Journal of Theoretical Politics

Publisher:: Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:: 2021-09-06

ISBN:: 0951-6298

Issue Number

Latest documents

(Not) Addressing issues in electoral campaigns
Two candidates competing for election may raise some issues for debate during the electoral campaign, while avoiding others. We present a model in which the decision to introduce an issue, or to reply to the opponent’s position on one that she raised, may change the further list of topics that end up being discussed. Candidates’ strategic decisions are driven by their appraisal of their expected vote share at the end of the campaign. Real phenomena observed during campaigns, like the convergence of the parties to address the same issues, or else their diverging choice on which ones to treat, or the relevance of issue ownership can be explained within our stark basic model. Most importantly, our analysis is based on a novel concept of equilibrium that avoids the (often arbitrary) use of predetermined protocols. This allows us to endogenously predict not only the list of topics that will be touched upon by each candidate, but also the order in which they will be addressed.
Bayesian explanations for persuasion
The central puzzle of persuasion is why a receiver would listen to a sender who they know is trying to change their beliefs or behavior. This article summarizes five approaches to solving this puzzle: (1) some messages are easier to send for those with favorable information (costly signaling), (2) the sender and receiver have common interest, (3) the sender messages are verifiable information, (4) the sender cares about their reputation for competence/honesty, and (5) the sender can commit to a messaging strategy (often called ‘Bayesian Persuasion’). After reviewing these approaches with common notation, I discuss which provide insight into prominent empirical findings on campaigns, partisan media, and lobbying. While models focusing on commitment have rapidly become prominent (if not dominant) in the recent theoretical literature on persuasion in political science and economics, the insights they provide are primarily technical, and are not particularly well-suited to explaining most of these phenomena.
Mowing the grass
Mowing the grass is a cyclical pattern in counterterrorism campaigns where governments attack to destroy terrorist capacity, thereby achieving a period of quiet as groups recover. If groups expect their capacity to be destroyed, why build their capabilities in the first place? I analyze an infinite-horizon dynamic game where a group endogenously builds capacity in the face of potential attacks and capacity is an evolving, persistent variable. The model highlights that terrorist groups and governments have incentives to create strategic uncertainty and thus explains attack cycles without punishment strategies, revenge preferences or imperfect/incomplete information. I calibrate the model to time-series data in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict describing rockets fired from Gaza. The results illustrate a peace-making dilemma: altering the government’s incentives will have comparatively minimal effects on long-term conflict dynamics, whereas changing the terrorists’ incentives to acquire capacity would either increase the frequency of high-capacity terrorism or government attacks.
Electoral inequity
Ideally, a representative democracy awards a genuine vote to each adult. We study this issue in competitive democracies with an election model combining district apportionment and proportional representation. Four classic seat allocation rules, including d’Hondt, are reframed as Dutch auctions, allowing important properties to be easily derived. The pros and cons of these methods are stated in terms of economic inequality; Sainte Laguë’s is shown to best carry the genuine vote ideal, both for elections and for apportionment. We next expound the interplay between these two components in generating an inequitable treatment of voters and develop the scale-free index of inequity best fitted to their concern. We apply it to 40 countries for the apportionment of electoral districts. Lastly, we compute the same inequity index for recent parliamentary elections in 80 countries, finding that the majority system mistreats electors, thus putting a ‘price’ on government stability.
Access to justice in revenue-seeking legal institutions
Legal bias against the poor, and competition from nonstate legal services providers, can both seriously affect state justice provision. But analyses of these factors often fail to incorporate a critical feature of justice systems: states use them for revenue generation. I build a series of formal models to understand how these factors interact. I derive several insights into empirical patterns of bias, competition, access to justice, and legal system viability. First, in poor countries, bias can increase access to justice and legal effectiveness. Second, given competition, poor groups will pay a premium for state-provided justice, while wealthy groups will pay a premium for private dispute resolution. However, losing a poor group to competition is also less costly than losing a wealthy group, and the latter loss can sometimes destroy the viability of the state justice system. These results contribute to our understanding of state capacity and rule of law development.
Slacktivism
Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers a certain quota of signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who choose whether to sign such a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition’s chance of bringing change. The number of citizens is large, while the cost of signing is positive but low. I show that a petition that can bring change succeeds by a strictly positive margin. Hence, a citizen signing the petition is almost surely not pivotal. On the other hand, a petition that cannot bring change still gathers the required number of signatures when citizens are not very well informed, implying a failure of information aggregation.
Electoral inequity
Ideally, a representative democracy awards a genuine vote to each adult. We study this issue in competitive democracies with an election model combining district apportionment and proportional representation. Four classic seat allocation rules, including d’Hondt, are reframed as Dutch auctions, allowing important properties to be easily derived. The pros and cons of these methods are stated in terms of economic inequality; Sainte Laguë’s is shown to best carry the genuine vote ideal, both for elections and for apportionment. We next expound the interplay between these two components in generating an inequitable treatment of voters and develop the scale-free index of inequity best fitted to their concern. We apply it to 40 countries for the apportionment of electoral districts. Lastly, we compute the same inequity index for recent parliamentary elections in 80 countries, finding that the majority system mistreats electors, thus putting a ‘price’ on government stability.
Slacktivism
Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers a certain quota of signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who choose whether to sign such a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition’s chance of bringing change. The number of citizens is large, while the cost of signing is positive but low. I show that a petition that can bring change succeeds by a strictly positive margin. Hence, a citizen signing the petition is almost surely not pivotal. On the other hand, a petition that cannot bring change still gathers the required number of signatures when citizens are not very well informed, implying a failure of information aggregation.
Access to justice in revenue-seeking legal institutions
Legal bias against the poor, and competition from nonstate legal services providers, can both seriously affect state justice provision. But analyses of these factors often fail to incorporate a critical feature of justice systems: states use them for revenue generation. I build a series of formal models to understand how these factors interact. I derive several insights into empirical patterns of bias, competition, access to justice, and legal system viability. First, in poor countries, bias can increase access to justice and legal effectiveness. Second, given competition, poor groups will pay a premium for state-provided justice, while wealthy groups will pay a premium for private dispute resolution. However, losing a poor group to competition is also less costly than losing a wealthy group, and the latter loss can sometimes destroy the viability of the state justice system. These results contribute to our understanding of state capacity and rule of law development.
Generalized medians and electoral competition with valence
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.