Behavioral Theory of Elections - Softcover

Bendor, Jonathan; Diermeier, Daniel; Siegel, David A.; Ting, Michael M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 069113507X ISBN 13: 9780691135076

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors--politicians as well as voters--are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor's aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later.

Based on this idea of adaptation, the authors construct formal models of party competition, turnout, and voters' choices of candidates. These models predict substantial turnout levels, voters sorting into parties, and winning parties adopting centrist platforms. In multiparty elections, voters are able to coordinate vote choices on majority-preferred candidates, while all candidates garner significant vote shares. Overall, the behavioral theory and its models produce macroimplications consistent with the data on elections, and they use plausible microassumptions about the cognitive capacities of politicians and voters. A computational model accompanies the book and can be used as a tool for further research.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Bendor is the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Political Economics and Organizations at Stanford University. Daniel Diermeier is the IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice and professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University. David A. Siegel is assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. Michael M. Ting is associate professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Traditional approaches in political science and economics have failed to explain why people vote or take other actions that apparently have no basis in self-interest. In this pathbreaking book, the authors provide the analytical foundations for a new behavioral theory of political participation."--Stephen Ansolabehere, Harvard University

"The authors apply the insights of psychology and bounded rationality to construct a new foundation for our understanding of how voters and politicians behave in complex strategic environments. Bold and highly original, this fascinating book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in elections and will fundamentally reshape how we think about political behavior."--Alan Gerber, Yale University

"Given the complexity of social processes, many social scientists question the assumption of rationality underlying game theoretic models of elections. The natural solution, to assume bounded rationality, has been stifled by the abundance of possible alternative models. This wonderful book examines a class of models grounded in aspiration-based learning and shows how they produce deep, explanatory insights into voter choice, turnout, party competition, and electoral outcomes. A tour de force!"--Scott E. Page, author of The Difference and Diversity and Complexity

"Distinctive in its use of aspiration-based adjustment models as a replacement for the traditional rational choice approaches, this book is clearly the first to develop a coherent model of elections based on reinforcement learning. Clearly written and effectively presented, it will advance the debate on the use of both behavioral and rational choice models in political science."--Mark Fey, University of Rochester

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Behavioral Theory of Elections

By Jonathan Bendor Daniel Diermeier David A. Siegel Michael M. Ting

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13507-6

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................xiChapter One Bounded Rationality and Elections....................................1Chapter Two Aspiration-based Adaptive Rules......................................23Chapter Three Party Competition..................................................52Chapter Four Turnout.............................................................80Chapter Five Voter Choice........................................................109Chapter Six An Integrated Model of Two-Party Elections...........................132Chapter Seven Elections with Multiple Parties....................................161Chapter Eight Conclusions: Bounded Rationality and Elections.....................191Appendix A Proofs................................................................205Appendix B The Computational Model...............................................215Bibliography......................................................................233Index.............................................................................249

Chapter One

Bounded Rationality and Elections

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality. —Herbert Simon (1957, p. 198; original emphasis)

One may speak of grand campaign strategy, rationally formulated and executed with precision, but a great deal of campaign management rests on the hunches that guide day-to-day decisions. The lore of politics includes rules of thumb that are supposed to embody the wisdom of political experience as guides to action. —V. O. Key (1964, p. 468)

An intellectual revolution has occurred in political science: the diffusion of rational choice theories. The study of elections has been one of the most receptive subfields. All of its major components—party competition (Downs 1957), turnout (e.g., Riker and Ordeshook 1968), and voters' choices (Downs's spatial-proximity theory; see Merrill and Grofman 1999)—have been strongly influenced by rational choice models.

We think this has been a salutary development for both the discipline in general and the study of elections in particular. The rational choice program has given political science a much-needed degree of intellectual coherence. This new-found coherence connects subfields both by causal claims—we can now more easily see the connections between foreign and domestic politics via, e.g., models of interest groups on trade policy (Grossman and Helpmann 1994)—and by giving us ideas that unify previously disconnected subfields—e.g., problems of credible commitment in governmental borrowing (North and Weingast 1989) and in fights over succession (Powell 2004). Rational choice theories have generated some predictions that have stood up rather well to empirical tests: delegation to congressional committees (Krehbiel 1991), macroeconomic effects of partisan elections (Alesina and Rosenthal 1995), bureaucratic independence (Huber and Shipan 2002), fiscal effects of constitutions (Persson and Tabellini 2003), and cabinet formation and stability in parliamentary democracies (Diermeier, Eraslan, and Merlo 2003; Ansolabehere et al. 2005). Some rational choice predictions, however, have been spectacularly falsified—famously so regarding turnout. Nevertheless, these theories have been wrong in interesting ways and so have stimulated much research.

Further, rational choice theorizing is now flourishing in subfields which once had been terra incognita to rigorous theories of decision making: e.g., the study of democratization (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006) and politics in violence-prone systems (Dal Bó, Dal Bó, and Di Tella 2006). All in all, no research program in political science has been more productive.

But nobody is perfect. Not even a research program. The major weakness of the rational choice program is well known: virtually all models in this program assume that human beings are fully rational, and of course we are not. Some of our cognitive constraints are obvious. For example, our attention is sharply limited: we can consciously think about only one topic at a time. Some are more subtle: e.g., we are sometimes sensitive to small differences in how problems are described (framing effects). But their existence is indisputable. And there is also considerable evidence (e.g., Rabin 1998; Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman 2002) that these constraints can significantly affect judgment and choice.

Rational choice theorists have tried a variety of responses to these criticisms of bounded rationality. For a long time they tended to be dismissive (famously, Friedman 1953), but as experimental evidence about cognitive constraints accumulated, a certain unease set in. Most scholars working in the rational choice program know about the obvious cognitive constraints, and many have read the critiques of Simon and of Tversky and Kahneman and their coauthors. Indeed, today enough scholars in the home disciplines of the rational choice program, economics and game theory, take bounded rationality sufficiently seriously so that new subfields—behavioral economics (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Rabin 2004), behavioral game theory (Camerer 2003), and behavioral finance (Barberis and Thaler 2003)—are now flourishing. (As evidence for this claim, one needs only to sample a few mainstream journals in economics and game theory and count the number of papers presenting behavioral models.) Things have heated up quite a bit in the home disciplines of rational choice theory—more so, it seems, than in political science. This is ironic, given that two of the most important behavioral theorists, Herbert Simon and James March, were trained in political science and, as indicated by the many disciplinary awards they have won, we still claim them as ours. As it is said, colonials can be more royalist than the king.

A change is overdue. The issues raised by the bounded rationality program—the impact of cognitive constraints on behavior—are as pertinent to politics as they are to markets, perhaps even more so. This is evident in the subfield of elections. Indeed, it is in this domain that the rational choice program has encountered one of its most spectacular anomalies: turnout. The problem is well known: as Fiorina put it, "Is turnout the paradox that ate rational choice theory?" (1990, p. 334). Canonical rational choice models of turnout, whether decision-theoretic or game-theoretic, predict very low turnout in equilibrium: if participation were intense, then the chance of being pivotal would be very small, so voting would be suboptimal for most people. Yet, of course, many citizens do vote: even in the largest electorates, participation rates are at least 50 percent in national elections. The difference between prediction and observation passes the ocular test: one needs only to eyeball the data to see the anomaly. Of course, as is often the case with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 069113507X
• ISBN 13: 9780691135076
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar