In many important political problems, citizens can directly participate in the decision making through a referendum. Examples include accession to international organizations (EU, Euro monetary union) or Quebec’s independence referendum. These settings are often characterized by uncertainty over the future consequences of the decision, the possibility of (at least partial) learning about these ...

Voting algorithms are used to arbitrate between the results of variants in fault-tolerant systems. Industrial sectors which employ such systems include process control, transportation (such as railway and avionics), nuclear power plants, and military applications. Typical voters used in fault tolerant systems are majority, plurality, median, and weighted average. These voters can produce either...

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are 'retrospective' voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility ...

I study and compare preference aggregation in a simultaneous and a sequential multicandidate election. Voters have perfect information about their own preference but do not know the median voter’s preference. A voter has an incentive to vote for her second choice for fear that a tie between her second and third choice is more likely than she would like. Therefore, a voter may want to coordinate...

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where individual legislators are selected to decide on policies under different rules and voter preferences can be precisely measured. This the first paper look at such situation. institutional Switzerland allows us observe behavior who change from proportionally-elected chamber majority-elected parliament with thei...

abstractaccording to public choice theory, the features of the tax structure effect on voters' perceptions from the tax burden, so they pay more cost for public goods, lower than the estimate. in this study has been investigated the relationship between tax and public expenditures in the iranian economy during 1360-1390 based on public choice theory to examine the level of government spend...

In the political-economy debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old, thus help sustaining the social security system. In addition, the median voter whose income derives from wages will wish to keep out the immigrants who will depress his/her wage. Therefore the decisive voter will keep migrants out. The paper addresses these two accepted propos...

This study applies median voter theorem and special interest politics to explain the setting of cigarette tax rates in the 48 states of the United States between 19962000. We measure median voter’s preferences and political influence of special interest groups using CPS Tobacco Use Supplements and data from National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP). Based on a theoretical framework ...