In this paper, I develop a positive model in which altruistic agents vote over quadratic (progressive) income tax schedules. The agents have heterogeneous preferences and productivities, and the model incorporates the incentive e¤ects of taxation. The main result of the paper is that under standard assumptions, there exists a self-con...rming majority rule equilibrium in which the agents’ labor...

In a general bargaining model with a fixed proposer, we show that the agenda setter’s equilibrium payoff is never lower than her payoff in the static model. There is a cutoff level of voter patience such that below the cutoff, the static equilibrium (possibly along with others) obtains; and above the cutoff, all equilibria are in mixed proposal strategies, and the agenda setter does strictly be...

It is shown that the counting function of n Boolean variables can be implemented with the formulae of size O(n3.06) over the basis of all 2-input Boolean functions and of size O(n4.54) over the standard basis. The same bounds follow for the complexity of any threshold symmetric function of n variables and particularly for the majority function. Any bit of the product of binary numbers of length...

values alone capture too little information about relationships between concrete values. For example, consider a system containing a majority voter. The voter's outputs depend on equality relationships among its inputs. If two inputs both have abstract value N, denoting the natural numbers, there is no way to tell from this whether they are equal. To more accurately track relationships between ...

This paper explores the causal influence of access to Western television programming on voting behavior. We exploit a natural experiment involving access to West German TV within the German Democratic Republic in which only geography and topography determined the allocation of individuals to treatment and control groups. Focusing on both the shares of extremist parties and voter turnout, we fin...

Why do people turn out to vote? By requiring coordination and by generating positive externalities on others while involving a private cost, turning out to vote resembles a public good contribution and is therefore subject to collective action problems. While this has been established theoretically, the empirical evidence is fraught with measurement and identification problems. We investigate w...

There has been much research in economics concerned with the factors affecting voter turnout. This research has so far ignored how the presence of children affects an individual’s propensity to vote. This paper shows that having young children decreases the likelihood of voting. Low income individuals are especially vulnerable to this increased cost of voting due to children, while higher incom...

This paper presents a novel technique for improved voting by adaptively varying the membership boundaries of a fuzzy voter to achieve realistic consensus among inputs of redundant modules of a fault tolerant system. We demonstrate that suggested dynamic membership partitioning minimizes the number of occurrences of incorrect outputs of a voter as compared to the fixed membership partitioning vo...

A considerable body of research focuses on why voter turnout changed — specifically, why it declined — in the 1960s and 1970s. Most models of the change focus on factors such as a decline in civic involvement or a shift in the age distribution toward younger citizens who vote less frequently. While these approaches have taught us much about voter turnout, they are puzzling in that none actually...