Representative Voter Research Articles

Does the winner take it all? Federal policies and political extremism

Whether citizens like or dislike federal policies often depends on regional differences. Because of geography, (economic) history or other path-dependent factors, certain regions are perceived to get more out of the union than others. We show that citizens, therefore, have a strategic incentive to elect Federal delegates that are more extreme than the representative voter. The intensity of such strategic delegation is U-shaped in expected benefits. The predictions of our model hence rationalise the voting differences we observe in the data between national and EU elections.

Why Norway has more female local councillors than Denmark: a crack in the Nordic gender equality model?

The article explores why women are better represented in municipal councils in Norway than in Denmark. This comparative case study offers a most similar systems design, as these two countries are similar on most relevant institutional variables, such as local government systems, electoral systems, party systems and societal gender equality, but they deviate on the dependent variable of women’s representation. Two unique comparative data sets are analysed: representative voter surveys and register data on all candidates (from the 2019 Norwegian and 2017 Danish municipal elections). The study focuses on demand-side explanations and concludes that institutional explanations do not appear relevant. Instead, the parties’ candidate selection matters: Norwegian parties are more concerned with gender balance than their Danish counterparts. Finally, the article discusses why this is the case and asks whether gender equality plays a more prominent role on the societal agenda in Norway than in Denmark.

Do Citizens use Sociodemographic Characteristics as Cues to Infer Candidate Issue Positions?

AbstractIn open‐list proportional representation systems, choosing candidates based on issue proximity can improve policy congruence. However, in practice, voters may not know enough about individual candidates to do so. Hence, we examine whether voters infer individual positions from cues provided on ballots, namely age and residence. Studying the Swiss parliamentary elections of 2019, we focus on environmental policy, both a very salient issue and featuring considerable intra‐party heterogeneity of positions. We combine comprehensive candidate data with a representative voter survey and conduct a survey‐embedded experiment (N = 10,758). We find that citizens have indeed little knowledge of candidate positions. However, ballot cues predict policy differences among candidates within parties only to a limited extent, and the experiment does not suggest that voters use ballot information to predict positions directly. Instead, as suggested by additional analyses, citizens may perceive candidates who resemble their own sociodemographic profile as having positions closer to their own.

Reducing partisanship in judicial elections can improve judge quality: Evidence from U.S. state supreme courts

Should technocratic public officials be selected through politics or by merit? This paper explores how selection procedures influence the quality of selected officials in the context of U.S. state supreme courts for the years 1947–1994. In a unique set of natural experiments, state governments enacted a variety of reforms making judicial elections less partisan and establishing merit-based procedures that delegate selection to experts. We compare post-reform judges to pre-reform judges in their work quality, measured by forward citations to their opinions. In this setting we can hold constant contemporaneous incentives and the portfolio of cases, allowing us to produce causal estimates under an identification assumption of parallel trends in quality by judge starting year. We find that judges selected by nonpartisan processes (nonpartisan elections or technocratic merit commissions) produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections. These results are consistent with a representative voter model in which better technocrats are selected when the process has less partisan bias or better information regarding candidate ability.

An informational role of supermajority rules in monitoring the majority party's activities

There often exists a supermajority rule that enables the minority party to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. I construct a two‐period model consisting of a representative voter, self‐interested parties, and a media outlet. In the model, the majority party has an incentive to misrepresent the voter's optimal policy. I show that the minority party's attempt to block a vote (e.g., a filibuster) can signal this misrepresentation. Interestingly, the key is that the minority party and the mass media are complementary in creating the signal. Overall, the results suggest that supermajority rules could be beneficial even for the majority of voters.

Condorcet domains, median graphs and the single-crossing property

Condorcet domains are sets of linear orders with the property that, whenever the preferences of all voters of a society belong to this set, their majority relation has no cycles. We observe that, without loss of generality, every such domain can be assumed to be closed in the sense that it contains the majority relation of every profile with an odd number of voters whose preferences belong to this domain. We show that every closed Condorcet domain can be endowed with the structure of a median graph and that, conversely, every median graph is associated with a closed Condorcet domain (in general, not uniquely). Condorcet domains that have linear graphs (chains) associated with them are exactly the preference domains with the classical single-crossing property. As a corollary, we obtain that a domain with the so-called ‘representative voter property’ is either a single-crossing domain or a very special domain containing exactly four different preference orders whose associated median graph is a 4-cycle. Maximality of a Condorcet domain imposes additional restrictions on the associated median graph. We prove that among all trees only (some) chains can be associated graphs of maximal Condorcet domains, and we characterize those single-crossing domains which are maximal Condorcet domains. Finally, using the characterization of Nehring and Puppe (J Econ Theory 135:269–305, 2007) of monotone Arrovian aggregation, we show that any closed Condorcet domain admits a rich class of strategy-proof social choice functions.

Dynamic Elections and Ideological Polarization

How does political polarization affect the welfare of the electorate? We analyze this question using a framework in which two policy and office motivated parties compete in an infinite sequence of elections. We propose two novel measures to describe the degree of conflict among agents:antagonismis the disagreement between parties;extremismis the disagreement between each party and the representative voter. These two measures do not coincide when parties care about multiple issues. We show that forward-looking parties have an incentive to implement policies favored by the representative voter, in an attempt to constrain future challengers. This incentive grows as antagonism increases. On the other hand, extremism decreases the electorate’s welfare. We discuss the methodological and empirical implications for the existing measures of political actors’ ideal points and for the debate on elite polarization.

Communicating on electoral platforms

This paper proposes an analysis of strategic communication on platforms by candidates during an electoral campaign. A candidate's platform in a (possibly) multidimensional policy space is fixed, but is imperfectly known by voters. A candidate strategically decides the emphasis he puts on the various issues, and thus the precision of the information he conveys to voters on his position on each issue. We show that if voters are fully rational, then all the relevant information is revealed at equilibrium, whatever the candidate's true position. We then study a model of boundedly rational voters, who take at face value the messages sent by the politicians, without being able to decipher their strategies. If voters are boundedly rational in this sense, a politician will not transmit all the relevant information; his communication strategy will depend on both the prior in the electorate and his true positions (unknown to the electorate). In particular, we show that candidates address all issues with positive probability, but tend to talk more often on issues on which they are a priori congruent with the representative voter, thereby providing a “nuanced” version of Petrocik's “issue ownership theory”.

The hidden cost of raising voters’ expectations: Reference dependence and politicians’ credibility

Two politicians compete to get elected. Each politician is characterized by a valence, which is unobservable to the electorate and can take one of two values: high or low. The representative voter prefers politicians with high valence, but random shocks may lead him to appoint a low-valence politician. Politicians make statements concerning their valence. If the voter is a standard expected utility maximizer, politicians’ statements lack any credibility and no information transmission takes place. By introducing reference dependence and loss aversion, we show that truthful communication is possible in equilibrium and we characterize the conditions under which it can arise. Intuitively, these behavioral biases introduce a cost of overstating one's valence as overstatements may shift the electorate's preferences toward better skilled opponents.

The voter’s blunt tool

When do voters win? We derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests in a setting where politicians can be influenced by contributions from special interests, and are also motivated by electoral incentives. We show that increasing office holding benefits, increasing political competition, decreasing potential rents to special interests, and increasing the salience of policy imply improved policies for the representative voter. We examine panel data on the ratio of taxes paid by individuals relative to corporations in the United States and show that it is negatively correlated with political competition, office holding benefits, and policy salience, as predicted by the model.

Lexicographic Voting: Holding Parties Accountable in the Presence of Downsian Competition

Abstract This paper combines ideas from models of electoral competition with forward-looking voters and models of electoral competition with backward-looking voters. Two political parties can commit in advance to policy platforms, but not to a maximum level of rent extraction. In the case without uncertainty, the electorate can limit rents to the same extent as in a purely backward-looking model of accountability, and the policy preferred by the voter who represents the median preferences of the electorate is implemented. In the case with uncertainty about the bliss point of the representative voter, the electorate has to accept higher rent seeking by the incumbent politician, but nonetheless retains some control over rent extraction. The policy positions of the two competing parties do not converge as they do in the case without uncertainty. I show in an example that this nonconvergence can increase the welfare of the representative voter.

Securely implementable social choice rules with partially honest agents

We study a social choice model with partially honest agents, and we show that strategy-proofness is a necessary and sufficient condition to achieve secure implementation. This result provides a behavioral foundation for the rectangularity property; and it offers as a by-product a revelation principle for secure implementation with partial honesty. We apply the implementation concept to a single-crossing voting environment, and we prove that it characterizes, in combination with unanimity, the family of augmented representative voter schemes.

Binary Aggregation by Selection of the Most Representative Voters

In binary aggregation, each member of a group expresses yes/no choices regarding several correlated issues and we need to decide on a collective choice that accurately reflects the views of the group. A good collective choice will minimise the distance to each of the individual choices, but using such a distance-based aggregation rule is computationally intractable. Instead, we explore a class of low-complexity aggregation rules that select the most representative voter in any given situation and return that voter's choice as the outcome.

Representative democracy and policy-making in the administrative state: is agency policy-making necessarily better?

AbstractThis study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representative democracy. This study allows for incomplete information, as well as solving for the comparative static conditions pertaining to the extent that a politician's policy-making venue choices mirror those preferred by a representative voter. The comparative static results highlight when a politician (1) chooses the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (ActiveorPassive Political Responsiveness); (2) is able to choose freely either policy-making venue without committing agency loss (Political Discretion); and (3) willing to deviate from the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (Political Shirking). In contrast to the study by Spence, this study analytically demonstrates that one cannot infer that the benefits accrued from agency policy-making will necessarily exceed those from electoral institutions.

Candidates, Credibility, and Re-Election Incentives

I analyze a model of repeated elections in which a representative voter selects among candidates with known policy preferences in each period. In addition to having preferences over policy, the elected candidate would like to use their position to secure rents at the voter's expense. I restrict attention to equilibria which are consistent with retrospective voting in which the candidates' strategies are stationary. I consider the policies different candidates would implement and the amount of rent-seeking they would engage in if elected, and, consequently, which candidates will be elected by the voter. I show that, when utilities are concave over policy choices, the voter will not want to delegate to candidates who share their policy-preferences. The voter is better off delegating to candidates with preferences on opposite sides of their own, and using these candidates to discipline each other. The resulting policy divergence decreases the amount of rent-seeking by elected candidates, resulting in a better outcome for the voter. I show that the best equilibrium, from the voter's perspective, involves two candidates, symmetric about the median, who are elected at some history of the equilibrium. The policies the candidates pursue in office do not converge but are more moderate than the candidates' own preferences.

Candidates, Credibility, and Re-election Incentives

I study elections between citizen-candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office, but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re-election. In each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences. The elected candidate chooses the policy to implement, and how much rent-seeking to engage in, when in office. As the voter decides both which candidate to elect and, subsequently, whether the candidate is retained, this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability. I show that, in the best stationary equilibrium, when utility functions are concave over policy, non-median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter. In this equilibrium, there are two candidates who are elected at some history, and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge. This divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent-seeking, increasing voter welfare.

Bad Apples: Political Paralysis and the Quality of Politicians

Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a 'good' incumbent with preferences identical to those of a representative voter will want to keep corrupt politicians out of office; she may do so by distorting her policy choices to signal her type and win re-election. The value of signalling and staying in office increases with the fraction of corrupt types in the population of politicians. Electing good types may therefore not be enough to ensure that the best policies are implemented, especially when corrupt politicians are common. This provides a new explanation for why political failure is particularly severe in corrupt democracies.

Bad Apples: Political Paralysis and the Quality of Politicians

AbstractWhy do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new and intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing for office. The key insight is that a “good” incumbent with preferences identical to those of a representative voter will want to keep rent‐seeking politicians out of office; he may do so by distorting his policy choices to signal his type and win reelection. The value of signaling and staying in office increases with the fraction of rent‐seeking types in the population of politicians. Electing good types may therefore not be enough to ensure that the best policies are implemented, especially when rent seeking is widespread. This provides a new explanation for why political failure is particularly severe in corrupt democracies.

The Voter's Blunt Tool

When do voters win? In this paper we derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests. We show that increasing political competition, increasing office holding benefits, decreasing potential rents to firms and increasing the salience of policy implies improved policies for the representative voter. We also find a positive interaction between the effect of political competition and office holding benefits. Panel data from the United States supports the model’s predictions. The ratio of taxes paid by individuals relative to corporations is decreasing with governor salary (a proxy for office holding benefits), protest activity (a proxy for policy salience), and political competition. Additionally, minimum wages are increasing with governor salary, protest activity, and political competition.

Asymmetric Single-peaked Preferences

The asymmetry of single-peaked preferences has scarcely been incorporated as an assumption in economic models. We analyze how to deal with asymmetric single-peaked preferences in a tractable way. We define natural types of asymmetries, provide the tools to compare degrees of asymmetry, and propose concrete utility functions that represent different directions and degrees of asymmetry. As an application, we provide a representative voter theorem which establishes the heterogeneity in degrees of asymmetry across agents that is compatible with the median being the representative voter.