Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298211027229
Christopher Li
This paper explores the indirect accountability of political appointees. The appointee’s quality is uncertain, and voters hold the politician accountable for the appointee’s performance. The politician has better information about the appointee than voters do, but electoral concerns induce the politician to make inefficient retention decisions. Specifically, there is over-retention of appointees relative to the social optimum. If the quality of candidates for appointment is low, then improving the pool of candidates can help reduce distortions and, in fact, it is in the interest of the politician to do so. I also show that more public information about the appointee reduces over-retention.
{"title":"Indirect accountability of political appointees","authors":"Christopher Li","doi":"10.1177/09516298211027229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211027229","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the indirect accountability of political appointees. The appointee’s quality is uncertain, and voters hold the politician accountable for the appointee’s performance. The politician has better information about the appointee than voters do, but electoral concerns induce the politician to make inefficient retention decisions. Specifically, there is over-retention of appointees relative to the social optimum. If the quality of candidates for appointment is low, then improving the pool of candidates can help reduce distortions and, in fact, it is in the interest of the politician to do so. I also show that more public information about the appointee reduces over-retention.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09516298211027229","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46376854","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 : 2021-04-13DOI: 10.1177/09516298211003129
Amy Pond
Some agencies derive legitimacy from their political independence: for example, political meddling in monetary policy is problematic, as politicians favor short-term electoral goals over long-term economic stability. Nevertheless, the process of agency reform, even for agencies that are thought to be independent, is seldom onerous and often follows standard legislative procedures. Furthermore, citizens frequently lack expertise to hold policymakers accountable for new bureaucratic policies. Why then do politicians abstain from exercising influence through agency reform? This article delineates an informational cost to agency reform. In issue areas where politicians are frequently biased and citizens cannot perfectly observe the quality of agency reforms, citizens assume that reforms serve the politicians’ self-interest and punish politicians for any reform at all. Agency independence then comes more from informational challenges than from institutional design. This article develops a formal model to explain when agencies are reformed and when they retain their independence.
{"title":"Biased politicians and independent agencies","authors":"Amy Pond","doi":"10.1177/09516298211003129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211003129","url":null,"abstract":"Some agencies derive legitimacy from their political independence: for example, political meddling in monetary policy is problematic, as politicians favor short-term electoral goals over long-term economic stability. Nevertheless, the process of agency reform, even for agencies that are thought to be independent, is seldom onerous and often follows standard legislative procedures. Furthermore, citizens frequently lack expertise to hold policymakers accountable for new bureaucratic policies. Why then do politicians abstain from exercising influence through agency reform? This article delineates an informational cost to agency reform. In issue areas where politicians are frequently biased and citizens cannot perfectly observe the quality of agency reforms, citizens assume that reforms serve the politicians’ self-interest and punish politicians for any reform at all. Agency independence then comes more from informational challenges than from institutional design. This article develops a formal model to explain when agencies are reformed and when they retain their independence.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09516298211003129","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44635655","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 : 2021-04-13DOI: 10.1177/09516298211003661
Miquel Pellicer, E. Wegner, Lindsay J. Benstead, Ellen Lust
Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic.
{"title":"Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism","authors":"Miquel Pellicer, E. Wegner, Lindsay J. Benstead, Ellen Lust","doi":"10.1177/09516298211003661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211003661","url":null,"abstract":"Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09516298211003661","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47246964","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 : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984849
Ruth Ben-Yashar, S. Nitzan, Tomoya Tajika
Power is an important basic concept in Political Science and Economics. Applying an extended version of the uncertain dichotomous choice model proposed, the objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between two different types of power a voter may have: skill-dependent (s-d) power and marginal contribution (mc). It is then shown that, under the optimal committee decision rule, inequality in skills may result in higher inequality of the two types of power and that the distribution of the second type of power (mc) can be even more unequal than the distribution of the first type of s-d power. Using simulations, and assuming evenly spread skills, this possibility is proved to be robust. The significance of the finding is due to the effect of power on reward, whether it is defined in terms of status or in terms of monetary payment.
{"title":"Skill, power and marginal contribution in committees","authors":"Ruth Ben-Yashar, S. Nitzan, Tomoya Tajika","doi":"10.1177/0951629820984849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820984849","url":null,"abstract":"Power is an important basic concept in Political Science and Economics. Applying an extended version of the uncertain dichotomous choice model proposed, the objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between two different types of power a voter may have: skill-dependent (s-d) power and marginal contribution (mc). It is then shown that, under the optimal committee decision rule, inequality in skills may result in higher inequality of the two types of power and that the distribution of the second type of power (mc) can be even more unequal than the distribution of the first type of s-d power. Using simulations, and assuming evenly spread skills, this possibility is proved to be robust. The significance of the finding is due to the effect of power on reward, whether it is defined in terms of status or in terms of monetary payment.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0951629820984849","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45121749","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 : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984847
Leyla D. Karakas, Devashish Mitra
This paper studies the effects of cultural identity on electoral and policy outcomes when voters are “behavioral.” Building on the evidence that voters assess political or economic events through the lens of their partisan identifications, we analyze an election between two office-motivated candidates in which voters over-reward or under-punish the candidate that shares their cultural identity. Focusing on issues with cultural as well as distributional implications for voters such as immigration and the cultural divide based on nativism as the source of identity politics, we find that the candidates’ equilibrium policies are always preferred by the electorally dominant cultural group to the policy that would be optimal if policies only had distributional consequences. We also show that candidates do not necessarily target their own cultural bases in equilibrium. Furthermore, stronger identity politics increases policy polarization. Our findings contribute to the debates on the decoupling of voting behavior from economic interests, and the rise of immigration, trade protectionism, or engagement with global governing institutions as electoral issues that can shift historical voting patterns.
{"title":"Electoral competition in the presence of identity politics","authors":"Leyla D. Karakas, Devashish Mitra","doi":"10.1177/0951629820984847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820984847","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the effects of cultural identity on electoral and policy outcomes when voters are “behavioral.” Building on the evidence that voters assess political or economic events through the lens of their partisan identifications, we analyze an election between two office-motivated candidates in which voters over-reward or under-punish the candidate that shares their cultural identity. Focusing on issues with cultural as well as distributional implications for voters such as immigration and the cultural divide based on nativism as the source of identity politics, we find that the candidates’ equilibrium policies are always preferred by the electorally dominant cultural group to the policy that would be optimal if policies only had distributional consequences. We also show that candidates do not necessarily target their own cultural bases in equilibrium. Furthermore, stronger identity politics increases policy polarization. Our findings contribute to the debates on the decoupling of voting behavior from economic interests, and the rise of immigration, trade protectionism, or engagement with global governing institutions as electoral issues that can shift historical voting patterns.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0951629820984847","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46435495","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 : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/09516298211003127
Jean Guillaume Forand, Gergely Ujhelyi
Erratum to ‘Don’t hatch the messenger? On the desirability of restricting the political activity of bureaucrats’ by Jean Guillaume Forand (Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada) and Gergely Ujhelyi (Department of Economics, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA). Published in Journal of Theoretical Politics 2021, Vol. 33(1) 95139, https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0951629820984848. The article was first published online January 19, 2021. SAGE Publishing regrets that the following errors were introduced by the publisher during the copy-editing process.
{"title":"Erratum to ‘Don’t hatch the messenger? On the desirability of restricting the political activity of bureaucrats’","authors":"Jean Guillaume Forand, Gergely Ujhelyi","doi":"10.1177/09516298211003127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211003127","url":null,"abstract":"Erratum to ‘Don’t hatch the messenger? On the desirability of restricting the political activity of bureaucrats’ by Jean Guillaume Forand (Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada) and Gergely Ujhelyi (Department of Economics, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA). Published in Journal of Theoretical Politics 2021, Vol. 33(1) 95139, https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0951629820984848. The article was first published online January 19, 2021. SAGE Publishing regrets that the following errors were introduced by the publisher during the copy-editing process.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09516298211003127","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42720841","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 : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984851
Carlo de Bassa, E. Grillo, Francesco Passarelli
Often foreign countries levy sanctions in the attempt to foment discontent with a hostile government. But sanctions may provoke costly reactions by the leaders of the target country. This paper presents a model in which sanctions exhaust the target country economically and impair its government’s fiscal capacity. Then, an office-motivated leader may find it convenient to default on foreign debt in order to free resources that she can invest to regain internal political support. The default thus becomes a defensive tool to partially dampen the internal political turmoil sanctions generate.
{"title":"Sanctions and incentives to repudiate external debt","authors":"Carlo de Bassa, E. Grillo, Francesco Passarelli","doi":"10.1177/0951629820984851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820984851","url":null,"abstract":"Often foreign countries levy sanctions in the attempt to foment discontent with a hostile government. But sanctions may provoke costly reactions by the leaders of the target country. This paper presents a model in which sanctions exhaust the target country economically and impair its government’s fiscal capacity. Then, an office-motivated leader may find it convenient to default on foreign debt in order to free resources that she can invest to regain internal political support. The default thus becomes a defensive tool to partially dampen the internal political turmoil sanctions generate.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0951629820984851","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47068108","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 : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984850
Chelsea A. Pardini, Ana Espínola‐Arredondo
Previous game-theoretic analyses of the settlement of the United States assume that Indigenous peoples and settler colonizers either engaged in free exchange or total war for land. We reframe the model to consider that violence, including coercion, was present in most of their interactions; that is, we allow for the settler colonizer to engage in coercion to strategically lower their appropriation costs for Indigenous peoples’ lands. We find that the settler strategically uses violence to pay less in exchanges for Indigenous peoples’ lands. In addition, we examine how uncertainty, about whether an agreement can ensure the avoidance of all-out conflict, affects initial violence and resistance. We find that the likelihood of all-out conflict affects settler violence and it critically depends on whether the Indigenous people can seek compensation.
{"title":"Violence, coercion, and settler colonialism","authors":"Chelsea A. Pardini, Ana Espínola‐Arredondo","doi":"10.1177/0951629820984850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820984850","url":null,"abstract":"Previous game-theoretic analyses of the settlement of the United States assume that Indigenous peoples and settler colonizers either engaged in free exchange or total war for land. We reframe the model to consider that violence, including coercion, was present in most of their interactions; that is, we allow for the settler colonizer to engage in coercion to strategically lower their appropriation costs for Indigenous peoples’ lands. We find that the settler strategically uses violence to pay less in exchanges for Indigenous peoples’ lands. In addition, we examine how uncertainty, about whether an agreement can ensure the avoidance of all-out conflict, affects initial violence and resistance. We find that the likelihood of all-out conflict affects settler violence and it critically depends on whether the Indigenous people can seek compensation.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0951629820984850","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49510745","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 : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984848
Jean Guillaume Forand, Gergely Ujhelyi
Many countries place restrictions on the political rights of government workers. This includes limitations on political activities such as taking an active part in political campaigns. Are such restrictions desirable? We present a formal welfare analysis of this question. Bureaucrats’ political activities affect voter perceptions of the government and this can have informational benefits. However, they can also induce policy mistakes and are susceptible to ‘noise’ from some bureaucrats’ innate desire for political expression. When politicians have limited control over bureaucrats and successfully coordinate with voters, bureaucrats’ political activities can be desirable. In most cases, however, banning political activities is optimal.
{"title":"Don’t hatch the messenger? On the desirability of restricting the political activity of bureaucrats","authors":"Jean Guillaume Forand, Gergely Ujhelyi","doi":"10.1177/0951629820984848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629820984848","url":null,"abstract":"Many countries place restrictions on the political rights of government workers. This includes limitations on political activities such as taking an active part in political campaigns. Are such restrictions desirable? We present a formal welfare analysis of this question. Bureaucrats’ political activities affect voter perceptions of the government and this can have informational benefits. However, they can also induce policy mistakes and are susceptible to ‘noise’ from some bureaucrats’ innate desire for political expression. When politicians have limited control over bureaucrats and successfully coordinate with voters, bureaucrats’ political activities can be desirable. In most cases, however, banning political activities is optimal.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0951629820984848","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43342243","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 : 2020-11-30DOI: 10.1177/09516298221081811
Ingela Alger, J. Laslier
This paper revisits two classical problems in the theory of voting—viz. the divided majority problem and the strategic revelation of information—in the light of evolutionarily founded partial Kantian morality. It is shown that, compared to electorates consisting of purely self-interested voters, such Kantian morality helps voters solve coordination problems and improves the information aggregation properties of equilibria, even for modest levels of morality.
{"title":"Homo moralis goes to the voting booth: Coordination and information aggregation","authors":"Ingela Alger, J. Laslier","doi":"10.1177/09516298221081811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221081811","url":null,"abstract":"This paper revisits two classical problems in the theory of voting—viz. the divided majority problem and the strategic revelation of information—in the light of evolutionarily founded partial Kantian morality. It is shown that, compared to electorates consisting of purely self-interested voters, such Kantian morality helps voters solve coordination problems and improves the information aggregation properties of equilibria, even for modest levels of morality.","PeriodicalId":51606,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Theoretical Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47207135","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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