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A Theoretical Analysis of Income Tax Evasion, Optimal Auditing, and Credibili…
We first construct a theoretical model of tax evasion in a stylized developing country in which all taxpayers have either high or low income. The key problem is that the high-income taxpayers may underreport their income. An individual income tax return can only be verified with an audit that costs c. There is a constant tax rate {tau} on income and a fine F on underpaid tax. In this setting, w…
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- Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2010. pp. 123-133
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
- Collation
- -
- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Condorcet Consistency of Approval Voting: a Counter Example in Large Poisson …
Approval Voting is analyzed in a context of large elections with strategic voters: the Myerson’s Large Poisson Games. We first establish the Magnitude Equivalence Theorem which substantially reduces the complexity of computing the magnitudes of the pivot outcomes. Furthermore, we show that the Condorcet Winner need not be the Winner of the election in equilibrium under Approval Voting. Indeed, …
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- Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2010. pp. 64-84
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
- Collation
- -
- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Properties of Simple Vs. Absolute Majority Rule: Cases Where Absences and…
Little attention has been paid to the differences between absolute majority rule and simple majority rule, which differ in their treatment of absences and ‘votes to abstain’. This article fills that gap by undertaking a probabilistic analysis of the two voting rules assuming two alternatives and a quorum requirement for simple majority rule. The rules are compared in both a modified sincere set…
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- Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2010. pp. 85-122
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Adaptively Rational Retrospective Voting
Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting has been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Franzese, 2002; Hibbs, 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We suspect that Key had a less heroic view of voter cognition, and we formalize his verbal theory a…
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- Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2010. pp. 26-63
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Effect of Initiatives on Local Government Spending
Tools of direct democracy, such as the citizen initiative, are available at both the state and local levels in the United States, yet models of the process typically do not consider these institutions in tandem. In this article, I develop a model of local fiscal policy that incorporates the impact of a statewide as well as a local initiative process. I posit that the statewide initiative proces…
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- Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2010. pp. 6-25
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Ambiguous Statutes and Judicial Deference To Federal Agencies
The Supreme Court’s Chevron decision raises questions about why Congress passes ambiguous statutes and why courts defer to agencies rather than impose their own interpretations. This article presents a model of policymaking where the legislature chooses strategically between an ambiguous and explicit statute, and where rulemaking and judicial review follow. The analysis reveals that when statut…
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- Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2010. pp 217-245
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Implications of High Court Docket Control for Resource Allocation and Leg…
A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. Despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remain relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In this article, we develop a formal model of high court resource allocation. We analyze the model under t…
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- Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2010. pp. 247-268
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Coups, Elections and the Predatory State
Even in the absence of elections, incumbents face threats to their survival which could induce them to reduce self-interested rent-seeking behavior. I compare the differences in incentives for incumbents to reduce rent extraction when they face a threat of being overthrown as opposed to when they face competitive elections. The key difference between the situations is that while voters do not g…
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- Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2010. pp. 169-215
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- -
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Political Accountability Under Alternative Institutional Regimes
We analyze the interaction between electoral accountability and separation-of-powers by comparing three regimes: ‘Unilateral Authority’ (the President has exclusive decision-making power); ‘Mandatory Checks’ (the President cannot change policy without congressional assent); and ‘Opt-in Checks’ (the President may seek congressional authorization or act unilaterally). We find: (1) voters use asym…
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- Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2010. pp 139-167
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Does ‘Civic Duty’ ‘Solve’ The Rational Choice Voter Turnout Puzzle?
Rational choice models of voter turnout try to account for why people vote by including on the ‘benefits’ side of the cost-benefit calculus some term representing either the collective benefits of voting or the satisfaction the individual derives from the very act of voting, a strategy subject to a number of telling criticisms. After a background discussion of three competing perspectives on th…
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- Vol. 22 no. 3 July 2010 pp. 275-300
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- -
- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Proportional Representation and Strategic Voters
The goal of this paper is to examine the incentives to vote insincerely, other than those created by rounding, faced by voters in systems of proportional representation (PR). We rigorously investigate two models of voter behaviour. The first model assumes that a voter is primarily interested in the distribution of seats in the post-election parliament (seat maximizer) while the second considers…
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- Vol. 22 no. 3 July 2010. pp. 301-332
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Electoral Competition When Some Candidates Lie and Others Pander
In this paper we analyze a two-candidate electoral competition in which a candidate can either lie about his private policy preference in order to get elected, or pander to post-election external influences in choosing a policy to implement. Both the pre-election announcement and post-election implementation are a candidate’s strategic choices. We show that, in equilibrium, different types of c…
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- Vol. 22 no. 3 July 2010.pp. 333-358
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Power Sharing and Reform Capacity
In this paper I argue that reform capacity, defined as the extent to which political institutions facilitate the adoption of socially efficient reforms, is not primarily determined by the number of veto players in the political system, but by the availability of institutional mechanisms that allow political agents to solve commitment problems associated with bargaining over reform. Specifically…
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- Vol. 22 no. 3 July 2010.pp. 359-376
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- -
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Evaluating the Unfairness of Representation With the Nash Social Welfare Func…
Using the Nash product (Nash Social Welfare Function) as a micro foundation, we create a decomposable index to evaluate the unfairness of representation in electoral districts. Using this index, we decompose the factors of such unfairness into apportionment and districting. We explore the situations of New Zealand, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada. We then pro…
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- Vol. 22 no. 4, October 2010.pp. 445-467
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Transparency and Accountability: Empirical Results for Us States
Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters’ willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972—2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax…
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- Vol. 22 no. 4, October 2010,pp. 379-406
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Ideology and Existence of 50%-Majority Equilibria in Multidimensional Spatial…
When aggregating individual preferences through the majority rule in an n-dimensional spatial voting model, the ‘worst-case’ scenario is a social choice configuration where no political equilibrium exists unless a super-majority rate as high as 1 — 1/(n+1) is adopted. In this paper we assume that a lower d-dimensional (d < n) linear map spans the possible candidates’ platforms. These d ‘ideolog…
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- Vol. 22 no. 4, October 2010.pp. 431-444
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Power Concentration and Interstate Conflict: Is There a Connection?
Singer et al. (1972) hypothesized that the distribution of military—industrial capabilities among the major powers, as reflected in an index referred to as CON, would have an impact on the incidence of war for those states. Subsequent research on the possible connection between CON and interstate conflict has continued for almost four decades. A recent book declares that CON is the single most …
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- Vol. 22 no. 4, October 2010,pp. 407-429
- ISBN/ISSN
- 09516298
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- Series Title
- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Inevitable Two-State Solution
By 2033, two states, Israel and Palestine, will be living side-by-side in an uneasy peace, with the risk of war between them and terrorism across their common border diminishing year by year. This two-state solution will not be imposed by the United States or the Arab world. It will be freely chosen by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. The growing Palestinian majority living between the…
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- Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 2008. Page 59–67
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0740-2775
- Collation
- -
- Series Title
- World Policy Journal
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Dominant party systems and electoral volatility in Africa: a comment on mozaf…
In a recent publication in this journal, Mozaffar and Scarritt claim to have found a puzzling combination of low fragmentation and high volatility in African party systems. However, if we look at national party systems rather than Africa-wide averages, include regime type as a variable and specify dominance, we find three different constellations: dominant party systems with relatively low …
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- Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2008. Page 113-130
- ISBN/ISSN
- 13540688
- Collation
- -
- Series Title
- Party Politics
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Intra-party politics and coalition formation: evidence from Swedish local gov…
Traditional theories about government formation in parliamentary democracies are based on the assumption that parties can be characterized as unitary actors. Many authors have questioned the soundness of this assumption. The problem with keeping it is that we may miss important factors explaining why certain coalitions form if we do not consider the role of intra-party politics. In this a…
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- Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2008. Page 71-89
- ISBN/ISSN
- 13540688
- Collation
- -
- Series Title
- Party Politics
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