Why do voters reject constitutional proposals drafted by conventions they themselves elected? We study a two-stage constitutional process in which voters first elect a legislator to draft a new constitution and subsequently approve or reject it in a referendum. The model highlights how imperfect electoral signals generate asymmetric information between voters and legislators. Its principal novelty lies in reversing the conventional direction of asymmetric information—placing uncertainty on the side of legislators rather than voters. We show that informational distortions are most severe at intermediate levels of voter polarization: when polarization is high, electoral separation allows legislators to infer voter preferences accurately, whereas moderate polarization increases misinterpretation and rejection risk. Moreover, learning from noisy electoral signals can backfire. Legislators who rationally update their beliefs may be less likely to secure approval than those who strategically ignore electoral information. Surprisingly, referenda may fail to improve voter welfare even when all actors prefer reform. These findings offer a new perspective on recent constitutional failures by emphasizing interactions between polarization, information, and strategic learning.
Political economy models of elections study how electoral incentives encourage parties to be responsive to voters. Election results can be informative about how platforms diverge from voter preferences, but the complexity of the environment and cognitive biases may inhibit learning. We develop a repeated model of elections with motivated reasoning and uncertainty about the fairness of the electoral system. A party who wants to believe the electorate is close to their preferences picks more extreme platforms, which in turn causes the other party to be more extreme as well. Motivated beliefs also allow parties to infer from poor results that elections are unfair rather than that their platforms are unpopular. Repeated elections exacerbate this problem: disagreement about the fairness of the electoral system increases over time, even if platform divergence decreases.
This article integrates two strands of game-theoretical literature, one on delegated bargaining and the other on compliance, to explain the failure of the two key military dispute-settlement agreements between Russia and Ukraine. While both strands of literature analyze principal-agent problems, they reach contrasting conclusions about the role of transparency and the public's role in securing agreements and ensuring compliance. We reconcile these perspectives by distinguishing analytically between agreement and compliance efficiency. Although closed-door delegated bargaining can improve the efficiency of reaching an agreement, we demonstrate that the efficiency of compliance hinges crucially on the level of public trust in the delegate. This implies that public mistrust of Ukraine's delegate in the Minsk negotiations undermined compliance with the two Minsk agreements. Nonetheless, our simulation results also show that effective compliance is still attainable: even an agreement with only moderate efficiency can be upheld provided that public trust in the delegate is not too low.
How do public good spillovers influence agent effort in an interconnected environment? We develop a model for a general class of problems in which agents share the provision of a public good and downstream agents experience spillovers. We characterize endogenous agent effort as the result of their location in the network, their responsibility over the resource, and a regulated facility’s location within the jurisdiction. We examine our findings with an empirical exercise centered on the regulation of 6000 major water pollution sources under the U.S. Clean Water Act. We construct a novel dataset of U.S. state water pollution regional offices and use geographic information on agency jurisdictions, watershed boundaries, and elevation-induced streamflow to characterize the propensity for agents to exert detection effort in their local environment. Our empirical results support our expectations.
I formally characterize three objectives of causally-oriented empirical research: identification, explanation, and generalization. I then analyze some logical relationships between them. Loosely, causal identification is measurability of treatment effects from data; causal explanation occurs when a unique theoretical model is consistent with observed data; and causal generalization is application of a causal model from one setting to another. I show that explanation implies identification but not vice versa; that explanation is possible even if no pairwise causal effects are identified for any variables; and that improvement in identification also improves explanation. Causal generalization requires a known mapping of causal models across cases based on the background or contextual characteristics of each case. Necessary conditions to recover this mapping empirically are stringent and require theoretical commitments. Overall the results show a strong connection between theoretical models and causal inference.
Despite expectations that large-scale anti-corruption campaigns would enhance governance, they often lead to bureaucratic inefficiencies and economic decline, as seen in China and Vietnam. This paper examines these purges as a top-down accountability mechanism in authoritarian regimes. Through a game-theoretic model, we demonstrate that systemic corruption traps rulers in a persistent trade-off between social productivity and political stability. Whether rulers incentivize informants, distinguish between ideologically congruent and non-congruent agents, prioritize profit or survival, or base purges on corruption or performance, the core dilemma remains-and often becomes more intricate. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of mass purges as a sustainable governance strategy.
Election boycotts are puzzling phenomena because they appear to only confirm government victory. Although opposition parties in authoritarian regimes frequently resort to boycotts, few studies have systematically examined the motivations underlying this behaviour. To understand the incentives and conditions enabling such seemingly self-defeating behaviour, this article develops a formal model of government-opposition interaction under authoritarianism. The analysis shows that, from the perspective of resource conservation, election boycotts serve two critical functions. First, they can induce the government to act in ways desired by the opposition. In some cases, opposition parties boycott elections to deter an autocratic government from cancelling subsequent elections. Conserving resources through election boycotts strengthens their capacity to threaten the government if cancellation occurs. Second, boycotts allow opposition parties to carry over resources to overcome entry barriers that would otherwise be insurmountable. These findings contribute to the literature on democratisation by elections by clarifying the factors that sustain autocratic governments' commitment to holding elections and those that shape opposition parties' strategic participation.
We study the incentives for writing dissenting opinions that try to shape the law. We model the interaction between a minority and majority in a collegial court setting. Dissenting judges calculate how much effort to put into a dissenting opinion with an expectation that their work can probabilistically affect how the law is applied in the future. That calculus can influence how a majority opinion author writes an opinion and the dynamics of collegial decision-making and coalition formation. We evaluate comparative statics about the content of opinions and the conditions under which dissenting opinions should emerge from collective choice. The results help rationalize both differences in dissenting behavior across levels of the judicial hierarchy and how separate opinion-writing shapes the extremity of judicial opinions.
In electoral competitions, political parties attempt to address key political issues, such as economic distribution problems and social issues (e.g., abortion and same-sex marriage). What factors prompt political parties to choose which issues to emphasize, and how does the strategy interact with their policy platforms? To answer this question, I develop an issue selection model between liberal and conservative parties with fixed social ideological positions and explore how issue selection strategies affect tax proposals. The findings reveal that the polarization of social ideologies motivates both parties to manipulate low-income/conservative voters’ salience weights during the campaign stage. This pattern makes conservative parties emphasize the importance of social issues, while liberal parties emphasize economic distribution problems. Furthermore, in this equilibrium, if social issues are more newsworthy than economic issues, both parties advocate for tax reductions, contributing to an escalation in income inequality.
In parliamentary democracies, voters delegate the power of replacing the chief executive to the more knowledgeable legislators. The logic of costly signaling suggests that this indirect accountability helps voters ensure a competent prime minister (PM). I formally model this indirect executive accountability and show that while the incentive of the legislators in the PM’s party to signal their leader’s competence leads to increased voter welfare through two distinct mechanisms, the PM’s incentive to remain in office can eliminate this welfare effect. Specifically, if we consider that the PM can use their delegated authority and resources to maintain the support of the legislators in the PM’s party, the benefit of indirect executive accountability is in general diminished and may be even eliminated. I also examine how the clarity of the PM’s responsibility affects voter welfare and highlight that greater clarity is not always good for voters.
We develop a game-theoretic model of two-candidate elections in which voters are concerned with the consistency of candidates’ political positions as well as their valence characteristics unrelated to policy positions. We examine two versions of the model: One in which candidates aim to maximize their vote shares and the other in which they seek to maximize their probability of winning amid valence uncertainty. In the game with vote motivation, a unique pure-strategy equilibrium exists when the valence asymmetry is not too large. The higher-valence candidate chooses a more centrist platform than the disadvantaged candidate. In the game with win motivation, despite platform divergence due to costs of flip-flopping, both candidates aim for the median voter. Departing from previous research, both games predict that platform divergence is not linked to valence advantage and that a close electoral competition does not equate to platform convergence. Lastly, we investigate how the results carry over to, or change in, more general settings.
Most writers on political science methods seem to suggest that explanation means causal explanation. Certainly, many explanations in the political sciences are causal. However, natural science often provides non-causal explanations, while non-causal explanations are recognized by philosophers of science. Causal inference, in itself, is not a causal explanation; it explains alongside theory. In this paper, we defend explanatory pluralism, arguing that many important explanations in political science are not causal in nature. We identify two important types of non-causal explanation - constitutive explanation (CE) and explanation by constraint (EC) - providing examples from the political sciences literature. We conclude by outlining what we believe non-causal explanation can contribute to political science.
The strategies of centralization and politicization have long served as a foundation for presidential influence over federal policymaking. However, most previous work has studied these strategies informally and/or in isolation. This article employs formal models of both centralization and politicization to explore the trade-offs presidents face when deciding how to create and influence policy. The models present several unique findings. First, contrary to existing literature, the president's ideal level of politicization is not monotonically increasing in ideological distance between the president and agency, but, after initially growing, is replaced by centralization. Second, congressional veto threats can exert substantial influence on the centralization/politicization decision apart from altering agency ideology. Finally, in a model that focuses on oversight of policy implementation, centralization and politicization serve as strict substitutes. More generally, the model illustrates how the joint examination of presidential tools can reshape our understanding of presidential actions.
Why do democracies pursue retrenchment policies against economic globalization? Through a formal model situated in a country party to an international agreement creating domestic ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ I offer a novel explanation of the globalization backlash grounded in the logic of domestic electoral competition whereby leaders vary in their ideological willingness to implement redistributive policies designed to offset losers’ incurred damages. Leaders with large ideological biases against redistribution cannot credibly promise to compensate for the losses these agreements cause to voters, and thus often have electoral incentives to propose anti-globalization policies rather than maintain the globalized status quo. In particular, as the gains from globalization are more unequally distributed between winners and losers, redistribution becomes politically suboptimal, and anti-globalization policy more attractive. The intersection of inequality and political leaders’ willingness to implement policies of embedded liberalism within the context of electoral competition generates incentives to withdraw from the international order.
Empirical studies have found that although parties focus disproportionately on favorable issues, they also address the same issues—especially, salient issues—through much of the ‘short campaign’. We present a model of multiparty competition with endogenous issue salience where parties behave in line with these patterns in equilibrium. In our model, parties’ issue emphases have two effects: influencing voter priorities, and informing voters about their issue positions. Thus, parties trade off two incentives when choosing issues to emphasize: increasing the importance of favorable issues (‘the salience incentive’), and revealing positions on salient issues to sympathetic voters (‘the revelation incentive’). The relative strength of these two incentives determines how far elections constrain parties to respond to voters’ initial issue priorities.
When can a third party manipulate the bargaining dynamics between its protégé and its adversary through diplomacy? I develop a formal model in which (1) the third party and its protégé have misaligned interests, and (2) the disputants bargain simultaneously over two issue dimensions—one capturing common interests, the other capturing misaligned interests between the allies. The results show that when the protégé and its patron have heterogeneous preferences for the disputed issues, the protégé will not necessarily use the patron’s support in the way the patron wants. Foreign support increases the protégé’s bargaining leverage, and how the protégé will use this increased leverage at the negotiating table directly affects the way the patron communicates. The existence of misaligned interests increases the credibility of the patron’s alleged support if the signal can potentially improve the protégé’s gains over both shared and misaligned interests with its patron.
How do distributive politics affect participation under incomplete information? We theorize a novel mechanism that we call asymmetric participation, which explains participation as a self-selection process induced by a broadly targeted welfare benefit. Incomplete information about the de facto allocation of benefits causes asymmetric participation. When citizens expect particularistic distribution and access to the benefit depends on voter registration, supporters of the incumbent, who supplies the benefit, self-select into the electorate. This creates an incumbency advantage. We illustrate this argument using the case of the Renda Básica de Cidadania (RBC) in Maricá, Brazil, the largest unconditional cash transfer program in Latin America. Based on qualitative evidence, we develop a formal model, which we test against novel survey data. We find that under the de facto procedure of implementation, supporters of the incumbent supplying the RBC, self-select into the electorate, and engage more in activities that signal party loyalty.
Recent empirical research points at the significance of issue salience for party competition and argues that small parties emphasize secondary issues. This article investigates parties’ salience strategies from a formal viewpoint. It presents a model of party competition that allows parties to compete with policy positions on a second dimension, and also to choose an optimal level of issue salience. Equilibrium results are computed based on artificial data. The results identify various relevant factors for policy divergence and emphasis on the second policy issue dimension, notably the structure of public opinion and non-policy related valence differences. The results suggest that it is not only challenger parties at the fringe, but also valence-advantaged parties that seek to push the salience of secondary policy issues.
This article analyzes the possible electoral advantages and disadvantages of a unique party that competes in two simultaneous elections with respect to those obtained when it competes as two different parties. I assume that a unified party has a larger strategy set but it is forced to choose the same policy in both elections. I analyze different scenarios depending on the features of the electorates and of the party configuration that it faces: the same party or two different parties. In all cases, I show that a unified party can only fare better than two independent parties when the two electorates are similar enough. In this case, the party may obtain the vote of the moderates in both elections. If the electorates are aligned with the opponent the gains from unification are more likely in more polarized electorates. Otherwise, the losses from unification increase with the intensity of the electoral competition.
Consider a society where the prestige of orthodox views is linked to the prestige of the elite. Heterodox individuals are less likely to express their views if other peers refrain from doing so and if the elite is prestigious. In turn, corruption by the elite is less easily detected if orthodox views dominate. We characterize equilibrium self-denial and corruption and show that an exogenous increase in the range of orthodox views may result in a decrease in the total number of individuals truthfully expressing their views. Some features of the model are shown to be compatible with US data.
