Editors’ Introduction to JTP issue 31.1
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629818820950 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Author | Torun Dewan,John W Patty |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(1) 3–5
ÓThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629818820950
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Editors’ Introduction to JTP
issue 31.1
To r u n D e w a n
London School of Economics& Political Science, London, UK
John W Patty
Emory University,Atlanta, GA, USA
This issue of Journal of Theoretical Politics contains four original articles.
In ‘‘Partisan strength and legislative bargaining,’’ Thomas Choate, John
Weymark, and Alan Wiseman incorporate intra-legislative partisanship into the
workhorse Baron–Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining. Their analysis illus-
trates how partisanship, modeled as a form of differential altruism, can benefit leg-
islators in differential fashions. Specifically, partisanship helps majority party
legislators while hurting other legislators through the increased costliness of bipar-
tisan proposals. Indeed, unless legislators are sufficiently patient, a positive parti-
san bias induces majority party members to never offer bipartisan proposals. In
addition to offering illuminating results in its own right, the model provides a great
starting point for future work on the role of differential intra-legislative motiva-
tions (e.g., copartisanship, common constituencies, competitive career concerns) in
legislative bargaining.
In the second article, ‘‘The superdominance relation, the positional winner, and
more missing links between Borda and Condorcet,’’ Rau´ lPe
´rez-Ferna
´ndez and
Bernard De Baets define three new social choice concepts, the superdominance
relation, the positional winner, and the unsuperdominated set. The motivation
behind the concepts is to illustrate the links between the pairwise, purely ordinal
approach to collective choice advocated by Condorcet and the ‘‘positional’’ method
proposed by Borda. The notion of superdominance is based on a robustness criter-
ion within positional methods. Informally, given a fixed set of voters’ preferences,
one candidate, A, superdominates another, B,ifAwould beat Bunder Borda count
regardless of whether one eliminated any (or all) of the other candidates. The
superdominance relation is acyclic, and therefore always possesses at least one
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