Sabotage in Contests: A Survey

A contest is a situation in which individuals expend irretrievable resources to win valuable prize(s). ‘Sabotage’ is a deliberate and costly act of damaging a rival’s' likelihood of winning the contest. Sabotage can be observed in, e.g., sports, war, promotion tournaments, political or marketing campaigns. In this article, we provide a model and various perspectives on such sabotage activities and review the economics literature analyzing the act of sabotage in contests. We discuss the theories and evidence highlighting the means of sabotage, why sabotage occurs, and the effects of sabotage on individual players and on overall welfare, along with possible mechanisms to reduce sabotage. We note that most sabotage activities are aimed at the ablest player, the possibility of sabotage reduces productive effort exerted by the players, and sabotage may lessen the effectiveness of public policies, such as affirmative action, or information revelation in contests. We discuss various policies that a designer may employ to counteract sabotage activities. We conclude by pointing out some areas of future research

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude

How a firm can induce legislators to adopt a bad policy

This paper shows why a majority of legislators may vote for a policy that benefits a firm but harms all legislators. The firm may induce legislators to support the policy by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district where voters or their representative support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, so each legislator who seeks the firm’s investment votes for the policy, though all legislators would be better off if they all voted against the policy. And when votes reveal information about the district, the firm’s implicit promise or threat can be credible. Unlike influence mechanisms based on contributions or bribes, the behavior considered is time consistent and in line with the low campaign contributions by special interests

Permanent Campaigning: A Meta-Analysis and Framework for Measurement

Permanent campaigning emerged as a concept in the 1970s in studies of US politics but is now recognized as a universal phenomenon. Despite its long history, there has been no attempt to build a holistic picture of the elements that constitute a permanent campaign. Generally, researchers focus on tactical elements, situating their use within an overall strategy, but there is a lack of a broader methodological framework for holistically measuring adherence to the permanent campaigning. This article presents results of a meta-analysis of relevant research to provide a framework to understand how permanent campaigning is practiced. Our study showed there were three reasonably discrete forms of campaigning activities that had been identified: those in which permanent campaign strategies are related to capacity building and strategy; a second, in which permanent campaigning relates to paid and owned media; and a third in which earned media is the main focus. In mapping these studies, we identify the common features of permanent campaigning, identifying strong and weak indicators and the extent these are employed by the government, parties, or elected representatives and within which political systems: parliamentarism or presidentialism. Our framework can be applied in future comparative research to understand trends in political communication