We formulate a dynamic model of party competition with a one-dimensional policy space. Policy choices at different times are linked because parties cannot change their policies abruptly; instead, policy adjustment happens gradually. Parties are uncertain of the median’s policy preferences at the time they choose their policies. Our results relate the steady state equilibrium of the dynamic game...

Policies impose lotteries of outcomes on individuals, since we never know exactly what the effects of the policy will be. In order to evaluate alternative policies, we need to make assumptions about individual preferences, even before social welfare functions are applied. There are two broad ways in which experimental methods are used to evaluate policy. One is to use experiments to estimate in...

Abstract Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation announced more likely. We give formal argument that observed distribution opinion not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving write clearly service implementation-related goals;...

Scholars wanting to estimate substantive quantities of interest, for example policy positions, from political texts typically apply a coding scheme to discrete text units such as words or sentences. Scales of policy positions, for example a left-right scale of economic policy, are typically built from the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. In this paper we reexa...

a r t i c l e i n f o Recent research has renewed interest in the exploration of the optimal design of monetary policy institutions in the presence of uncertainty. In this paper, we revisit the rationale for delegation to a weight-conservative central banker when the social planner's knowledge about the true preferences of delegates is ex ante ambiguous and he exhibits a preference for robustne...

Insurance Policies for Monetary Policy in the Euro Area* In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate costs in terms of lower expected performance....

Title of Document: DISSOCIATED CHOICES IN DIRECT DEMOCRACY: PREFERENCES, POLICY RESPONSIVENESS AND TRUST IN BALLOT INITIATIVE ELECTIONS Joshua J. Dyck, Ph.D. 2006 Directed By: Professor James G. Gimpel, Department of Government and Politics This research begins with a simple question: do direct democratic voting systems fulfill their promise of generating more majoritarian policy outcomes? I pr...

Estimates of instrumental rules can be utilized to describe central bank's behavior and monetary policy stance. In the last decade, considerable attention has been given to time-varying parameter (TVP) specification of monetary policy rules. Constant-parameter reaction functions likely ignore the impact of model uncertainty, shifting preferences and nonlinearities of policymaker's choices. This...

How do changes in the economy translate into shifts in aggregate preferences for a more or less activist government in the U.S.—a construct referred to as “policy mood”? Existing theories pose alternative explanations based on either a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs model, where citizens prefer an activist federal government to expand the social safety net when the economic future looks bright (Durr...

To treat dynamic preferences correctly is inevitably required in the legal reasoning. In this paper, we present a method which enables us to handle some class of dynamic preferences in the framework of circumscription and to compute consistently its metalevel and object-level reasoning by expressing them in an extended logic program. This is achieved on the basis of policy axioms and priority a...