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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Gianmarco Daniele; Amedeo Piolatto; Willem Sas |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we argue that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals -such as economic history, geography or natural resources- can lead to extreme voting in federal systems of government. The outcome of higher-level (federal) policies often depends on these fundamentals, meaning some regions will always benefit from the policy whilst others lose out. In our model, voters have an incentive to stack this kind of redistribution in their favour, using the regional ties of politicians as a strategic link. The median voter therefore elects federal representatives that are extremely protective of their own region's interests. We find that the incentive to select such a tough negotiator survives the pressure to belong to the ruling coalition. We test our predictions by looking at the performance of parties at national and European Parliament elections since 1990. We indeed observe that such strategic voting behaviour is U-shaped on the "losing-winning from the policy" dimension. Our online survey provides further evidence. |
| Keywords: | strategic delegation, interregional redistribution, political extremism, federalism, bargaining, coalitions, EU elections, euroscepticism, populism |
| JEL: | H6 H71 H74 H77 |
| Date: | 2020–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1157&r=all |
| By: | Francesco Giavazzi; Felix Iglhaut; Giacomo Lemoli; Gaia Rubera |
| Abstract: | We study the role of perceived threats from cultural diversity induced by terrorist attacks and a salient criminal event on public discourse and voters' support for far-right parties. We first develop a rule which allocates Twitter users in Germany to electoral districts and then use a machine learning method to compute measures of textual similarity between the tweets they produce and tweets by accounts of the main German parties. Using the dates of the aforementioned exogenous events we estimate constituency-level shifts in similarity to party language. We find that following these events Twitter text becomes on average more similar to that of the main far-right party, AfD, while the opposite happens for some of the other parties. Regressing estimated shifts in similarity on changes in vote shares between federal elections we find a significant association. Our results point to the role of perceived threats on the success of nationalist parties. |
| JEL: | C45 D72 H56 |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26825&r=all |
| By: | Hend Ghazzai (UR MASE - Modélisation et Analyse Statistique et Economique - ESSAIT - Ecole Supérieure de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information - Université de Carthage - University of Carthage); Wided Hemissi; Rim Lahmandi-Ayed (LEGI - Laboratoire d'Économie et de Gestion Industrielle [Tunis] - Ecole Polytechnique de Tunisie); Sana Kefi |
| Abstract: | This note extends the results already obtained by Khaloul et al. (2017) on the majority vote between monopoly and duopoly by a heterogeneous population composed of individuals who are potentially consumers, workers, and shareholders to the general case where firms are owned by a given proportion of the population. Results show that duopoly is preferred when non-shareholders constitute a majority of the population. Otherwise, the majority vote depends on the relative dispersion of the individuals with respect to their intensity of preference for quality and their sensitivity to effort. |
| Keywords: | Imperfect Competition,Democracy,Vertical Differentiation,Gen- eral Equilibrium,Ownership Structure * hendghazzai@msbtn † widedhemissi@msbtn |
| Date: | 2020–02–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02480175&r=all |
| By: | Leopoldo Fergusson; Carlos Molina |
| Abstract: | The Internet and social media have been considered crucial determinants of recent political turmoil and protests. To estimate the causal impact of Facebook on collective action for a large set of countries, we use its release in a given language as an exogenous source of variation in access to social media where the language is spoken. Using country-, subnational-, and individual-level data, we show that Facebook has had a significant and sizable positive impact on citizen protests. Complementary findings show that reverse causality and correlated changes in protest reporting are not driving these results. Facebook’s effect is particularly important in countries with: underlying conditions that facilitate using the technology (more Internet access), grievances (economic downturns), few other opportunities to coordinate action against authorities (no freedom of assembly, repression of the opposition), and factors that make the country more conflict prone (natural resource abundance, denser urban populations). The effect is also stronger in countries with either very low or very high levels of accountability. Finally, we find that Facebook impacts individuals with very different characteristics; we detect no evidence of displacement in other forms of political participation or news consumption; and we document an increase in individuals’ perceived freedom to express what they think, to join political organizations, to vote, and to voice their political opinions. |
| Keywords: | Collective action, Protests, Social media, Facebook |
| JEL: | D70 L82 D80 |
| Date: | 2020–03–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000518:018004&r=all |
| By: | Koriyama, Yukio; Ozkes, Ali |
| Abstract: | Cognitive hierarchy theory, a collection of structural models of non-equilibrium thinking, in which players' best responses rely on heterogeneous beliefs on others' strategies including naive behavior, proved powerful in explaining observations from a wide range of games. We introduce an inclusive cognitive hierarchy model, in which players do not rule out the possibility of facing opponents at their own thinking level. Our theoretical results show that inclusiveness is crucial for asymptotic properties of deviations from equilibrium behavior in expansive games. We show that the limiting behaviors are categorized in three distinct types: naive, Savage rational with inconsistent beliefs, and sophisticated. We test the model in a laboratory experiment of collective decision-making. The data suggests that inclusiveness is indispensable with regard to explanatory power of the models of hierarchical thinking. |
| Keywords: | cognitive hierarchy, collective decision-making, level-k model, strategic thinking |
| Date: | 2020–03–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus055:7506&r=all |