Weingast B.R., Wittman D. The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
22 introduction: the reach of political economy
diverse preferences. Countries also need an effective military apparatus to protect
their wealth from predation by other countries. Success in these endeavors may lead
to immigration and geographical expansion, while failure to meet these goals may
lead to extensive emigration or break-up of a country (see Wittman 2000).
Bolton and Roland (1997) consider another modification of the model. Until now
we have assumed that the citizens are similar in all respects except for their preference
for public policy, which has been given exogenously. Suppose instead that individuals
differ in productivity and income, which determines their preference for redistrib-
utive public policy. Suppose further that there are two sections of the country and
that each section votes by majority rule. Then two sections of a country may separate
because of significant productivity differences. All of this is reflective of Tiebout’s
(1956) argument that jurisdictions specialize to reflect the preferences and wealth of
their constituents.
26
To summarize, political economy is making use of its basic tools to investigate an
ever deepening set of questions. Ultimately, fewer institutions are treated as being
exogenously determined and more institutions, including the nation state, are treated
as variables to be explained. In this way, anthropology and history become part of
political economy.
We conclude this section on pushing the envelope with a final observation. As
the topics in this Handbook illustrate, the bulk of political economy research has
focused on institutions and behavior within advanced industrial democracies. In
these settings, the formal institutions of courts, legislatures, executives, bureaucracy,
and elections can all be taken as given. Hundreds, if not thousands of papers have
been written on these topics. Not surprisingly, the most progress has been made in
these areas.
In contrast, political economy work that studies phenomena in countries outside of
the advanced industrial democracies has made far less progress. Nevertheless, there
are a number of exciting developments. We briefly mention a few areas of nascent
research (posed as questions) that are likely to blossom in the future and that we
cover in the Handbook:
r
What do authoritarians maximize and why do they make the decisions they do?
In past, many scholars assumed that they maximize their share of rents (e.g.
North 1981,ch.3;Olson2001). Yet this approach remains inadequate because it
takes as given that the authoritarian remains in power, something deeply prob-
lematic (as Tullock 1987 observed). Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003;seeBueno
de Mesquita, this volume, for a summary) provide a new approach arguing
that authoritarians maximize their likelihood of staying in power. Haber (this
volume) provides a program for future research on this topic.
r
Why does democracy survive in some countries but not others? Przeworski (this
volume) argues against some common answers and suggests that per capita
wealth is an important reason.
²⁶ For an extensive discussion of the Tiebout hypothesis, see Wildasin (this volume). For ethnic
causes of division, see Fearon (this volume).
barry r. weingast & donald a. wittman 23
r
And while we are on the subject of democracy, what is the relationship between
democracy and capitalism? Iverson (this volume) surveys various political econ-
omy models that try to answer this question.
r
Why do so many countries remain poor? And why did a handful of countries in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries manage to rise well above the rest of the
world? Here too we have important new political economy models that seek to
answer these questions (see, for example Acemoglu and Robinson, this volume;
and Bates, this volume).
r
What are the sources and circumstances of ethnic coalitions and violence? Fearon
(this volume) provides an overview of the political economy approach and an
agenda for future research.
In short, the extension of political economy methods beyond the advanced indus-
trial nations is rapidly developing, and this Handbook provides overviews that can
serve as building blocks for further research.
5 The Intellectual Arms Race
.............................................................................
Although we have characterized political economy as a set of agreed-upon method-
ological approaches, the set is quite large; different models and empirical studies
frequently come to quite opposing conclusions. Scholarly works tend to play off each
other so that there is an ever-increasing level of sophistication. Thus, while we have
characterized political economy as a synthesis of fields, the synthesis will nonetheless
provide sparks and an exciting research agenda for decades to come.
References
Alchian,A.1950. Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory. Journal of Political Economy,
58: 211–21.
Alesina,A.,andSpolaore,E.2003. The Size of Nations. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Baron,D.P.1994. Electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters. American
Political Science Review, 88: 33–47.
Ben-Zion,U.,andEytan,Z.1974. On money, votes and policy in a democratic society. Public
Choice, 17: 1–10.
Bolton,P.,andRoland,G.1997. The breakup of nations: a political economy analysis.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112: 1057–89.
Boyd,R.,Gintis,H.,Bowles,S.,andRicherson,P.J.2003. Evolution of altruistic punish-
ment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100: 3531–5.
Buchanan,J.,andTullock,G.1962. Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
24 introduction: the reach of political economy
Bueno de Mesquita,B.,Smith,A.,Siverson,R.M.,andMorrow,J.D.2003. The Logic of
Political Survival. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Calvert,R.L.1985. The value of biased information: a rational choice model of political
advice. Journal of Politics, 47: 530–55.
1995. Rational actors, equilibrium, and social institutions. In Explaining Social Institu-
tions, ed. J. Knight and I. Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cargill,T.F.andHutchison,M.1991. Political business cycles with endogenous election
timing: evidence from Japan. Review of Economics and Statistics, 73: 733–9.
Coate,S.2004. Pareto-improving campaign finance policy. American Economic Review, 94:
628–5.
Cox,G.W.,andMcCubbins,M.D.1993. Legislative Leviathan. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
2005. Setting the agenda. Manuscript, Dept. of Political Science, UCSD.
Denzau,A.T.,andMackay,R.J.1983. Gatekeeping and monopoly power of committees: an
analysis of sincere and sophisticated behavior. American Journal of Political Science, 27: 740–
61.
Downs,A.1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.
Feddersen,T.,andPesendorfer,W.1996. The swing voter’s curse. American Economic
Review, 86: 408–24.
1999. Abstentions in elections with asymmetric information and diverse prefer-
ences. American Political Science Review, 69: 381–98.
Fenno,R.F.1966. Power of the Purse. Boston: Little, Brown.
1973. Congressmen in Committees. Boston: Little, Brown.
Ferejohn,J.,andShipan,C.1990. Congressional influence on bureaucracy. Journal of Law,
Economics, and Organization, 6: 1–20.
Friedman,Daniel,andSingh,N.2000. Negative reciprocity: the coevolution of memes and
genes. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25: 155–73.
2005. Equilibrium vengeance. Working paper, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Friedman,David 1977. A theory of the size and shape of nations. Journal of Political Economy,
85: 59–77.
Gilligan,T.,andKrehbiel,K.1989. Asymmetric information and legislative rules with a
heterogeneous committee. American Journal of Political Science, 33: 459–90.
1995. The gains from exchange hypothesis of legislative organization. In Positive
Theories of Congressional Institutions, ed. K. A. Shepsle and B. R. Weingast. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Gintis,H.,Bowles,S.,Boyd,R.,andFehr,E.2005. Moral Sentiments and Material Interests:
On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Groseclose,T.,andSnyder,J.2001. Estimating party influence on congressional roll call
voting: regression coefficients vs. classification success. American Political Science Review,
95: 689–98.
Grossman,G.M.,andHelpman,E.1996. Electoral competition and special interest politics.
Review of Economic Studies, 63: 265–86.
Hirshleifer,J.2001. On the emotions as guarantors of threats and promises. In J. Hirshleifer,
The Dark Side of the Force. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krehbiel,K.1991. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press.
1993. Where’s the party? British Journal of Political Science, 23: 235–66.
1998. Pivotal Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
barry r. weingast & donald a. wittman 25
and Shepsle,K.A.1996. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in
Parliamentary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Breton,M.,andWeber,S.2003. The art of making everybody happy: how to prevent a
secession. IMF Staff Papers, 50: 403–35.
McKelvey,R.,andOrdeshook,P.1986. Information, electoral equilibria, and the democratic
ideal. Journal of Politics, 48: 909–37.
Marks,B.A.1988. A model of judicial influence on congressional policymaking: Grove City
College v. Bell.WorkingPaper88–7, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Mayhew,D.1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
North,D.C.1981. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
2005. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Olson,M.2001. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships.
New York: Basic Books.
Prat,A.2002. Campaign advertising and voter welfare. Review of Economic Studies, 69: 997–
1017.
Shepsle,K.A.1978. Giant Jigsaw Puzzle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
and Weingast,B.R.1981. Structure-induced equilibrium and legislative choice. Public
Choice, 37: 503–19.
1995. Introduction. In Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions, ed. K. A.
Shepsle and B. R. Weingast. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Smith,A.2003. Election timing in majoritarian parliaments. British Journal of Political Science,
33: 397–418.
2004. Election Timing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tiebout,C.1956. The pure theory of local expenditures. Journal of Political Economy, 64:
16–24.
Tullock,G.1987. Autocracy. Hingham, Mass.: Kluwer Academic.
Weingast,B.R.2002. Rational choice institutionalism. In Political Science: State of the Disci-
pline, ed. I. Katznelson and H. Milnor. New York: Norton.
and Marshall,W.J.1988. The industrial organization of Congress: why legislatures, like
firms, are not organized as markets. Journal of Political Economy, 96: 132–63.
Wittman,D.1989. Why democracies produce efficient results. Journal of Political Economy,
97: 1395–424.
1995. The Myth of Democratic Failure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2000. The wealth and size of nations. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44: 885–95.
2005. Pressure groups and political advertising: how uninformed voters can use strategic
rules of thumb. Working paper, Dept. of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz.
forthcoming. Candidate quality, pressure group endorsements, and the nature of politi-
cal advertising. European Journal of Political Economy.
part ii
..............................................................
VOTERS,
CANDIDATES,
AND PRESSURE
GROUPS
..............................................................
chapter 2
..............................................................
VOTERS,
CANDIDATES, AND
PARTIES
..............................................................
stephen ansolabehere
Fifty years ago, Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy laid the founda-
tions for what has become the modern political economy theory of elections. Downs
presents a simple model of the motivations of voters, candidates, and parties. He
begins where classical democratic theory begins—with the assumption that people
seek their self-interest in politics. In a society where individuals rationally pursue their
self-interest, who wins in democratic elections and what policies will government
follow?
Voters, in Downs’s treatment, are concerned about the policies that the govern-
ment will implement. Policy choices involve trade-offs which can be represented as
a single dimension, such as more or less restrictive money supply, or more or less
government spending. Each voter has spatial preferences over the issue, characterized
by a policy that the individual most prefers, deviations from which lead to less good
outcomes for that voter.
For their part, politicians seek to win office, and parties, which are treated as teams
of politicians, seek to win control of the government. Electoral politics consists of
the policy promises that candidates and parties offer to implement if elected. Voters
choose the candidate closest to their ideal policy.
From this model come a set of predictions about the behavior of voters, candi-
dates, and parties that have organized contemporary political economy and political
science more broadly. The core prediction holds that competition for office will lead
candidates and parties to represent the public policies that most strongly appeal to
the median voter.
30 voters, candidates, and parties
The spatial theory of voting has proven extremely successful. Any issue that can
be characterized as involving conflicting beliefs or preferences among voters may be
viewed through the lens of the spatial model. As a result, the framework has been
widely used to describe the general ideological clash between political parties or social
classes and the politics of social issues, such as abortion and race relations.
1
The analytical simplicity of the approach has paved the way for wide application
to the operation of governments. Legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies
make collective decisions under majority rule and super-majority rule, and executives
also have a “vote” in the making of laws, such as the power to make proposals in
parliaments and veto power in the USA. The logic behind the median voter result
emerges throughout the extensive literature that characterizes the politics of group
decision-making along a spatial or ideological dimension. Indeed, theorists often
characterize an electorate or committee with just the ideal policy of the median
voter.
2
The political economy approach has also revolutionized the methodology of po-
litical science. At the time An Economic Theory of Democracy was written, political
science was dominated by behavioralism, which draws heavily on social psychology.
Strong correlations, such as between partisan identification and voter preference
or between education and political participation, are often taken as basic, behav-
ioral relationships. But the application of economic reasoning and of game theory
to politics changed the way scholars think about the basic correlations in aggre-
gate electoral and survey data. The behavior we observe, such as election results
and the policies parties pursue, reflects the equilibrium among competing candi-
dates and voters, as well as basic behavioral or structural relationships. Although
the psychology of the spatial model is quite spare, it offers a powerful approach
to the study of political strategy and the forces that shape collective decision-
making.
The wide adoption of the economic methodology to the study of elections, how-
ever, should not lead us to believe that the spatial framework provides a complete or
even consistent characterization of electoral politics. The theory is, in many respects,
a work in progress, and its development has proceeded in response to critiques of
the consistency of the theory and empirical failings of its predictions. Four lines of
criticism have been particularly important, and I will organize my discussion around
these.
First, the assumption that individuals maximize their self-interest in politics im-
mediately leads to two paradoxes—rational non-participation and rational igno-
rance. If an individual did not vote, the results of a national election would differ
imperceptibly. The marginal benefits to voting and of becoming informed so as to
¹ Page and Shapiro 1992 offer a critical examination of the spatial model applied to survey data in the
United States. Russell Dalton 2002 provides an extensive analysis of public opinion, voting, and
representation in advanced industrial economies.
² See, for example, Krehbiel 1998. The models analyzed there represent the committees and the entire
legislature with just the median (or other pivotal player) of those bodies.
stephen ansolabehere 31
make the correct decision, therefore, must be extremely small, much smaller than the
inconvenience of voting and of learning about public affairs.
Second, the spatial characterization of preferences does not capture many aspects
of the electoral decision that are of paramount importance. Voters value performance
as much as policy. On many questions people do not disagree about policy. Rather,
they want the government to produce better outcomes, regardless of the policy.
Indeed, the abilities of politicians to lead and to govern may be more important than
the policies promised.
Third, the central prediction of the spatial theory, the median voter theorem, does
not hold. Candidates and parties generally do not converge on the median voter’s
ideal policy. This problem has been perhaps the most fruitful for the development of
a more robust economic theory of elections.
Fourth, people are assumed to be fully informed about the candidates and issues
of the day, yet nearly a century of public opinion research has shown the striking
lack of information about public affairs and electoral choices. Voters may want to
find the best possible candidate or party, but they are only rational to the extent to
which they understand the choices. How do voters steer through the maze of claims
and counter-claims in contemporary campaigns? And, at the end of the campaign,
are voters sufficiently informed to cast a vote consistent with their own interests or
beliefs about what is right?
In the pages that follow, I will discuss the response to each of these four problems.
While I will organize the discussion around the problems themselves, one overarching
theme deserves emphasis. In thinking about these puzzles and problems, the con-
temporary economic theory of democracy has moved away from the individualism
embodied in traditional democratic theory, such as that of John Locke and James
Madison, and has moved much closer to sociology and psychology.
The assumption of narrow self-interest or maximizing private benefits, such as
income, has slowly leached out of the economic theory of democracy. In its place,
contemporary theorists assign voters generic spatial preferences and put aside the
question of why people vote. Voters have beliefs about what is best for them or
society and they act accordingly. Involvement in politics has become a “consumption”
benefit, rather than a pecuniary one.
Political economists have also come to recognize that individuals do not act alone
in the political sphere. Groups, especially political parties, structure the choices in
elections. Party identification and party labels, social psychologists have long told
us, provide the information for vote choice.
3
Parties also determine how we assess
performance of the government and how candidates are selected to run for office,
and they even determine what is left and right in politics.
The challenge facing contemporary political economists is to understand the im-
plications of moving away from an individualistic and narrowly self-interested model
of the voter. Why are parties essential to democracy? Why do people perceive politics
in terms of ideology? Such questions, of course, lie at the heart of political science
³ This is spelled out most clearly in Campbell et al. 1960.