Voting as a Credible Threat

We offer a rationale for elections that take place in the shadow of power. Factions unhappy with policy can threaten violence. But when they lack common knowledge about (i) one another's rationality, and (ii) their chances of victory at arms, mutual overconfidence can precipitate civil war. We argue that elections can clarify the likely consequences of violence, and so facilitate peaceful resolution. Our theory is based on the recognition that both voting and fighting are intrinsically correlated actions: individuals who undertake the individually irrational act of voting are unusually prone the individually irrational act of voluntary combat.

A Model of the Political Economy of the United States

We develop and test a model of joint determination of economic growth and national election results in the United States. The formal model, which combines developments in the rational choice analysis of the behavior of economic agents and voters, leads to a system of equations in which the dependent variables are the growth rate and the vote shares in presidential and congressional elections. Our estimates support the theoretical claims that growth responds to unanticipated policy shifts and that voters use both on-year and midterm elections to balance the two parties. On the other hand, we find no support for "rational" retrospective voting. We do reconfirm, in a fully simultaneous framework, the "naive" retrospective voting literate's finding that the economy has a strong effect on presidential voting. We find congressional elections unaffected by the economy, except as transmitted by presidential coattails.Economic

A Model of the Political Economy of the United States

We develop and test a model of joint determination of the rate of economic growth and the results of presidential and Congressional elections in the United States. In our model, economic agents and voters have rational expectations. Economic policy varies as a function of control of the White House and the two-party shares in Congress. Politics affects growth through unanticipated policy shifts following the outcome of presidential elections. The economy influences elections as voters use past realizations of growth to make rational inferences about the "competency" level of the incumbent administration. Elections are also influenced by voters using their midterm Congressional votes to moderate the policies of the incumbent administration. The theoretical model is used to generate a recursive system of equations in which the dependent variables are the growth rate and the vote shares in presidential and Congressional elections. The theory implies several restrictions on the equations. Tests of the restrictions generally support the model; however, the results support the traditional view of naive retrospective voting as well as the "rational" retrospective voting posited in the model.

The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call

We develop a Bayesian estimation procedure for spatial models of roll call voting. We show how a Bayesian approach to roll call analysis overcomes shortcomings and idiosyncracies of NOMINATE (some of which are not widely recognized). Our Bayesian approach (a) applies to any legislative setting, irrespective of size, legislative extremism, or the number of roll calls available for analysis; (b) provides a mechanism for directly incorporating auxiliary information as to the dimensionality of the underlying policy space, the identity of extremist legislators, key votes and the evolution of the legislative agenda; (c) lets us integrate measurement of legislative preferences with the analysis of those preferences. Notes to NEMP, May 2002 This paper sets out our ‘‘basic setup’ ’ (a Bayesian statistical operationalization of the Euclidean spatial voting model with roll call data), and constrasts it with the NOMINATE algorithms of Poole and Rosenthal. In the talk I will be considering extensions to our model, so as to accommodate and/or test conjectures in the literature on legislative politics (most prominently, the ‘‘party discipline’ ’ hypothesis, and conjectures about legislative responsiveness to constituency interests)