exercises oversight and chooses to take corrective action against the executive before going up for reelection. We show that partisan types who prefer to take corrective action regardless of the probability of wrongdoing will always conduct oversight, but sincere types who only want to correct legitimate wrongdoing will exercise restraint to avoid appearing too partisan and losing reelection. The model also shows that oversight is increasing in the probability that the incumbent is partisan and the probability that the challenger is sincere. Finally, we present two case studies, the Elián González custody case and the attack on the Benghazi embassy, to illustrate our theory.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"35 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44002870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1177/09516298211061151
Dan Reiter, S. Wolford
We analyze a model of leader gender and crisis bargaining under asymmetric information. There are no essential differences between the sexes in their willingness to use force, but sexist leaders receive a subjective boost for defeating female leaders in war and pay a subjective cost for defeat. We show that this hostile sexism can lead to war for two reasons, first by offering sufficient private benefits to make peace impossible and second by influencing an uninformed leader’s willingness to risk war. We also show that (a) the effect of leader sex on disputes and war depends on the distribution of power, (b) sexist leaders may initiate disputes at less favorable distributions of power than non-sexist leaders, and (c) sexist leaders adopt bargaining strategies that make it difficult for women to cultivate and benefit from reputations for resolve, even in the absence of sex differences in the willingness to use force.
{"title":"Gender, sexism, and war","authors":"Dan Reiter, S. Wolford","doi":"10.1177/09516298211061151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211061151","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze a model of leader gender and crisis bargaining under asymmetric information. There are no essential differences between the sexes in their willingness to use force, but sexist leaders receive a subjective boost for defeating female leaders in war and pay a subjective cost for defeat. We show that this hostile sexism can lead to war for two reasons, first by offering sufficient private benefits to make peace impossible and second by influencing an uninformed leader’s willingness to risk war. We also show that (a) the effect of leader sex on disputes and war depends on the distribution of power, (b) sexist leaders may initiate disputes at less favorable distributions of power than non-sexist leaders, and (c) sexist leaders adopt bargaining strategies that make it difficult for women to cultivate and benefit from reputations for resolve, even in the absence of sex differences in the willingness to use force.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"59 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41906094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-06DOI: 10.1177/09516298211061159
JBrandon Duck-Mayr
Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts’ policy making efficacy, so why do judges allow it to happen? I show judicially-created policy can become inconsistent when judges explain rules in more abstract terms than they decide cases. To do so, I expand standard case-space models of judicial decision making to account for relationships between specific facts and broader doctrinal dimensions. This model of judicial decision making as a process of multi-step reasoning reveals that preference aggregation in such a context can lead to inconsistent collegial rules. I also outline a class of preference configurations on collegial courts (i.e., multi-member courts) in which this problem cannot arise. These results have implications for several areas of inquiry in judicial politics such as models of principal-agent relationships in judicial hierarchies and empirical research utilizing case facts as predictor variables.
{"title":"Explaining legal inconsistency","authors":"JBrandon Duck-Mayr","doi":"10.1177/09516298211061159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211061159","url":null,"abstract":"Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts’ policy making efficacy, so why do judges allow it to happen? I show judicially-created policy can become inconsistent when judges explain rules in more abstract terms than they decide cases. To do so, I expand standard case-space models of judicial decision making to account for relationships between specific facts and broader doctrinal dimensions. This model of judicial decision making as a process of multi-step reasoning reveals that preference aggregation in such a context can lead to inconsistent collegial rules. I also outline a class of preference configurations on collegial courts (i.e., multi-member courts) in which this problem cannot arise. These results have implications for several areas of inquiry in judicial politics such as models of principal-agent relationships in judicial hierarchies and empirical research utilizing case facts as predictor variables.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"107 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49384449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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