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Despite years of crisis, the euro has enjoyed strong popular support across the Eurozone periphery. In light of the high costs of internal devaluation strategies, this begs the question why the public has remained in favor of the common currency. In this article, we propose a theoretical mechanism that accounts for both voters' pocketbook preferences and their sociotropic assessments over the noisy trade-offs associated with the outcomes of euro membership and euro exit. Using original survey data from three consecutive survey waves in Greece (conducted in July, September, and December 2015, respectively), we analyze the attitudes of Greek voters toward the euro in an environment of acute uncertainty, austerity, high unemployment, and economic recession. First, we juxtapose our uncertainty mechanism of popular euro attitudes against other explanations put forward in the literature and find strong support for our argument. Second, we conduct a survey experiment to tap into attitudes toward the euro-austerity trade-off and find that as uncertainty over policy outcomes diminishes, framing effects abate in significance, especially among those who voted No in the July 2015 referendum. Finally, we derive distinct sets of euro preferences for different 'vulnerability profiles'. Over time, as the trade-offs of euro membership become more pronounced, we find a marked fall in euro support between July and December 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to analyze the political economy of military conscription policy and its relationship with a country's external security environment. National security is modeled as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable public good, whose production technology consists of either centrally conscripted or competitively recruited military labor. Conscription is construed as an implicit discretionary tax on citizens' labor endowment. Based on this, I propose a simple political economy model of pure public goods provision financed by two policy instruments: a lump-sum income tax and a conscription tax. Constraint optimization of a quasi-linear utility function gives rise to three general classes of preferences: high- and low-skilled citizens will prefer an all-volunteer army, albeit of different size, whereas medium-skilled citizens will favor positive levels of conscription. These derived preferences allow me to tease out an explicit relationship between military manpower procurement policy, a country's level of external threat, and its pre-tax income inequality levels. One of my key findings is that more egalitarian countries are more likely to use conscription as a military manpower procurement mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-à-vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]