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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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
- ISBN/ISSN
- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Creation of Social Order in Ethnic Conflict
This article develops a model of random matching with costly monitoring to demonstrate that the threat of ethnic conflict can function to create an in-group policing mechanism which helps enforce inter-ethnic social order. Instead of regarding ethnic conflict as a form of collective penalty on an unidentified wrongdoer and his ethnic brethren (Fearon and Laitin, 1996), we argue that ethnic conf…
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- Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2009.pp. 365-394
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- 09516298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Matching Donors and Nonprofits: The Importance of Signaling in Funding Awards
The topic of nonprofit reform has sparked a debate on the battle between efficiency and effectiveness. Why do ineffective nonprofits survive? Prospective donors favor applicants likely to fulfill donor priorities. Donors with limited time and energy look for signals that reveal recipients' true capabilities. Knowing this, recipients attempt to send the right signals to prospective donors. If th…
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- Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2009.pp. 283-309
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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From Many, One: State Representation and the Construction of an American Iden…
I present a formal model of the effect of political representation on the formation of group identities using the drafting of the United States Constitution as a case study. I first show the presence of `factions', or groups with competing interests, to be beneficial in forging a national identity. Next, I use this model to argue that the Great Compromise succeeded as more than a political mane…
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- Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2009.pp. 343-364
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Lotteries, Justice and Probability
Intuition suggests that a fair lottery is the appropriate way to allocate a scarce good when two or more people have equally strong claims to it. This article lays out three conditions that any conception of justice compatible with this intuition must satisfy — efficiency of outcomes, fairness of outcomes, and fairness of treatment. The third, unlike the first two, manifests itself only in the …
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- Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2009.pp. 395-409
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Successful and Failed Screening Mechanisms in the Two Gulf Wars
The article addresses the question of how status-quo states can identify revisionist threats. After recasting the question within the collective security and social learning literatures, the article presents and models a new mechanism for the collective identification of threats — screening. It then identifies several conditions for the existence of screening mechanisms, among which states' mut…
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- Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2009.pp. 311-342
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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Ballot Structure, Political Corruption, and the Performance of Proportional R…
What is the relationship between ballot structure (the manner in which citizens cast their votes) and corruption related to the financing of politics? The author develops a principal agent—model which considers how differences in ballot structure may facilitate or impede attempts by parties to utilize the public administration as a source of electoral resources. Electoral systems which concentr…
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- Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2009.pp. 509-541
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- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The Puzzle of Weak Pocketbook Voting
This article investigates why predominantly self-interested voters exhibit weak pocketbook voting. Focusing on the USA, it estimates partisan government’s impact on household income and, based on the Permanent Income Hypothesis, models the conversion of that income into consumption, the source of voters’ utility in the model. The analysis implies that pocketbook voting is weak because anticipat…
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- Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2009.pp. 451-482
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0951-6298
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- Journal of Theoretical Politics
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