Vote Maximization Research Articles

The Interplay of Ideology and Advice in Economic Policy-Making: The Case of Political Business Cycles

Political business cycle models propose an attractive rationale for presidents to manipulate the economy: it is a way to win votes. But there is little empirical support for the hypothesis. The problem with positing that vote maximization leads to political business cycles is clear: the incentive is universal; the facilitating economic and political conditions occur frequently; but the outcome occurs seldom. Why is it that only some presidents respond to the incentive only some of the time? What features of an administration might help us explain or predict the occurrence of such cycles? The issues here are not limited to economic policy-making: they raise questions about goal-setting and policy coordination. Focusing on economic policy helps to structure observations within an important but bounded context. This paper focuses on two critical aspects of economic policy-making: the president's economic ideology summarizes the administration's goals; the organization of economic advice provides a means through which they might be sought. The empirical section concentrates on economic policy-making in the two post-war administrations most in need of explanation: the Eisenhower years, when there were opportunities but no electoral cycles; and the Nixon administration, the most egregious instance of the political business cycle genre. The concluding section elaborates the classification and tentatively maps other administrations into the model.

Bureaucratic corruption as a constraint on voter choice

This paper has attempted to explain variations among countries in the tax level, in the importance of progressive taxes and transfers, and in the after-tax share of middle-income groups. Particular attention was paid to the declines in each of these variables which are observable in cross-section data in the intermediate ranges of development. It was argued that these phenomena are difficult to explain by variations in the demand for public spending or in the degree of tax evasion. The hypothesis set out in this paper was that these nonlinearities are a result of the inability of elected representatives to observe taxable activities at certain levels of income. The result is a loss of potential tax revenues through bribes to officials. Such bribes, it was suggested, are most likely in the income brackets where total income is increasing rapidly in developing countries. A theoretical model based on expected vote maximization by political candidates indicated that voter-taxpayers will be unwilling to make up the short fall by additional taxes. To the extent that the problem of observing taxable activities is more serious for direct than for indirect taxes, direct tax revenues should fail to keep pace with total income in the early stages of development. The presence of supply-side constraints on the capacity of the fiscal system to generate direct-tax revenues was tested by means of a simultaneous-equation model. Since in practice transfer payments or negative taxes form an important part of the direct tax system, it was necessary to include them in the empirical analysis. It was decided to define an unobservable variable, the overall fiscal structure, which reflects the effects of both tax structure and transfer payments. Use of the LISREL technique allowed this new variable to be treated as a latent variable in statistical estimation. The results indicated that overall fiscal structure varied in nonlinear fashion with the logarithm of per-capita income, as the theoretical model predicted. This variable was found in turn to be a significant determinant of the level of taxes and the distribution of after-tax income. Little evidence was found of feedback from these other variables to the overall fiscal structure. These findings were interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that voter choices may be constrained by the revenue-generating capacity of the fiscal system if a significant portion of taxable activities is not easily observable.

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.

Vote maximization by international predation

Vote maximization by international predation

Optimal Electoral Strategies for Socialist Parties

A strategic dilemma confronts social democratic parties in postindustrial politics: whether to depend on the working class or on the middle class for electoral support. If a social democratic party becomes more heterogeneous (argue working-class strategists) or more homogeneous (argue the middle-class strategists) in class support, then it will also become more electorally successful. The controversy is addressed in two ways. First, a formal model of vote maximization offers a more complete explication of the strategic tradeoffs confronting party leaders than is offered by either the working-class or the middle-class strategists. Second, the alternative electoral strategies are also probed using aggregated survey data on social class and party fortunes. Data come from 41 elections in the postwar era contested by five social democratic parties. Findings come from regressing the total, working-class, and middle-class votes for each party on (lagged) Rose and Urwin's indexes of social cohesion of party alignments and on (lagged) Alford's indexes of class voting. Analytical results and empirical findings are interpreted in terms of their implications for party leaders.

Plurality Maximization vs Vote Maximization Reconsidered

Plurality Maximization vs Vote Maximization Reconsidered

Challenges and Responses in British Party Politics

This paper addresses the question of why parties decline in electoral support and examines particularly the recent dealignment in Great Britain. The general theme is that dealignment depends on the nature of the demands placed upon the parties by the electorate and the response of the parties to those demands, An analysis of the key issues of the sixties and seventies shows that there were changes in the agenda of British politics, particularly in the form of increasingly salient economic problems and the emergence of several cross-cutting issues like immigration and devolution. It is argued that to some extent the intrinsic complexity of these issues and the demands they placed upon the parties should be blamed for the dealignment of support from the major parties during this period. At the same time, there is evidence that the response of the parties to these problems also contributed to their current predicament both in the sense that self-interested vote maximization led to voter alienation and that the institutionalization of support made adaptation and change more difficult.

Plurality Maximization vs Vote Maximization: A Spatial Analysis with Variable Participation

Spatial models of party competition constitute a recent and incrementally developing literature which seeks to explore the relationships between citizens' decisions and candidates' strategies. Despite the mathematical and deductive rigor of this approach, it is only now that political scientists can begin to see the incorporation of those considerations which less formal analyses identify as salient, and perhaps crucial, features of election contests.One such consideration concerns the candidates' objectives. Specifically, spatial analysis often confuses the distinction between candidates who maximize votes and candidates who maximize plurality. Downs and Garvey, for example, assume explicitly that candidates maximize votes, though plurality maximization is clearly the assumption which Garvey actually employs, while Downs frequently assumes that vote maximization, plurality maximization, and the goal of winning are equivalent. Downs, nevertheless, attempts to disentangle these objectives, observing that plurality maximization is the appropriate objective for candidates in a single-member district, while vote maximization is appropriate in proportional representation systems with many parties. All subsequent spatial analysis research, however, assumes either implicitly or explicitly that candidates maximize plurality. If Downs is correct, therefore, this research may not be relevant for a general understanding of electoral competition in diverse constitutional or historical circumstances. The question then is whether those strategies that maximize votes differ from those strategies that maximize plurality.