Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people’s reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome.We find that subjects reactmuch less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people’s aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people’s main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals

The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' preferences when voters are attentive. Accordingly, news media's influence on legislative behavior should be most apparent near elections and dependent on the partisan composition of the constituency. We capitalize on the incremental rollout of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s to evaluate our theoretical predictions. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party position on divisive votes, but only in the waning months of the election cycle and among those members who represent districts with a sizable portion of Republican voters

Shirking and slacking in parliament

How and why do the activities of members of parliament (MPs) change in response to electoral constraints? In this paper, we draw on unique and newly collected data from the Swiss federal chambers and two cantonal parliaments (Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land) to explore the effects of electoral constraints. Leveraging variation in mandatory term limits, we study the extent to which term-limited MPs engage in shirking---i.e. move away from their principal, whether it be the party and/or voters---and slacking---i.e. reduce their parliamentary activities. Our analysis, which draws on a combination of novel roll-call votes and speech data, yields mixed results: while there is no evidence of shirking by term-limited MPs in the cantonal parliaments, we find some indications of such behavior amongst term-limited legislators in the federal chambers. These latter legislators also engage is some limited slacking, which is not observable in the cantonal parliaments. These findings shed light on the (political) implications of term limits, and the effect of electoral constraints on legislator behaviour