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Comments on the papers by Theodore Keeler and Barry Weingast about the changes in the U.S. regulatory process. Highlights of Keeler's paper; Information on Weingast's paper; Factor that drives the voter and interest groups to support new views through the electoral process.

Comments on a paper that applied some technical analysis from game theory to a dynamic version of the divide-the-dollar game in voting theory. Contribution of the work in principle to the understanding of the role of voting as a paradigmatic political institution; Analysis of whether the approach can yield a testable theory of the outcomes of majority rule; Investigation of how outcomes change over time as an existing government operates in a changing environment.

Discusses the research of Francis Galton on the relationship between voting and robust estimation. Use of the influence curve on determining voting and estimation relationship; Suggestion on the retirement process of juries; Accuracy of the vox populi principle on estimating voter preference.

From 1939 to 1968 Florida used a unique referendum system to set property tax rates for public school operating expenditures at the median millage rate selected by voters. These referendums revealed the entire distribution of voter preferences, which is not possible in the standard up or down referendum. We are the first to use the Florida referendum data. The form of the ballot played an important role in how people voted. Voting machine elections were much more likely than paper ballots to result in rejections of the recommendations of school boards, and produced much greater dispersion of expressed preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that political parties may have incentives to adopt a partisan view on the working of the economic system. Our approach is based on a dynamical spatial voting model in which political parties are policy oriented. This model revolves around two interrelated issues X and y. The policy maker sets x directly. There exist two views on the relationship between X and y. Model uncertainty confronts policy makers with the problem of the selection of a model to base their actions on. We show that if voters have imperfect information about the working of the economic system that model selection contains a strategic element. Policy makers are inclined to adopt a view on the working of the economic system which fits in with their preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment is concerned with the relation between the basic model of elections and income redistribution in Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) and the model in Coughlin (1986a). Its purpose is to (i) isolate the (small set of) assumptions that separate these closely related models, (ii) identify a special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model where their results immediately provide direct extensions of four of the results in my paper, and (iii) point out that one of the lemmata in my paper identifies the precise location of the equilibrium income distribution for this important special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model. The comment also relates these observations to Lindbeck and Weibull's example of familiar assumptions that satisfy their sufficient conditions for the existence of a political equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two different data sources—municipal level data and individual data—we consider several hitherto unexplored aspects of the relationship between voting technology and election outcomes. We distinguish between introductory and permanent effects of electronic voting, and between national and municipal elections. We test for a possible asymmetry between the effect of moving from paper ballots to electronic voting, and vice versa, and we control for polling station density. We find a positive but temporary effect of electronic voting on voter turnout, a negative effect on the fraction of residual votes, and no effect on the share of left wing parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previously published paper evaluated election schemes under a wide variety of election circumstances. This paper improves upon the previous work by refining the measures used to rate the election schemes and increasing the statistical significance of those ratings. With these modifications, we can now draw some new conclusions: (a) In general circumstances, the Borda System outperforms the Copeland System which out-performs Approval which outperforms Majority Rule. (b) The Maximin Rule -- strongly supported by Rawls's -- turns out to be a reasonable election rule if the number of election alternatives is large relative to the number of voters. (c) With two exceptions, all our election systems performed quite well given a society with highly correlated utilities. (d) Given a polarized society, a serial dictatorship was better than every other election system except Borda. Perhaps even more importantly, we now have the possibility of conducting some cost/benefit analyses of different proposals for electoral changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An earlier paper showed a negative relation between increases and accelerations in F, the ratio of federal expenditures to GNP and E, the reelection or defeat of the incumbent party in the White House over the last 100 years. This paper argues that there also exists a negative relation between V, the percentage of the popular vote cast for the incumbents, and F. This function is displaced by wars and depressions and can drift over time, making it difficult to discover negative curves in the data. Dividing British and US data for the last 50 years into party periods yields clearly discernable negative functions for F and V for the incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a response to a comment on an article about income redistribution and elections. Explanation on the existence of equilibrium among voters; Assumptions on the probability of votes; Opinion on the claims of John O. Ledyard regarding election theorems.

The voting rule proposed by Basset and Persky (Public Choice 99:299-310, ) picks the alternative with the best median evaluation. This paper shows that this MaxMed principle is equivalent to the MaxMin (so-called Rawls') principle, with the proviso that one can discard half of the population. In one-dimensional, single-peaked domains, the paper compares the MaxMed rule with majority rule and the utilitarian criterion. The MaxMed outcome is rejected by a majority of voters in favor of outcomes that are also utilitarian improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the authority structure. This is based upon the bare positions of actors and ignores the existence of decision-making mechanisms. The few studies, which also take into account decision-making mechanisms, are 'membership-based'. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that such an approach is, in general, inappropriate. As a solution we suggested an 'action-based' approach and developed a power score and measure ascribing positional power to actors in hierarchies. In this paper we axiomatize this power score and measure and illustrate their applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a political explanation for the form of corporate governance captured by the degree of minority shareholder protection (MSP). Using a multi-stage game model of three-party competition under proportional electoral systems, I demonstrate that the electoral threshold-the minimum percentage of votes a party must receive to get at least one seat in parliamentary PR systems-is inversely related to the degree of MSP. This finding represents an important modification to formal models in the political economic literature that tends to omit the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides empirical evidence on how budget referendums affect school inputs by taking advantage of an exogenous enactment of budget referendums for small city school districts (SCSDs) in New York State in 1998. The paper shows that SCSDs reduce instructional spending and increase student-teacher ratios while preserving administrative spending in response to budget referendums. These empirical findings are obtained by difference-in-differences estimations on data processed with propensity score matching, and the results are robust to sensitivity analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate locations rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single-peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candidate to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party extremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the possibility of coalition government into the theoretical study of political accountability and analyzes the accountability of coalitions as a problem of team production. It is shown that coalition governments can be held accountable in the presence of an electoral alternative. Accountability becomes problematic if it is certain that at least one of the coalition parties stays in power after the elections. Such a coalition (sometimes called a ‘unity government’) can not be given appropriate collective incentives. To incentivate government performance, voters make one coalition party responsible for the outcome. This, however, makes the other coalition party interested in sabotage. The paper analyzes the resulting conflict and characterizes optimal voter strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most striking feature of liberal democracies is the coexistence of large inequalities of wealth with a roughly egalitarian distribution of voting power. So far most attempts to explain this have asked ‘why don’t the poor form a coalition to expropriate the rich?’ This paper argues that this is not necessarily the best way to interpret the problem and attempts to provide an alternative unified political-economic model that is more consistent with standard assumptions about voting. This is done by studying what would happen if every possible coalition could form in a wealth distribution game. Among the main findings is that, if the marginal contribution of every individual to production is increasing sufficiently, there is a stable distribution of the product. This may include the egalitarian distribution. If individuals are not so valuable there is no stable distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between office-holder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the office-holder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has an incentive to learn, i.e., raise effort so that performance becomes a more accurate signal of her ability. Elections reduce the learning effect, and the reduction in this effect may more than offset the positive “re-election concerns” effect of elections on effort, implying higher effort with appointment. When this occurs, appointment of officials may welfare-dominate elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of Congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll-call alternatives. The model is applied to the Senate roll-call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators, and to examine the role of a liberal-conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues. In light of the spatial model, the paper argues that "standard" models of roll-call voting are not based on a theory of choice, and hence, that it is difficult to interpret their results. Alternatives to standard models, based on the spatial model, are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue: coal strip-mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the median voter model to include risk aversion. An expected utility maximizing median voter with an aversion to risk may behave differently than a median voter who is certain. A referendum on income redistribution from the top of the distribution to the bottom which fails when the median voter is certain may pass in the extended median voter model. Economic inefficiencies and the net losses accompanying redistribution are shown to play a pivotal role in determining the behavior of the risk averse median voter. The model is illustrated using a one percent Demogrant redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another - embodying respectively, "memory" and "foresight." We also show how to develop the idea of a "sophisticated agenda," one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to Duverger's Law, there exist multi-party systems in conjunction with simple majority single-ballot systems. At least three exceptions exist to this "law". Rae (1971) and Riker (1976; 1982) offer explanations for two of the most prominent exceptions, i.e. Canada and India. I also discuss another exception. Great Britain. In this paper, I use a simple one-dimensional spatial model to show that a multi-party system can be supported under a simple majority single-ballot system. This explanation depends on the way political parties exit the system. If parties decide sequentially whether or not to exit, a multi-party system can not be maintained. If political parties make this decision simultaneously, a multi-party system may be able to sustain itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of preferences for government-supplied goods disregard the fact that in a democratic society, these preferences are revealed by an individual choice: the vote. In this paper this is taken account of in a model, explaining the dynamics in voting behavior in a multi-party system. The model assumes that voters may be categorized into K groups of individuals, pursuing the same interests, who remember how parties do in representing these interests (given the level to which they are held responsible for government policy). The model allows one to estimate party identification, sensitiveness to economic performances, time preference, and relative preferences for public versus private goods, all for each of the groups. Furthermore, the model allows for an estimation of the level to which various parties are held responsible for government policies. An empirical application of the model to the Netherlands is presented, albeit that data restrictions did not allow a distinction of more than one group. The results in terms of significance of the coefficients as well as the interpretation of the original parameters are promising. The two main conclusions are that the relative preference for private versus collective consumption is lower than the existing ratio in the Netherlands, and that two parties forming a government coalition are not held equally responsible for the policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on demand-revealing process, which is a way of making collective decisions. Basic principle of the demand-revealing process; Information on the framework that motivates voters to provide honest statements of the relative values to them of the options under consideration; Explanation of the caveat to the incentive for honest statements.

This paper identifies aspects of Borda's rule that distinguish it from all other strictly monotonic positional scoring rules. Moreover, it demonstrates through most of the characterizations that Borda's rule is closely related in certain respects to Condorcet's simple majority principle. The paper does not attempt to resolve the conflicts between Borda's rule and Condorcet's principle, but it does show that Borda's rule is unique among positional scoring rues in its adherence to certain conditions that might suggest a preference for this rule over other positional scoring rules. We conclude with an informal summary of the results presented in the paper. These results presume at least three candidates in the set A of candidates. Strictly monotonic positional scoring rules are referred to as w rules. 1. The Borda rule is the only w rule that invariably yields all candidates as tied winners whenever the number of voters who prefer candidate x to candidate y equals the number who prefer y to x for all x and y in A. 2. The Borda rule is the only w rule that invariably yields x as a winner under one profile when x is a winner under a second profile and the number of voters who prefer candidate a to candidate b is the same in both profiles, for all a and b in A. (Theorem 1.) 3. When A contains exactly three candidates and w is any non-Borda rule, the number of profiles with Condorcet winners that are also Borda winners exceeds the numbers of profiles with Condorcet winners that are also w rule winners for any sufficiently large set of voters. (Theorem 2.) 4. The Borda rule is the only w rule that guarantees that a Condorcet winner will not be beaten by every other candidate under rule w. (Theorem 4.) 5. The Borda rule is the only w rule that guarantees that a candidate that is beaten by every other candidate under simple majority will not be the unique winner under rule w. (Corollary 1.) 6. A sequential weighted elimination rule invariably yields the Condorcet winner... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no consensus on the properties of voting power indices when there is a large number of voters in a weighted-voting body. On the one hand, in some real-world cases that have been studied the power indices have been found to be nearly proportional to the weights (e.g., the EUCM, US Electoral College); this is true for both the Penrose-Banzhaf and the Shapley-Shubik indices. It has been suggested that this is a manifestation of a conjecture by Penrose (known subsequently as the Penrose limit theorem, that has been shown to hold under certain conditions). On the other hand, we have the older literature from cooperative game theory, due to Shapley and his collaborators, showing that, where there is a finite number of voters whose weights remain constant in relative terms, and where the quota remains constant in relative terms, while the total number of voters increases without limit, the powers of the voters with finite weight tend to limiting values that are, in general, not proportional to the weights. These results, too, are supported by empirical studies of large voting bodies (e.g., the IMF/WB boards, corporate shareholder meetings). This paper proposes a restatement of the Penrose limit theorem and shows that, in general, both the 'classical' power indices converge in the limit to proportionality with weights as the Laakso-Taagepera index of political fragmentation increases. This new version reconciles the different theoretical and empirical results that have been found for large voting bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why fight secession? This paper is a case study on this question, asking why the North chose to fight the South in the American Civil War. It tests a theoretical prediction that economic motivations were important, using county-level presidential election data. If economic interests like manufacturing wished to keep the Union together, they should have generated votes to do so. That prediction is borne out by the data, and explanations other than Northern economic concerns about Southern secession appear unable to explain the results, suggesting that economic motivations were important to support for fighting the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how the incentives of regions to unite and to separate are related to the incentives to provide public goods. Separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of public goods. From a social welfare perspective, there are excessive incentives for separation and for the provision of public goods. When incentives for public good provision are not taken into account, however, these incentives can be misinterpreted as incentives for separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data for the 50 US states for presidential elections from 1972 to 2004 two theories for determining state voting outcomes are considered jointly: the ‘economy matters’ and ‘home grown-ness’ theories. Fixed-effects regressions show that measures of the ‘economy matters’ (real income, unemployment and a proxy for inflation) have the predicted effects on state voting patterns for presidential elections. The home grown theory receives mixed support. There is weak evidence that incumbent-party candidates garner greater support in their home states. There is strong support, however, for the proposition that incumbent-party candidates fare worse in the home state of rival-party candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring the effect of ballot access restrictions on electoral competition is complicated because the stringency of ballot access regulations cannot be treated as being exogenous to candidates’ entry decisions. This paper exploits the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down Ohio’s ballot access law as a natural experiment to overcome the endogeneity problem. The evidence from difference-in-difference estimations suggests that the court’s decision and the accompanying sharp decrease in Ohio’s petition requirements resulted in major parties facing a significant increase in competition from third party and independent candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyze a 3-person voting game in which players sequentially choose amendments to a bill and then vote sophisticatedly on the resulting agenda. This game differs from previous work on endogenous agenda formation in that the number of items on the agenda is not fixed. Players keep making proposals until they can do no better. I find that there is a nonempty set of minimax equilibrium outcomes to the game, and that this set contains the simple von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment protection and unemployment benefits are considered the most prominent insurance devices for workers to protect themselves against the risk of unemployment. It occurs that societies either choose a high level of employment protection relative to unemployment benefits or vice versa. This paper explains where countries locate on this trade-off. It is argued that higher coverage of voters out-of-the labor force with intra household transfers yields a politico-economic equilibrium with relatively high employment protection and relatively low unemployment benefits. Cross country data and survey data on voters’ preferences are presented that corroborate the outcomes of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the common normative assumptions about elections is that competitive elections are inherently good, and non-competitive elections are problematic. This paper challenges that assumption. At the level of individual elections, competitive elections produce either sub-optimal results or trivially optimal results, but competitive elections are never uniquely optimal. In aggregation, competitive elections for a set of offices are inherently sub-optimal. From a procedural perspective, the circumstances in which competitive elections are appropriate are rare, and from a diagnostic perspective, we cannot conclude that there are problems in the electoral system based on a lack of competition. In the context of social choice theory, competitive elections are not inherently good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the welfare consequences of strategic voting under the Borda rule in a comparison of utilitarian efficiencies in simulated voting games under two behavioural assumptions: expected utility-maximising behaviour and sincere behaviour. Utilitarian efficiency is higher in the former than in the latter. Strategic voting increases utilitarian efficiency particularly if the distribution of preference intensities correlates with voter types. The Borda rule is shown to have two advantages: strategic voting is beneficial even if some but not all voter types engage in strategic behaviour, and even if the voters’ information is based on unreliable signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality election would win an ensuing runoff. Statistical models of voter behavior are developed that estimate this probability, which are verified with runoff-election data from United States elections. The models allow governments to make more informed choices in creating rules to decide when to hold runoff elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001 the Italian government introduced a personal income tax reform to be implemented in successive phases. In 2004 taxes were reduced to all income levels with higher gains for low-income and high-income individuals than for middle-income ones. A large debate arised. This paper explores the political economy reasons under this tax reform, mainly the attempt of the government to attract the uncertain voters (swing voters). A probabilistic voting model is introduced to capture the importance of swing voters. The model predicts that the average personal income tax rate tends to be lower for groups of lower income, higher preference for leisure and containing more politically mobile voters (swing voters). However, data from Italian polls show that, while the tax reform was a good strategy to attract swing voters, the specific design of the reform, which favored high-income and low-income individuals, but not the middle class, was not the more appropriate strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group decision making is very significant in a broad variety of settings. This paper deals with committees that make binary decisions and addresses the question of whether informative decisions can be assumed within this framework. We show that when using the optimal decision rule, informative decision making is a Nash equilibrium. Thus we justify the assumption of informative decision making and provide support for the relevance of assumptions such as independent decision making, when using the optimal decision rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the method of power indices to study voting power of members of a legislature that has voting blocs. Our analysis is theoretical, intended to contribute to a theory of positive political science in which social actors are motivated by the pursuit of power as measured by objective power indices. Our starting points are the papers by Riker (Behavioural Science, 1959, “A test of the adequacy of the power index”) and Coleman (American Sociological Review, 1973, “Loss of Power”). We argue against the Shapley–Shubik index and show that anyway the Shapley–Shubik index per head is inappropriate for voting blocs. We apply the Penrose index (the absolute Banzhaf index) to a hypothetical voting body with 100 members. We show how the power indices of individual bloc members can be used to study the implications of the formation of blocs and how voting power varies as bloc size varies. We briefly consider incentives to migrate between blocs. This technique of analysis has many real world applications to legislatures and international bodies. It can be generalised in many ways: our analysis is a priori (assuming formal voting and ignoring actual voting behaviour) but can be made empirical with voting data reflecting behaviour; it examines the consequences of two blocs but can easily be extended to more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political representation in the national assemblies is geographic and elected representatives care about who gains and who loses in their electoral districts. Since legislators are re-election oriented, their chances of electoral success are directly associated with the net benefits delivered to their constituents. In this perspective, geography is not only the basis for political organisation and representation, but also the hallmark of distributive politics. In this context, it is likely that locally elected politicians and party leaders standing in national elections would tend to cooperate in pre-election dates. In this paper we argue that local administrators have an incentive to manipulate local government outlays in connection with national election dates to enhance the re-election prospects of their national party leaders. In particular, given the matching character of national grants with local investment spending, we expect that in pre-election dates local policy-makers would be induced to raise investment outlays beyond their standard growth rate. This would determine inefficient local public spending as a result of the geographically-based system of democratic representation. The case study under our investigation is the behaviour of Italian local policy-makers in connection with national election dates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contrasts voting behavior in multicandidate elections between the proximity and the directional spatial models of electoral competition. Under the traditional proximity spatial model, a voter's utility for a candidate is a declining function of distance between their respective positions. Under the directional spatial model, introduced by Rabinowitz and Macdonald, utility is specified as the scalar product of the vectors representing voter and candidate. The present paper specifies and compares regions of candidate support for the two models and for several voting procedures. The degree to which each model and voting system favors extremist versus centrist candidates is assessed. It is shown that a pure directional model implies that candidates lying in the interior of the convex hull of the other candidates receive no support under the single-vote plurality procedure. A one-parameter family of mixed proximity and directional models may provide more plausible descriptions of voter behavior than either pure model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent papers have established that bicameralism can support a non-empty core in majority voting games in two dimensional policy spaces. We generalise this result to the n-dimensional case, and provide a discussion of multi-cameralism, Bicameralism generates a core of potentially stable equilibria by institutionalising opposition between mutually oriented median voters, this provides a clear link with the standard median voter model and with more traditional analyses of bicameralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with equilibria in multi-party systems, not excluding systems with two parties. The model has a one-dimensional policy space for the positions of parties and voters. Furthermore it assumes an arbitrary continuous density of voters, voters vote for the nearest party. and parties try to maximize the number of votes. Sufficient and necessary conditions for equilibria are given, and from these conditions it is deduced that for systems with a large number of parties equilibria are rare, unless the density of voters is uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we tested the hypothesis that the performance of the economy is a determinant factor in the voter's preferences. The results obtained enable us to corroborate this notion, since the model has a high predictive value, and the behavior of the economy, both in terms of level of activity as well as in its changes, comes up consistently as a determinant factor of voting behavior. These results are also consistent with those obtained through Chilean polls in which it has been ascertained that economic events, particularly in the case of those who favored the anti-Pinochet option NO, were of utmost importance in the voters' decisions. The results also confirm the idea that, in Chile, women tend to give economic issues a lesser weight in their political preferences. An implied additional insight is that voters are relatively sophisticated when it comes to interpreting the available information. The most significant economic variables are that of average unemployment throughout the last three years prior to the election, while the variable associated to changes in unemployment over the last year is of lesser consequence. It follows that voters have a "good memory" and willingly write off economic trends which could be deemed as pre-electionary in nature. This entails that, even though economic variables are a key factor in voter's preferences and electoral results, there is no possibility for governments to manipulate these variables and benefit from opportunistic behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the theory of legislative inefficiency and the role of ideological preferences of legislators. It is shown that inefficiency can be caused by many factors other than legislative ideological behavior. Three major sources are emphasized: cost of voting and policy position information asymmetries across groups of voters and barriers to entry in political competition. Ideological preferences of legislators is not a cause of inefficiency independently. Legislators who care about both policy and winning will give inefficient representation to their constituents only when groups of voters are prevented from participating equally in the legislative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores a mechanism by which special interest groups might be able to affect political outcomes, namely single-issue voting. Political impact of special interest groups; Properties of single-issue voting equilibria in the case where voters are zealots; Model of special interest voting based on economies in information gathering and processing.

This paper compares the theoretical bases of the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices of voting power for a legislature with weighted voting. Definitions based on probabilistic-voting assumptions, useful both as behavioral descriptions and for computation in empirical applications, are compared in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions on the choice of voting probabilities. It is shown that the Shapley-Shubik index requires stronger conditions than the Banzhaf index: the former that voting probabilities be chosen by all players from a common uniform distribution on the unit interval, the latter only that voting probabilities be selected independently from any set of distributions (on the unit interval) which have a common mean of 1/2. This result has a bearing on the theoretical criteria by which one may choose between the two indices in a voting context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relative performance between representative and direct democracies in a local government. Assumptions on the identity of consumer-voters in the metropolitan area; Arguments presented using the median-voter model; Views on the use of the allocative efficiency in the local public sector to test the relative efficiency of representative and direct democracy.

A model is presented of an open-voting public choice process that features pressure groups vying for society's support. Individuals choose what policy to advocate on the basis of their private preferences, which are those they would express in a secret ballot; endogenous social pressures; and the utility they gain from integrity. They falsify their preferences when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. An implication is that a policy advocated by few people in private might receive strong public support. The paper goes on to explore why secret voting, which eliminates this possibility, might not be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a graphical model to explain the relationship between majority voting and government growth in the U.S. Total government expenditure and GNP from 1929 to 1982; Assumption that government sets agendas to maximize expenditure; Numerical example of migration between two jurisdictions.

In many elections, individuals are given two alternatives and are asked to indicate which of the two they prefer. These votes are then tabulated using one person/one vote and the alternative with the most votes becomes the public choice. Can we improve upon this system? If we change the election system and gel more information on voter preference intensities, there are a number of better systems: demand revelation schemes, logrolling, Borda Voting etc. But suppose we can't change the way in which voters cast their ballots; suppose we are only allowed to change the way in which votes are tabulated, ls there a better system? Generally there is one extra bit of information -- usually considered incidental -- which comes with an individual's vote: his voting address. But voting address tells us something about the interest groups to which the individual may belong. As this paper shows, we can use this information to devise a better way of tabulating votes. This new system generally gives individuals from moderately cohesive voting regions more voting weight than individuals from either mildly cohesive or highly cohesive voting regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]