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.
Employing a game-theoretic model of electoral competition, Myerson (1993, American Political Science Review 87(4): 856-869) finds that both single-winner plurality voting (PV) and proportional representation (PR) lead to identical equilibrium campaigning strategies, with platform inequalities increasing as the number of political competitors rises. Using the same model, this paper derives and compares the resulting post-election income distributions and associated Gini coefficients. Key findings include: (1) The identical campaigning strategies under PV and PR lead to considerably different post-election income distributions. (2) For any given number of competing parties, PV exhibits comparatively higher inequality. (3) Inequality rises with the number of parties in both electoral systems but increases more rapidly under PV. Notably, when PV is fixed at two parties (Duverger's law), once the simulated number of parties exceeds five, PR exhibits slightly higher inequality, challenging the belief that PR is inherently the more equal electoral system.
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 examines how self-imposed term limits—pledges made by candidates, should they be elected, not to seek reelection—can arise endogenously within a model of electoral accountability. To this end, I extend a standard model with adverse selection by introducing an election stage during which two candidates may voluntarily pledge to forgo reelection. I first show that such pledges can occur in equilibrium even without credible commitment power, highlighting their connection to cheap talk. I then analyze, at a high level of generality, equilibria when candidates can credibly commit to such pledges. In this scenario, self-imposed term limits allow strong candidates to signal their type and commit to making policy choices free from career distortions, thereby gaining an electoral advantage over reelection-seeking candidates. Finally, in a model specification in which politicians have heterogeneous policy preferences, I identify conditions under which term limit pledges are both informative and welfare-improving.
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.
