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A Dynamic Model of Generalized Social Trust
How does generalized social trust — a Trustor's willingness to allow anonymous Trustees to make decisions affecting the Trustor's own welfare without an enforceable contract or guarantee, despite the Trustees' incentives to exploit or defraud — come to predominate in a community? This article is organized around a theoretical argument about the dynamics of generalized trust. This argu…
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- Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2008. Page 151-180
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- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Navigating the Legislative Divide: Polarization, Presidents, and Policymaking…
Polarization hallmarks contemporary Washington's political landscape. While an increasing literature examines the factors propelling this schism, theoretical work investigating its consequences has just begun. Building from a simple bargaining model in which an exogenous actor (e.g. the president) strategically allocates scarce `political capital' to induce changes in legislators' prefere…
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- Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2008. Page 201-220
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Uncertainty, Difficulty, and Complexity
In this article I clarify the often muddled distinctions between uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity and show that all three can enhance our understanding of institutional performance and design. To cope with uncertainty, institutions align incentives for information revelation; to handle difficult problems, institutions create incentives for diverse problem-solving approaches; and to…
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- Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2008. 115-149
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Getting a Poor Return: Courts, Justice and Governing Coalitions and the Audit…
Many years ago Robert Dahl (1957) argued that the courts are rarely out of alignment with the dominant national political coalition and more recent scholarship has built on this argument. However, despite this, it is still a prevalent belief that courts protect the minority against the power of the majority. This article analyzes these views by examining the influence of the national coal…
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- Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2008. Page 181-200
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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To Punish the Guilty and Protect the Innocent: Comparing Truth Revelation Pro…
Any country in the aftermath of transition to democracy confronts the challenge of transitional justice, that is, the task of designing a system of procedures for holding perpetrators and collaborators of the ancien regime responsible for their past activity. Two important normative goals that transitional justice shares with any system of justice are avoiding false convictions (punishing the i…
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- Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2008. Page 221-245
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Arguments-Based Collective Choice
This article presents a model of collective choice when group decisions must be justified by arguments from first principles. Individuals may have preferences over both the actions chosen and the arguments used to justify them. Defining a notion of stability in the arguments made and actions supported within a group, I characterize the set of actions that can be justified as well as the argumen…
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- Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 379-414
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- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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QRE, NSNX and the Paradox of Voting
Levine and Palfrey's QRE account of turnout in large elections raises the broader question of how much of a departure from standard rational choice theory is justified by the considerable repertoire of rational choice anomalies that has accumulated since Downs and Olson half a century ago. An alternative but more controversial unconventional view turns on what I call NSNX motivation to account …
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- Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 443-460
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Still Converging? a Downsian Party System Without Polls
This article compares convergence of political parties when voters are voting strategically and when they are voting sincerely under low-information conditions. In order to examine this problem, I create a computational model of a party system, where parties are uncertain about the distribution of the electorate. In one condition of the model, voters vote sincerely; in another, voters vote stra…
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- Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 461-476
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Outcomes of Collective Decisions With Externalities Predicted
In collective decision making bilateral deals can increase or decrease the likelihood of finding compromises, depending on whether such deals have externalities. Positive externalities mean third actors profit from bilateral deals, whereas negative externalities mean bilateral deals hurt third actors. We develop the first model of collective decision making that takes externalities into account…
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- Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 415-441
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Social Stability and Catastrophe Risk: Lessons From the Stag Hunt
Had the destruction and suffering visited upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina been the result of a terrorist attack, it would have been very successful — not because of the number of innocent lives lost or amount of property destroyed, but rather because of the breakdown of the social order. What better possible outcome could a terrorist envision than planting seeds of doubt regarding the wil…
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- Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 477-497
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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A Simple Model of Legislator and News Media Interaction
This article examines the effect of a strategic news media on legislators' interactions with their constituencies. Specifically, legislators can only be constrained by constituency preferences over policies when voters have the information to hold legislators accountable for their actions. A strategic news media can provide such information in a constant and continuous manner unlike, say, chall…
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- Volume 21, Number 1, January 2009. pp. 5-24
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- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Explaining the 1914 War in Europe: An Analytic Narrative
This essay constructs a theoretically rigorous explanation of the 1914 European war that involved Austria—Hungary, Germany, Russia, and France. It also serves to confirm Trachtenberg's contention that `one does not have to take a particularly dark view of German intentions' to explain the onset of war in 1914 and `question the ``inadvertent war'' theory'. A number of related questions about the…
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- Volume 21, Number 1, January 2009. pp. 63-95
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Making Making Social Science Matter Matter To Us
This article pursues two line of inquiry in response to Bent Flyvbjerg's advocacy of a phronetic social science in Making Social Science Matter (2001). First, I explore how Flyvbjerg's manifesto relates to the approach employed in his earlier empirical work, Rationality & Power (1998). There are, I argue, notable disjunctions between the practice of Rationality & Power and the preaching of Maki…
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- Volume 21, Number 1, January 2009. pp. 97-112
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Constitutions and Policy Comparisons: Direct and Representative Democracy Whe…
Voters in democracies can learn from the experience of neighbouring states: about policy in a direct democracy (`policy experimentation'), about the quality of their politicians in a representative democracy (`yardstick competition'). Learning between states creates spillovers from policy choice, and also from constitutional choice. I model these spillovers in a simple principal-agent framework…
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- Volume 21, Number 1, January 2009. pp. 25-61
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Leader Rule: A Model of Strategic Approval Voting in a Large Electorate
The article considers Approval Voting for a large population of voters. It is supposed that voters evaluate the relative likelihood of pairwise ties among candidates based on statistical information about candidate scores. This leads them to vote sincerely and according to a simple behavioral rule we call the `Leader Rule'. At equilibrium, if a Condorcet-winner exists, this candidate is elected.
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- Volume 21, Number 1, January 2009. pp. 113-136
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Exit, Voice, and Cooperation: Bargaining Power in International Organizations…
Literature on international organizations points to several potential sources of bargaining power: voice, exit, and exclusion. In some circumstances, a member state may be able to effectively voice objections to a change to an organization's institutions. In others, it may threaten to leave the organization if its demands are not met. Finally, member states may be able to force a laggard member…
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- Volume 21, Number 2, April 2009. pp. 187-211
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- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Is the 50-State Strategy Optimal?
In 2005, the Democratic National Committee adopted the 50-state strategy in lieu of the strategy of focusing solely on battleground states. The rationale given for this move is that campaign expenditures are durable outlays that impact both current and future campaigns. This article investigates the optimality of the 50-state strategy in a simple dynamic game of campaign resource allocation in …
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- Volume 21, Number 2, April 2009. pp. 213-236
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Multiple Principals and Oversight of Bureaucratic Policy-Making
I examine a model in which multiple legislative principals monitor a bureaucratic agent's implementation of a project. The principals can each perform oversight of the implementation to limit information asymmetries exploited by the agent. Oversight is costly to perform and due to information leakages between principals, oversight by one principal reveals information to all principals. Thus for…
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- Volume 21, Number 2, April 2009. pp. 161-186
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout: Theory and Evidence From Britain
The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about the candidates attach little value to information because they perceive that voting itself will have little value. Voters that are ex ante very ideological also attach l…
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- Volume 21, Number 2, April 2009. pp. 237-276
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Structure of Heresthetical Power
This article considers manipulation of collective choice — in such environments, a potential alternative is powerful only to the degree that its introduction can affect the collective decision. Using the Banks set (Banks, 1985), we present and characterize alternatives that can, and those that can not, affect sophisticated collective decision-making. Along with offering two substantive findings…
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- Volume 21, Number 2, April 2009. pp. 139-159
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- -
- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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