Bis zu 50 % günstiger als neu 3 Jahre rebuy Garantie Professionelles Refurbishment

Derzeit nicht verfügbar

Handgeprüfte Gebrauchtware

Bis zu 50 % günstiger als neu

Der Umwelt zuliebe

Three Essays in Political Economy

Lukas Schmid (Unbekannter Einband, Englisch)

Keine Bewertungen vorhanden

Optischer Zustand

Beschreibung

Both economist and political scientist agree that the composition of the constituency is an important driver of policy outcomes. The existing literature has tried to find explanations why people turn out to vote. While we still lack an adequate theory of political participation in large elections, there is a broad consensus that rational turnout behavior comprises a trade-off between costs and benefits of individual actors. The seminal work of Downs (1957) was the first to stress the so called “paradox of (non-) voting”. In large elections, individual’s probability to change the outcome is vanishingly small. Therefore, citizens should abstain even in the presence of only minor positive costs. Yet, the theoretical predictions of zero turnout are contradicted by positive rates of participation in all Western countries. Recent approaches to rational voting turnout can be broadly divided into three categories. The first strand endogenizes whether a voter is pivotal (Ledyard, 1984; Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983, 1985; Levine and Palfrey, 2007). The second argues that information asymmetries dissuade people from voting (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1996b, 1999; Battaglini and Morton, 2008). The third integrates the civic duty component, originally formulated by Riker and Ordeshook (1968), into a structural model of group voting (Coate and Conlin, 2004; Feddersen and Sandroni, 2006). This thesis aims to make a contribution to the turnout literature by using the system of direct democracy in Switzerland in combination with the country’s decentralized electoral legislation that generates considerable variation in the costs to voting. In a nutshell, the second chapter examines the long-term effects of a severely sanctioned voting norm in the canton of Vaud. The compulsory voting norm had been in place for more than 25 years before being abolished in 1949. Individuals in Vaud were confronted with the same choices as their fellow citizens in the rest of the country where compulsory voting was not introduced. The third chapter explores whether cost shocks have an effect on the turnout decision of voters. I use data from the post-vote survey (FORS 2011), which I combine with a dataset on local rain data as well as information on the stepwise introduction of postal voting in Swiss cantons. Both variables generate large variations in the costs of voting. The fourth chapter focuses on the mobilization power of referendums. Specifically, I classify proposals according to their a priori mobilization power and test whether spillovers from concurrent proposals change voting outcomes of less mobilizing proposals. The analysis explores whether large spillovers increase the degree of status quo bias and government support. The empirical work on political participation has revealed that the turnout decision depends on a number of factors. While social pressure (Gerber and Green, 2000; Gerber, Green, and Larimer, 2008; Funk, 2010) and altruism (Fowler, 2006) have been considered as important determinants of turnout for a long time, recent contributions stress the role of genes (Fowler and Dawes, 2008) and information asymmetries (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1996b; Battaglini and Morton, 2008). However, costs and benefits are at the core of the rational choice approach. Recent models of group voting (Coate and Conlin, 2004; Feddersen and Sandroni, 2006) as well as models multidimensional voting decision models (Krishna and Morgan, 2011a) and pivotal-voting models (Ledyard, 1984; Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983, 1985) base their theory on the assumption that voters have heterogenous voting costs. As a consequence, rational voters use cutpoint strategies which refers to the fact that there is exactly one voter who is indifferent between his voting costs and the benefits from going to the polls. All individuals with voting costs below this cutpoint value go to the polls, those with higher voting costs abstain. Chapter 2, which is joint work with Dominik Hangartner and Michael Bechtel, focuses on the long-term and spillover effects of compulsory voting. The chapters examines norm internalization in the context of a severely sanctioned and long-standing compulsory voting law in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Social norms such as fairness, conditional cooperation, or inequality aversion are prominent explanations for the empirical puzzle that individuals often provide public goods at levels that exceed those predicted by orthodox theory (Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010; Rege and Telle, 2004; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004; Fehr and Gächter, 2001; Fehr and Schmidt, 1999; Lindbeck, 1997; Coleman, 1990; Hollaender, 1990; Ullmann-Margalit, 1977). The study of the evolution of social norms has central to all social sciences, but most of the existing literature focuses primarily on the evolution of norms in the absence of state intervention (Ostrom, 2000; Gueth, 1995; Axelrod, 1986), most prominently on norms as a result of repeated interactions between rational egoists and conditional cooperators (Gueth, 1995; Axelrod, 1986) or between individuals that experience envy and altruism (Teraji, 2007; Fehr and Gächter, 2001). However, we have very limited knowledge whether individuals internalize sanctioned legal norms in the context of political participation. Many previous studies show that turnout tends to be higher in countries that practice compulsory voting (Jackman, 1987; Blais and Young, 1996; Panagopoulos, 2011b). Most of these studies use national turnout data, which has—from a methodological point of view—two major drawbacks. First, countries are different in both their observed and unobserved factors. Second, countries are likely to be confronted with different country-specific shocks over time. The chapter advances existing approaches to compulsory voting in two dimensions. On the one hand, data on Swiss cantonal is used to make a comparison. These units are much more similar with regard to their covariates such as the institutional setting and political culture. On the other hand, the analysis is based on a synthetic control method (Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller, 2010), which is a recently developed empirical strategy to chose a control group for a single-intervention case in a data driven manner. The results are important for the literature in political economy as participation in referendums and elections constitutes “collective action par excellence” (Shepsle and Bonchek, 1997, p. 251), as it is a very important means of citizens in order to hold elected offiials accountable (Frey, 1994; Dal Bó, Foster, and Putterman, 2010; Snyder and Strömberg, 2010; Lijphart, 1997). Furthermore, from a normative point of view, some have argued that high levels of turnout are desirable because they increase the legitimacy of the political system (Dahl, 1989; Lijphart, 1997; Franklin, 2004). Chapter 3 tackles the question of how voters react to cost shocks in large elections. I use data on individual turnout for over 80 referendum days and combine it with data on the variation in the costs of voting, namely rainfall and the introduction of postal voting. Rainfall exhibits considerable variation not only between cantons but also between referendum days. The analysis pays special attention to where individuals lie on the cost distribution. I make use of detailed information on their average participation per 10 referenda which is used as a measure of individual costs. Rainfall data has mainly been used as an exogenous increase in the voting costs for aggregate data of US elections (Knack, 1994; DiNardo, 2007). Another source of variation comes from the sovereignty of Swiss cantons in terms of electoral law, both on the cantonal and federal level. This autonomy created a situation where the earliest canton (Basel-Town) introduced unconditional postal voting in 1978, whereas the last canton (Ticino) did so in 2005. This variation has been used in Luechinger, Rosinger, and Stutzer (2007) and Hodler, Luechinger, and Stutzer (2012) who find considerable effects on aggregate turnout levels. Funk (2010) finds that the effect of postal voting varies between smaller and bigger municipalities because it not only lowers voting costs, but also removes social pressure that is higher in small municipalities. An important aspect of these changes in the costs to voting is the question whether it leads to a change in the constituency that favors certain groups more than others. In his presidential address, Lijphart (1997) expresses the concern that low levels of turnout is a “serious democratic problem” since these translate into a class-bias of political influence. The main argument put forward is that disadvantaged people are less likely to vote which is aggravated when costs to voting, such as diffcult registration procedures, are high (Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980). Hansford and Gomez (2010) use the variation in rainfall as an instrument for turnout and show that higher participation helps the Democrats. While chapter 2 and 3 are related to cost shocks, chapter 4 focuses on variation in mobilization power. An important component of democracy in Switzerland is the fact that various proposals are at stake on the same referendum day. As a consequence, most voters cast their vote for all proposals once they have decided to turn out. This creates a situation in which the endogenous mobilization mechanism is not working and relatively distant voters are mobilized for proposals they would not vote on otherwise. Another effect is that highly mobilizing proposals reduce the information level among voters. Therefore, it is likely that this also affects the outcome of a vote. If it does, the timing of referendums could be strategically influenced by the government based similar to the timing of elections (Smith, 2003; Keppo, Smith, and Davydov, 2008). More specifically, the existing literature predicts two sorts of effects coming from additional relatively uninformed voters. First, the research on risk attitudes has revealed that people with lower education and knowledge are more risk averse (Frederick, 2005; Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, and Sunde, 2010; Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Sunde, Schupp, and Wagner, 2011), which would lead to higher aggregate preferences for the status quo. Second, the literature on the European Union has put forward the idea that referendums and elections are “secondorder” national elections that are used as a means to punish the government (Reif and Schmitt, 1980; Van der Eijk and Franklin, 1996; Garry, Marsh, and Sinnot, 2005). Both theoretical predictions will be examined empirically. Weniger zeigen

Dieses Produkt haben wir gerade leider nicht auf Lager.

ab 33,99 €

Derzeit nicht verfügbar

Handgeprüfte Gebrauchtware

Bis zu 50 % günstiger als neu

Der Umwelt zuliebe

Produktinformationen

Technische Daten

Erscheinungsdatum

04.11.2013

Sprache

Englisch

EAN

9783866245921

Herausgeber

Winter Industries

Serien- oder Bandtitel

Dissertation Premium

Sonderedition

Nein

Autor

Lukas Schmid

Seitenanzahl

182

Auflage

Einbandart

Unbekannter Einband

Bandzählung

1692

Schlagwörter

Compulsory Voting, Information Aggregation, Turnout, Rain, Costs of Voting

Höhe

210 mm

Breite

14.8 cm

Warnhinweise und Sicherheitsinformationen

Informationen nach EU Data Act

Bewertungen

-.-

Leider noch keine Bewertungen

Sicher bei rebuy kaufen

Sehr Gut, 4.52/5.00

Aus 200.000+ Bewertungen

Schreib die erste Bewertung für dieses Produkt!

Wenn du eine Bewertung für dieses Produkt schreibst, hilfst du allen Kund:innen, die noch überlegen, ob sie das Produkt kaufen wollen. Vielen Dank, dass du mitmachst!