Why political disagreements over how the world works may be easier to solve than those over goals.

Politics is all about disagreement – disagreement over what government should be trying to achieve, but also about how the world works and how that affects the pursuit of shared goals. But what makes disagreements over beliefs different from disagreements over goals? In a new study, Alexander V. Hirsch writes that beliefs may be able to be changed when new information is introduced, and so disagreements driven by differing beliefs should result in more policy experimentation compared to disagreement driven by differing goals

Polarization and Campaign Spending in Elections

We develop a Downsian model of electoral competition in which candidates with both policy and office-motivations use a mixture of platforms and campaign spending to gain the median voter’s support. The unique equilibrium involves randomizing over both platforms and spending, and exhibits the following properties – (i) ex-ante uncertainty in platforms, spending, and the election winner, (ii) platform divergence, (iii) inefficiency in spending and outcomes, (iv) polarization, and (v) voter extremism. We also show that platform polarization and campaign spending move in tandem, since spending is used by candidates to gain support for extreme platforms. Factors that contribute to both phenomena include the candidates’ desire for extreme platforms, and their ability to translate campaign spending into support for them. The latter insight generates new hypotheses about the potential causes of both rising polarization and spending

Fear, Appeasement, and the Effectiveness of Deterrence

Governments often fear the future intentions of their adversaries. In this article we show how this fear can make deterrent threats credible under seemingly incredible circumstances. We consider a model in which a defender seeks to deter a transgression with both intrinsic and military value. We examine how the defender’s fear of the challenger’s future belligerence affects his willingness to respond to the transgression with war. We derive conditions under which even a very minor transgression effectively “tests” for the challenger’s future belligerence, which makes the defender’s deterrent threat credible even when the transgression is objectively minor and the challenger is ex ante unlikely to be belligerent. We also show that fear can actually benefit the defender by allowing her to credibly deter. We apply the model to analyze a series of historical cases and show the robustness of our results to a variety of extensions

Policy-Specific Information and Informal Agenda Power

In Gilligan and Krehbiel's models of procedural choice in legislatures, a committee exerts costly effort to acquire private information about an unknown state of the world. Subsequent work on expertise, delegation, and lobbying has largely followed this approach. In contrast, we develop a model of information as policy valence. We use our model to analyze a procedural choice game, focusing on the effect of transferability, i.e., the extent to which information acquired to implement one policy option can be used to implement a different policy option. We find that when information is transferable, as in Gilligan and Krehbiel's models, closed rules can induce committee specialization. However, when information is policy‐specific, open rules are actually superior for inducing specialization. The reason for this surprising result is that a committee lacking formal agenda power has a greater incentive to exercise informal agenda power by exerting costly effort to generate high‐valence legislation

Competitive Policy Development

We present a model of policy development in which competing factions have different ideologies, yet agree on certain common objectives. Policy developers can appeal to a decision maker by making productive investments to improve the quality of their proposals. These investments are specific to a given proposal, which means that policy developers can potentially obtain informal agenda power. Competition undermines this agenda power, forcing policy developers to craft policies that are better for the decision maker. This beneficial effect is strongest if policy developers have divergent ideological preferences, because their intense desire to affect policy motivates them to develop higher quality proposals

Veto Players and Policy Entrepreneurship

Political institutions often use decision making procedures that create veto players—individuals or groups who, despite lacking direct decision making authority, nevertheless have the power to block policy change. In this paper we use the competitive policy development model of Hirsch and Shotts (2015) to examine how the presence of veto players effects outcomes when policies are developed endogenously. Consistent with spatial models of pivotal politics, veto players can induce gridlock, which is harmful to a centrist decisionmaker. But they can also have more subtle effects. Some of the effects are negative—for example, when the status quo is centrist, veto players dampen productive policy competition because of their resistance to change. But some of the effects are surprisingly positive. In particular, when the status quo benefits a veto player and there is a skilled policy entrepreneur who is highly motivated change it, the veto player forces the entrepreneur to develop a much higher quality proposal. This effect yields substantial benefits for a centrist decisionmaker. We also show that veto players can induce asymmetric patterns of policy development, with much greater activity by the faction that is more dissatisfied with the status quo

Whistleblowing and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy

One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the presence of a whistleblower can increase compliance by lower courts, beyond a certain point blowing the whistle is counterproductive and actually reduces compliance. Moreover, a whistleblower who is a “perfect ally” of the higher court (in terms of preferences) blows the whistle too often. Our model shows an important connection between the frequency of whistleblowing and the effectiveness of whistleblowing as a threat to induce compliance in hierarchical organizations

Experimentation and Persuasion in Political Organizations

Different beliefs about how to achieve shared goals are common in political organizations such as government agencies, campaigns, and NGOs. However, the consequences of such conflicts have not yet been explored. We develop a formal model in which a principal and an agent disagree about the right policy for achieving their shared goals. Disagreement creates a motivational problem, but we show how both observing policy outcomes and experimenting with policies can ameliorate it. We also show that the principal often defers to the agent in order to motivate him, thereby generating more informative policy outcomes and building future consensus. Most surprisingly, she sometimes allows the agent to implement his desired policy even when she is sure it is wrong, to persuade him through failure that he is mistaken. Using the model, we generate empirical implications about performance measurement and Presidential appointments in U.S. federal agencies