Schedule
| Wednesday, June 14 | |
| 12:00 - 1:30 | lunch |
| 1:45 - 3:30 | (1) Probabilistic Voting with Office-Motivated Candidates |
| John Duggan (Rochester) | |
| 3:30 - 4:00 | break |
| 4:00 - 5:45 | (2) Term Limits and Pork Barrel Politics |
| Dan Bernhardt (Rochester and Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) | |
| 7:30 | dinner |
| Thursday, June 15 | |
| 10:00 - 11:45 | (3) Mixed Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate |
| Tom Palfrey (Caltech) | |
| 12:00 - 1:30 | lunch |
| 1:45 - 3:30 | (4) Sequential Candidate Entry: Osborne's Conjecture and a Related Model |
| Mark Fey (Rochester), with a guest appearance by Martin Osborne (Toronto) | |
| 3:30 - 4:00 | break |
| 4:00 - 5:45 | (5) Non-Majoritarian Policy Outcomes and the Role of Citizen Initiatives |
| Steve Coate (Cornell) | |
| 7:30 | dinner
|
All sessions will be held in Harkness 112.
Details
1. John Duggan's presentation is based on two papers, ``The Theory of
Probabilistic Voting in the Spatial Model of Elections,'' coauthored with
Jeff Banks (Caltech), and ``Equilibrium Equivalence under Expected
Plurality and Probability of Winning Maximization.''
In the paper with Jeff Banks, we give an overview of the theory of probabilistic
voting with vote maximizing candidates, unifying and generalizing known results
on several topics, e.g., equilibrium existence, policy coincidence (a.k.a. ``policy convergence''), and robustness of equilibrium. In the second paper, I
examine connections to equilibria in models with probability-of-winning maximizing
candidates. In a specific model of probabilistic voting, equivalence of local
equilibria obtains as long as the second derivatives of voters' utility functions
are negative. The equivalence does not hold if the condition on voters' utility
functions is weakened to merely strict concavity (allowing for zero second derivatives
at some points).
2. Dan Bernhardt's presentation is based on a paper of the same title, coauthored
with Sangita Dubey (Government of Canada) and Eric Hughson (Colorado):
We develop a dynamic model of democratic politics in which both potential
office-holders and the electorate have heterogeneous ideologies. Voters
have incomplete information about candidate ideologies, so they must use
information from previous positions taken in office to make informed
re-election decisions. We characterize the effects of term limits and
legislator compensation on the evolution over time of the ideological
positions taken by office-holders and derive the implications for voter
choice and welfare. Contributions of our paper include:
1. We detail how pork provision by more senior incumbents interacts
with term limits to affect electoral outcomes. Pork provision -
transfers of resources from districts with junior legislators to
districts with more senior legislators - induces voters to be more
forgiving of extreme location by incumbents, especially incumbents in
small or poor districts. Pork provision can explain why re-election
probabilities in Congress exceed those for governors.
(a) Term limits reduce voter welfare when all that matters are the
ideological positions taken by the office-holder.
(b) Term limits may be advantageous when senior incumbents can extract
benefits for their constituencies at the expense of districts with
more junior representatives. Large or rich districts especially
value term limits when there is substantial pork.
2. We characterize the welfare of all voters, not just the median
voter.
3. We derive how the method of selecting challenging candidates - at
large versus party selection - affects electoral outcomes. If voters
are increasingly averse to distant location by candidates, the median
voter may not be decisive. Then, the imprimateur that a party places
on its representative offers voters with extreme ideologies valuable
reassurance.
4. Voters disagree about how much to pay legislators. Voters with more
extreme ideologies prefer to pay legislators less. If pay is too high,
only some incumbents who locate at the median are re-elected.
3. Tom Palfrey's presentation is based on a paper of the same
title, coauthored with Enriqueta Aragones (Harvard and Pompeu Fabra):
The paper examines competition in the standard one-dimensional Downsian model
of two-candidate elections, but where one candidate (A) enjoys an advantage
over the other candidate (D). Voter preferences are Euclidean, but any
voter will vote for candidate A unless D is closer to her ideal point by
some fixed distance d. The location of the median voter's ideal point
is uncertain and its distribution is commonly known by both candidates. The
candidates simultaneously choose locations to maximize the probability of
victory. Pure strategy equilibria often fail to exist in this model, except
under special conditions about d and the distribution of the median
ideal point. We solve for the essentially unique symmetric mixed
equilibrium, show that candidate A adopts more moderate policies than
candidate D, and obtain some comparative statics results about the
probability of victory and the expected distance between the two candidates'
policies.
4. This presentation is a joint effort:
Martin Osborne will introduce the topic by discussing his conjecture about a
sequential entry game in a unidimensional space. In his model, candidates
sequentially pick a position or choose to stay out of the race. If
candidates prefer to enter the competition only if they have some chance of
winning, the conjecture is that the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the
game is for the first and last players to enter the race at the median and
for all other candidates to stay out. More details on this are available at
the following website: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ osborne/research/CONJECT.HTM
Mark Fey examines the issue by looking at a related model in his paper
``Sequential Action in Spatial Competition.'' In this model, candidates do
not have the choice to stay out of the race - all players must choose positions
in the policy space. The subgame perfect equilibrium of the model is
characterized and in doing so some technical issues are addressed. A main
feature of the analysis is a comparison of the sequential entry results to
the simultaneous decision outcomes of previous models.
5. Steve Coate's presentation is based on a paper of the same
title, coauthored with Tim Besley (LSE).
In the context of a simple model of political competition, this paper
identifies three distinct reasons why policy outcomes in representative
democracies can be non-majoritarian. Each explanation relies on the fact
that elected policy-makers are responsible for deciding on a bundle of policy
issues. The paper then goes on to investigate the constitutional tool of
citizen initiatives as a way of restoring majoritarian outcomes. Initiatives
can be successful in this regard because they permit the unbundling of
specific policy issues.