The dynamics of distributive politics
نویسندگان
چکیده
We study dynamic committee bargaining over an infinite horizonwith discounting. In each period, a committee proposal is generated by a random recognition rule, the committee chooses between the proposal and a status quo by majority rule, and the voting outcome in period t becomes the status quo in period t + 1. We study symmetric Markov equilibria of the resulting game and conduct an experiment to test hypotheses generated by the theory for pure distributional (divide-the-dollar) environments. In particular, we investigate the effects of concavity in the utility functions, the existence of a Condorcet winning alternative, and the discount factor (committee “impatience”). We report several new findings. Voting behavior is selfish and myopic. Status quo outcomes have great inertia. There are strong treatment effects that are in the direction predicted by the Markov equilibrium. We find significant evidence of concave utility functions. We thank audiences at Northwestern University, NYU, MIT, the 2007 Constitutional Political Economy Conference in Torino, the 2007 Wallis Conference in Rochester, and the 2007 Workshop in Behavioral Public Economics in Innsbruck for comments. Anna Bassi, Kyle Mattes, Salvatore Nunnari, and Stephanie Wang provided valuable research assistance. Battaglini gratefully acknowledges financial support from a NSF CAREER Award (SES-0547748) and the hospitality of the Kellogg School’s MEDS department for the academic year 2006–2007. Palfrey gratefully acknowledges financial support of grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-0617820 and SES-0962802) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. M. Battaglini (B) Department of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. R. Palfrey Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA e-mail: [email protected]
منابع مشابه
Distributive Politics and the Benefits of Decentralisation
This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or "universalism'') of the provision of regional projects is endogenous, and depends on the strength of the externality. The welfare benefits of decen...
متن کاملDistributive Politics and the Bene...ts of Decentralisation
This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key ...nding is that the degree of uniformity (or “universalism”) of the provision of regional projects is endogenous, and depends on the strength of the externality. The welfare bene...ts of dece...
متن کاملThe political economy of Medicare.
Medicare spends more than $200 billion a year; the politics surrounding the Medicare program cannot be fully understood without an adequate appreciation of that fact. An understanding of the political economy of Medicare is perhaps best achieved by thinking along three dimensions: (1) Medicare as redistributive politics; (2) Medicare as special-interest politics; and (3) Medicare as distributiv...
متن کاملVoting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics
We analyze and evaluate the di¤erent decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to now. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as a power measure in distributive situations and an alternative to the Shapley-Shubik index. We then calc...
متن کاملLegislative Bargaining and Distributive Politics in Brazil:
This paper tailors general theories of distributive politics to guide an empirical analysis of the distribution of intergovernmental grants among the Brazilian states. It shows that grants are distributed in accordance with the political interests of the president, who seeks to maintain a stable, low-cost legislative coalition. States with greater legislative representation per capita receive l...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011