Self-interested Voters Research Articles

Homo moralis goes to the voting booth: Coordination and information aggregation

This paper revisits two classical problems in the theory of voting—viz. the divided majority problem and the strategic revelation of information—in the light of evolutionarily founded partial Kantian morality. It is shown that, compared to electorates consisting of purely self-interested voters, such Kantian morality helps voters solve coordination problems and improves the information aggregation properties of equilibria, even for modest levels of morality.

Homo moralis goes to the voting booth: coordination and information aggregation

This paper revisits two classical problems in the theory of voting-viz. the divided majority problem and the strategic revelation of information by majority vote-in the light of evolutionarily founded partial Kantian morality. It is shown that, compared to electorates consisting of purely self-interested voters, such Kantian morality helps voters solve coordination problems and improves the information aggregation properties of equilibria, even for modest levels of morality.

Brothers or Invaders?: How Crises-Driven Migrants Shape Voting Behavior

Can voter’s negative attitudes toward immigration be explained by self-interest or sociotropic motives? Self-interested voters care about their personal economic circumstances. Sociotropic voters display in-group bias and perceive migrants as threats to their culture. We study the voting effects of forced internal and international migration in Colombia and exploit the disproportionate flows of migrants to municipalities with early settlements of individuals from their origin locations. In line with the sociotropic hypothesis, we find that only international migration inflows increase political participation and shift votes from left- to right-wing ideologies. These results are not accounted for by the observed changes caused by migrants in socioeconomic variables.

Group incentives and rational voting

Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them. In a tournament style analysis, the model characterizes how contingent allocation of prizes based on relative levels of support affects equilibrium voting behavior. In addition to standard notions of pivotality, voters influence the distribution of prizes across groups. Such prize pivotality supports positive voter turnout even in non-competitive electoral settings. The analysis shows that competition for a prize awarded to the most supportive group is only stable when two groups actively support a party. However, competition among groups to avoid punishment is stable in environments with any number of groups. We conclude by examining implications for endogenous group formation and how politicians structure the allocation of rewards and punishments.

Redistribution through social health insurance: evidence on citizen preferences.

The extent of social health insurance (SHI) and supplementary private insurance is frequently analyzed in public choice. Most of these analyses build on the model developed by Gouveia (1997), who defines the extent of SHI as consequence of a choice by self-interested voters. In this model, an indicator reflecting individuals' relative income position and relative risk of falling ill determines the voting decision. Up to now, no empirical evidence for this key assumption has been available. We test the effect of this indicator on individuals' preferences for the extent of SHI in a setting with mandatory SHI that can be supplemented by private insurance. The data is based on a DCE conducted in the field with a representative sample of 1538 German citizens in 2012. Conditional logit and latent class models are used to analyze preference heterogeneity. Our findings strongly support the assumptions of the models. Individuals likely to benefit from public coverage show a positive marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for both a shift away from other beneficiary groups toward the sick and an expansion of publicly financed resources, and the expected net payers have a negative MWTP and prefer lower levels of public coverage.

The Puzzle of Weak Pocketbook Voting

This article investigates why predominantly self-interested voters exhibit weak pocketbook voting. Focusing on the USA, it estimates partisan government’s impact on household income and, based on the Permanent Income Hypothesis, models the conversion of that income into consumption, the source of voters’ utility in the model. The analysis implies that pocketbook voting is weak because anticipated policy is already incorporated in household consumption plans. Sociotropic variables are more powerful because they determine the relative value of partisan policies in the longer term. Using PSID data, estimates of the US parties’ impact on income generate a measure of partisan utility differences. This measure enters into a probit analysis using 1952—2000 ANES presidential election data. The pocketbook measure performs as predicted both independently and in relation to sociotropic variables.

Term Limits and Pork

We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.

Majority Support for Progressive Income Taxation with Corner Preferences

This paper studies voting over quadratic taxation when income is fixed and taxation non distortionary. The set of feasible taxes is compact and self-interested voters have corner preferences. We first show that, if a majority winning tax policy exists, it involves maximum progressivity. We then give a necessary and suficient condition on the income distribution for a majority winner to exist. This condition appears to be satisfied for a large class of distribution functions.

Is there a demand for income tax progressivity?

Recently, Marhuenda and Ortuno-Ortin [Economics Letters 48 (1995) 319] have provided a popular support for progressivity theorem that says that a marginal progressive tax always defeats a marginal regressive tax as long as individuals vote for the tax scheme minimizing their tax liabilities and the median income is less than the mean income. In this paper we provide, under similar circumstances, a popular support for regressivity theorem according to which for any existing tax scheme there is always a majority support for a regressive reform reducing marginal progressivity (or increasing marginal regressivity). This regressive reform is supported by both extremes of the income distribution. Combining this result with Marhuenda and Ortuno-Ortin’s result implies that vote cycling between regressive and progressive tax reform is inevitable and thus that the demand for progressivity cannot be established in the standard Downsian framework with self-interested voters.

Is There a Demand for Income Tax Progressivity?

Recently Marhuenda and Ortuno-Ortin (1995) have provided a popular support for progressivity theorem that says that a marginal progressive tax always defeats a marginal regressive tax as long as individuals vote for the tax scheme minimizing their tax liabilities and the median income is less than the mean income. In this paper we provide, under similar circumstances, a popular support for regressivity theorem according to whichmore marginal regressivity (or less marginal progressivity) can always defeat any existing tax scheme. This move towards more regressivity (or less progressivity) is supported by the extremes of the income distribution. Combining this result with Marhuenda and Ortuno-Ortin result implies that vote cycling is inevitable and that the demand for progressivity cannot be established in the standard Downsian framework with self-interested voters.

A Statistical Analysis of the Effect of State-Level Economic Conditions On the 1992 Presidential Election

Cross-sectional data are used to assess the effect of state-level economic conditions on state outcomes in the 1992 presidential election. The analysis provides evidence on the role of macroeconomic variables in models of national election outcomes and presents simulations to determine whether changes in economic circumstances might have reversed the election's result. It is argued that self-interested voters are more likely to prefer a new president if they are experiencing unemployment or income losses, or if they fear that economic conditions may lead to their own unemployment or inadequate income growth. Altruistic voters may seek a change to improve the economic positions of others. Whether specified as the current unemployment rate or as recent real per capita income growth, states with subpar economic performances are found to have significantly higher voter shares for Clinton. The simulations indicate that reasonable adjustments in state unemploy ment rates do not reverse the election outcome, whereas more rapid personal income growth during the year prior to the election results in a Bush victory.

On the Definition of Tax Neutrality: Distributional and Welfare Implications of Policy Alternatives

The fairness of a tax change is often judged by examining its impact on tax burdens or net incomes of different income classes. Two competing definitions of tax neutrality give surprisingly different and conflicting answers to the fairness question. If the objective is to maximize welfare, the Lorenz dominance principle offers guidance as to how tax neutrality should be defined. In the presence of asymmetric information the different definitions of tax neutrality make it possible for politicians to adopt the definition that favors their constituency and/or serves a particular political agenda. The median voter model is applied to explore the definition of neutrality in a democracy. In general, decisions by rational self-interested voters and politicians may, but do not necessarily, result in the definition that leads to Lorenz dominance.

General interest and redistribution with self-interested voters: Social contract revisited

I provide a rational solution to the lasting paradox that citizens be more concerned with “general interest” than most economic agents. I show who that, in the face of fundamental political uncertainty, the social contract, as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago, provides to self-interested voters an effective mechanism of self-insurance that limits amount of involuntary transfers.

Working Class Communism in Western Europe: Rational or Nonrational

The theories of Communist voting among workers suggested by Lipset and Allardt assume that party choice among working-class Communists is in whole or in part nonrational. These theories are analyzed and compared with a voting model of the Downsian type, which assumes that voting is determined by rational choice on the bases of the relative utility to the worker of the policies that the parties stand for. A review of data pertaining to Lipset's hypothesis that authoritarianism is the variable underlying working class Communism fails to give support for this assumption. Some crucial correlations interpreted by Lipset as supporting his theory are probably spurious and caused by demograhic factors. Data also fail to support Allardt's theory of anomie as the key variable behind emerging Communism. It seems possible to interpret available data on Communist sympathies among workers in Western Europe in terms of a simple model assuming rational, self-interested voters.