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Voter Preferences (voter + preference)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences66%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting22%

Selected Abstracts

The political economy of direct legislation: direct democracy and local decision,making

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 33 2001
Lars P Feld
Local and regional governments account for an important share of total government spending and, given the decentralization trend in OECD nations, this is likely to increase. How should this spending be governed? This article argues that direct democracy is best suited to organize decision,making at the state and local level. To support this, we present the main theoretical arguments on why and how referenda and initiatives affect fiscal policy outcomes. The basic argument concerns voter control. Under representative democracy, citizens only have direct control at election time. With referenda and initiatives, citizens can selectively control their representatives on specific policies whenever they deviate sufficiently from citizens' preferences. As a result, fiscal policy outcomes are likely to more closely reflect voter preferences. We empirically test this on Swiss data since Switzerland provides a ,natural laboratory' for local governance. The governance structures of Swiss cantons and localities with respect to fiscal issues range from classic parliamentary democracy to pure direct democracy, and an important part of spending and taxation is controlled at these levels. Specifically, we estimate an econometric model of fiscal behaviour using data from 1986 to 1997 for the 26 Swiss cantons, and 1990 data on 134 local communities. It is shown that mandatory referenda on fiscal issues at both levels have a dampening effect on expenditure and revenue, and at the local level also on public debt. Combining this with existing empirical evidence leads to a relatively uncontested result, namely that elements of direct democracy are associated with sounder public finances, better economic performance and higher satisfaction of citizens. [source]

Probabilistic Voting and Accountability in Elections with Uncertain Policy Constraints

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 1 2007
ADAM MEIROWITZ
We consider accountability in repeated elections with two long-lived parties that have distinct policy preferences and different levels of valence. In each period the government faces a privately observed feasibility constraint and selects a publicly observed policy vector. While pure strategy equilibria do not exhibit tight control on government policy making, complete control is possible in mixed strategies. In optimal equilibria voters use reelection functions which depend on policy in a manner that causes the governing party to internalize voter preferences. In these optimal equilibria the voters use different reelection functions for different parties. [source]

Modelling political popularity: a correction

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES A (STATISTICS IN SOCIETY), Issue 1 2002
David Byers
Summary. The paper supplies a missing step in the aggregation argument that was used in our 1997 paper in this journal. We show that monthly poll data representing the average of a sample of voter preferences, evolving in different ways in the face of new information, should follow a fractionally integrated process. [source]

Is Rule by Majorities Special?

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2010
Hugh Ward
One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue-by-issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy-proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue-by-issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered. [source]

Giving the People What They Want?

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010
The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives
The common wisdom in journalistic accounts of earmarking is that Congress distributes earmarks on a purely political basis, without any consideration for the demand for federal spending. Academic accounts similarly argue that factors internal to Congress are preeminent in determining where earmarks go, even more than for other types of pork-barrel spending. Using earmarks appearing in the fiscal year 2008 Appropriations bills, I search for both chamber-based and demand-side determinants of the distribution of earmarks. I find that both types of factors are significantly related to the number of earmarks that a House member receives. This result indicates that even while earmarking, members of Congress are at least minimally responsive to voter preferences and calls into question whether earmarks should be treated as an outlier within the universe of spending allocation mechanisms. [source]

A Model of Farsighted Voting

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2009
Elizabeth Maggie Penn
I present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation. In such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today, but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future. The model can be used to characterize both long-term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted. [source]

Voter Decision Making in Election 2000: Campaign Effects, Partisan Activation, and the Clinton Legacy

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2003
D. Sunshine Hillygus
How do citizens respond to campaign events? We explore this question with a unique repeated measures survey design, fielded during the 2000 presidential campaign. We model transitions in support for the major party candidates following the party conventions and presidential debates. In the aggregate, Gore support increases following the conventions (but not the debates), while Bush support increases with the debates (but not the conventions). But there is considerable microlevel variation in the data: responsiveness to campaign events is greatest among Independents, undecided voters, and "mismatched partisans," but exactly how these groups respond differs for each event. Moreover, attitudes toward then President Clinton mediate the effect of the campaign events on voter preferences. Two primary conclusions follow: (1) rich data sets are required to observe the effects of campaign events; (2) the influence of campaign events on vote choice is conditional on previous preferences, partisan dispositions, and political context. [source]

Can Presidentialism Work Like Parliamentarism?

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 1 2005
Josep M. Colomer
Inter-institutional cooperation between the congress and the presidency may be the best way to promote good governance in a regime of separation of powers. In order to evaluate the performance of different political institutions, especially the different frameworks associated with ,presidentialism' and ,parliamentarism', we adopt the criterion that policy outcomes coinciding with the median voter's preference can produce the highest satisfaction or social utility. From this perspective, proportional representation in congress can be very appropriate since it tends to establish a close correspondence between the median party's and the median voter's preferences. Likewise, cooperation , rather than conflict or mutual checks , between the median party in congress and the presidency for both legislative decisions and cabinet formation can favour socially efficient outcomes. A survey of some recent institutional reforms in democratic presidential regimes in Latin America shows that ,parliamentarization' of presidentialism is gaining acceptance, although intermediate formulae may be more conflictual than a global, more coherent institutional reform. [source]