Pub Date : 2022-10-11DOI: 10.1177/09516298221130265
Tasos Kalandrakis
I establish conditions for existence of pure strategy equilibria in K-candidate Downsian electoral competition (K ≥ 2) with valence when the voting rule is monotonic, generalizing existing results to non-proper rules and possibly continuous electorates. The conditions are sufficient when K ≥ 2 and (essentially) necessary in the K = 2 candidate case. They compare the size of one candidate's valence advantage to the radius of a generalized median pivotal ball (P-ball). I flesh out the difference of this generalized median with a recent alternative which, in turn, I characterize both on the basis of a weaker median property and using pivotal hyperplanes.
{"title":"Generalized medians and electoral competition with valence","authors":"Tasos Kalandrakis","doi":"10.1177/09516298221130265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221130265","url":null,"abstract":"I establish conditions for existence of pure strategy equilibria in K-candidate Downsian electoral competition (K ≥ 2) with valence when the voting rule is monotonic, generalizing existing results to non-proper rules and possibly continuous electorates. The conditions are sufficient when K ≥ 2 and (essentially) necessary in the K = 2 candidate case. They compare the size of one candidate's valence advantage to the radius of a generalized median pivotal ball (P-ball). I flesh out the difference of this generalized median with a recent alternative which, in turn, I characterize both on the basis of a weaker median property and using pivotal hyperplanes.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65666046","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 : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298221108346
Ishan Joshi
Little is known about how the scope for deliberation can be compared across different branches of government. Two things need to happen for a consensus to emerge in a particular setting. Crucially, parties must coordinate to facilitate such provisions in the first place. Second, the quality of this coordination must be able to override the other biases of the environment in the long run. A parsimonious framework presents the necessary and sufficient conditions for both of these to happen across different settings—legislatures, bureaucracies, and judiciaries. Complicating matters are intra-group factions that have heterogeneous preferences. Interestingly, even if we assume factions that do not want to compromise outnumber those that do, it is the former that take the lead in solving the coordination problem in equilibrium. A related finding suggested by these comparisons is that as institutional environments become more complex—and move away from purely representative functions—the scope for generating this consensus is enhanced.
{"title":"The evolution of consensus through coordinated action","authors":"Ishan Joshi","doi":"10.1177/09516298221108346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221108346","url":null,"abstract":"Little is known about how the scope for deliberation can be compared across different branches of government. Two things need to happen for a consensus to emerge in a particular setting. Crucially, parties must coordinate to facilitate such provisions in the first place. Second, the quality of this coordination must be able to override the other biases of the environment in the long run. A parsimonious framework presents the necessary and sufficient conditions for both of these to happen across different settings—legislatures, bureaucracies, and judiciaries. Complicating matters are intra-group factions that have heterogeneous preferences. Interestingly, even if we assume factions that do not want to compromise outnumber those that do, it is the former that take the lead in solving the coordination problem in equilibrium. A related finding suggested by these comparisons is that as institutional environments become more complex—and move away from purely representative functions—the scope for generating this consensus is enhanced.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45319960","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 : 2022-09-25DOI: 10.1177/09516298221122094
Anthony Fowler, Kisoo Kim
Partisan voters tend to seek political news from media sources that match their predispositions. Scholars and pundits often attribute this partisan media sorting to psychological biases, and they typically assume that it leads voters to make worse decisions at the ballot box. To reinterpret this evidence and provide an alternative explanation, we develop two formal models of media choice—one in which voters only want to hear good news about their party and another in which voters only care about making good electoral decisions. Both models predict partisan media sorting, so sorting does not constitute evidence that voters are poorly informed or that they are driven by psychological biases. However, the models do produce competing predictions about when voters will consume more or less news and about whether signals from the news should influence vote choices. Reassessing the empirical literature, we find some support for both explanations.
{"title":"An information-based explanation for partisan media sorting","authors":"Anthony Fowler, Kisoo Kim","doi":"10.1177/09516298221122094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221122094","url":null,"abstract":"Partisan voters tend to seek political news from media sources that match their predispositions. Scholars and pundits often attribute this partisan media sorting to psychological biases, and they typically assume that it leads voters to make worse decisions at the ballot box. To reinterpret this evidence and provide an alternative explanation, we develop two formal models of media choice—one in which voters only want to hear good news about their party and another in which voters only care about making good electoral decisions. Both models predict partisan media sorting, so sorting does not constitute evidence that voters are poorly informed or that they are driven by psychological biases. However, the models do produce competing predictions about when voters will consume more or less news and about whether signals from the news should influence vote choices. Reassessing the empirical literature, we find some support for both explanations.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49236260","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 : 2022-09-22DOI: 10.1177/09516298221123263
Mark C. Wilson, B. Grofman
For a two-party electoral competition in a districted legislature, the change in mean vote share for party A from one election to the next is commonly referred to as swing. A key question, highly relevant to election forecasting and the measurement of partisan gerrymandering, is: “How do we expect the swing to be distributed across the districts as a function of previous vote share?”. The literature gives two main answers: uniform swing and proportional swing. Which is better has been unresolved for decades. Here we (a) provide an axiomatic foundation for desirable properties of a model of swing; (b) show axiomatically that using uniform swing or proportional swing is a bad idea, (c) provide a simple swing model that does satisfy the axioms, and (d) show how to integrate a reversion to the mean effect into models swing. We show that all the above models can be expected to work well when (a) elections are close, or (b) when we restrict to data where swing is low, or (c) when we eliminate the cases where the model is most likely to go wrong. We show on a large US Congressional dataset that in addition to its superior axiomatic properties, our new model provides an overall equal or better fit on five indicators: mistakes about directionality of change, mistakes in winner, estimates that are outside the [0..1] bounds, mean-square error, and correlation between actual and predicted values. We recommend replacing the uniform and proportional swing models with the new model.
{"title":"Models of inter-election change in partisan vote share","authors":"Mark C. Wilson, B. Grofman","doi":"10.1177/09516298221123263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221123263","url":null,"abstract":"For a two-party electoral competition in a districted legislature, the change in mean vote share for party A from one election to the next is commonly referred to as swing. A key question, highly relevant to election forecasting and the measurement of partisan gerrymandering, is: “How do we expect the swing to be distributed across the districts as a function of previous vote share?”. The literature gives two main answers: uniform swing and proportional swing. Which is better has been unresolved for decades. Here we (a) provide an axiomatic foundation for desirable properties of a model of swing; (b) show axiomatically that using uniform swing or proportional swing is a bad idea, (c) provide a simple swing model that does satisfy the axioms, and (d) show how to integrate a reversion to the mean effect into models swing. We show that all the above models can be expected to work well when (a) elections are close, or (b) when we restrict to data where swing is low, or (c) when we eliminate the cases where the model is most likely to go wrong. We show on a large US Congressional dataset that in addition to its superior axiomatic properties, our new model provides an overall equal or better fit on five indicators: mistakes about directionality of change, mistakes in winner, estimates that are outside the [0..1] bounds, mean-square error, and correlation between actual and predicted values. We recommend replacing the uniform and proportional swing models with the new model.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46134773","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 : 2022-09-21DOI: 10.1177/09516298221122104
F. Brandt, Marie Matthäus, Christian Saile
Voting paradoxes date back to the origin of social choice theory in the 18th century, when the Chevalier de Borda pointed out that plurality—then and now the most common voting rule—may elect a candidate who loses pairwise majority comparisons against every other candidate. Since then, a large number of similar, seemingly paradoxical, phenomena have been observed in the literature. As it turns out, many paradoxes only materialize under some rather contrived circumstances and require a certain number of voters and candidates. In this paper, we leverage computational optimization techniques to identify the minimal numbers of voters and candidates that are required for the most common voting paradoxes to materialize. The resulting compilation of voting paradoxes may serve as a useful reference to social choice theorists as well as an argument for the deployment of certain rules when the numbers of voters or candidates are severely restricted.
{"title":"Minimal voting paradoxes","authors":"F. Brandt, Marie Matthäus, Christian Saile","doi":"10.1177/09516298221122104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221122104","url":null,"abstract":"Voting paradoxes date back to the origin of social choice theory in the 18th century, when the Chevalier de Borda pointed out that plurality—then and now the most common voting rule—may elect a candidate who loses pairwise majority comparisons against every other candidate. Since then, a large number of similar, seemingly paradoxical, phenomena have been observed in the literature. As it turns out, many paradoxes only materialize under some rather contrived circumstances and require a certain number of voters and candidates. In this paper, we leverage computational optimization techniques to identify the minimal numbers of voters and candidates that are required for the most common voting paradoxes to materialize. The resulting compilation of voting paradoxes may serve as a useful reference to social choice theorists as well as an argument for the deployment of certain rules when the numbers of voters or candidates are severely restricted.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45513362","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298221107552
Perrin Lefebvre, D. Martimort
A substantial literature has been devoted to analyzing how legislators delegate regulatory power to a more knowledgeable agency. Yet, much less attention has been paid to understand how this delegation process is shaped by the environment in which this agency operates, and more specifically by the actions of interest groups. We propose a model of regulatory capture to assess how the distribution of information across interest groups and agencies impacts optimal delegation. Whether an interest group and his agency share information or not determines the scope for capture and how much discretion should be left to this agency in response. Whether asymmetric information reduces or increases discretion depends on the biases of the group and the agency vis-à-vis Congress. Groups that are more aligned with Congress collect politically relevant information, while more extreme groups remain poorly informed. The information structure that endogenously emerges increases discretion under broad circumstances.
{"title":"Delegation, capture and endogenous information structures","authors":"Perrin Lefebvre, D. Martimort","doi":"10.1177/09516298221107552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221107552","url":null,"abstract":"A substantial literature has been devoted to analyzing how legislators delegate regulatory power to a more knowledgeable agency. Yet, much less attention has been paid to understand how this delegation process is shaped by the environment in which this agency operates, and more specifically by the actions of interest groups. We propose a model of regulatory capture to assess how the distribution of information across interest groups and agencies impacts optimal delegation. Whether an interest group and his agency share information or not determines the scope for capture and how much discretion should be left to this agency in response. Whether asymmetric information reduces or increases discretion depends on the biases of the group and the agency vis-à-vis Congress. Groups that are more aligned with Congress collect politically relevant information, while more extreme groups remain poorly informed. The information structure that endogenously emerges increases discretion under broad circumstances.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47470372","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 : 2022-06-28DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
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