Preferences and Democracy: Villa Colombella Papers / Edition 1

by Alb. Breton, P. Galeotti, P. Salmon, R. Wintrobe

Overview

I. Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote. Given this assumption, the analyst could express the outcome of the voting process in one of two ways. One possibility was to make the heroic assumptions necessary to obtain the median voter theorem, in which case, the political demands of the citizenry are simply the preferences of the median voter. The alternative was to make Arrow's Impossibility Theorem in which case even though individual preferences are well ordered, no collective preference function exists. On either of these approaches, institutions such as interest groups, political parties, or the structures ofpolitical representation played no role in the analysis. The work of "Chicago" scholars especially George Stigler, Gary Becker and Sam Peltzman took a different approach and emphasized the importance of organization in making political demand seffective, shifting thefocus from voting topolitical "pressure" byinterestgroups. However, in these models, voting as an instrument of political action simply disappears and the relationship between interest group pressures and electoral processes has never been clarified.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792393214
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	03/31/1993
Series:	International Studies in Economics and Econometrics , #28
Edition description:	1993
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

One: Unsatisfied Political Demands.- Unpopular Policies and The Theory of Representative Democracy.- Equilibrium Political Inaction in a Democracy.- Two: Bridges Between Demand and Supply.- A Theory of Demand for Governmentally Supplied Goods and Services.- Organized Groups and the (Mis?) transmission of Public Preferences.- Public Goods Provision Institutions.- Three: Equilibrium Political Platforms: Convergence and Divergence.- The Silent Revolution of Probabilistic Voting.- Pivotal Voters and Political Equilibria of Party Equilibrium.- Political Exchange and the Allocation of Surplus: A Model of Two-Party Competition.- Four: The Behaviour of Political Parties.- Fourteen Ways to Credibly Escape a Credible Commitment (and Still Get Re-Elected).- Issues and Party Alignments: A Review with Canadian Examples.- Five: Redistribution.- The Demand for the Public Sector In the Rich Welfare State of Denmark: Two Polls from 1990.- Voting Rights and the Demand for Public Expenditure: An Analysis of the Redistributive Impact of Universal Suffrage.- Coercive Redistribution and the Franchise: A Preliminary Investigation Using Computable General Equilibrium Modelling.