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"Data from a longitudinal study of Polish workers interviewed in 1988, 1993 and 1998 are used to test propositions about the connections between employment, attitude, and voting changes during the transition to a market economy. The results show that changes in attitudes about the reforms are associated with changes in voting, with those coming to favor reforms and their consequences voting for liberal parties, and vice versa for those coming to oppose the reforms and/or their consequences. Individuals making a successful transition and residents in areas with more employment in new firms are more likely to switch their attitudes to favor the reforms and vice versa for those who lose their jobs or who live in areas without new firms. " (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

The assumption that individual preferences, or attitudes, are fixed and exogenously determined is central to many studies of political and economic institutions, such as markets and elections. We present a Bayesian model of adaptive preferences and empirical evidence consistent with that model to argue that preferences are not always exogenous and fixed. The changing relationships between partisanship and preferences on civil rights issues between 1956 and 1964 and on the Vietnam War issue between 1968 and 1972 coincide with significant changes in the major parties' positions on these issues, suggesting that preferences are endogenous to the electoral process. We conclude with a discussion of the positive and normative implications of endogenous preferences.

An overview of the recent economic & political science literature on the importance of ideology in governmental decision making. Several problems in this research are identified in the context of the larger literature on legislative behavior. The statistical inconsistency of the commonly used methodologies based on interest group scores is also demonstrated. 1 Appendix, 54 References. Adapted from the source document.

We estimate a model of House members' roll call voting decisions embodying some hypotheses about representation, including estimates of the influence of district opinion on broad collective issues relative to personal economic interests, of the effect of electoral security on constituency responsiveness, and of the difference in constituency and party voting among Republicans and Democrats. This model is estimated with votes taken during deliberations on the 1978 Tax Reform Act, important because it was a significant change from the tax reforms passed in the late 1960s and 1970s, marked the first appearance of the Kemp-Roth proposed tax cut, and represented a concerted effort by Republicans to make tax policy a broad national issue. Findings indicate that constituent preferences for redistribution are important influences on representatives' decisions and that Republicans exhibited a greater degree of party voting than the Democrats while the Democrats better represented their constituent's preferences.

Public policies are the product of conflicting demands within society. These demands are both collective in nature and the product of individual interests. Individuals must balance these conflicting interests in developing their policy preferences. We estimate the role of collective and individual interests in preference formation, using tax policy as a substantive example. Survey data are used to estimate the model for evaluations of several tax policies debated during consideration of the 1978 Tax Revenue Act. Our analysis indicates that individual preferences for tax policies are greatly affected by attitudes towards collective issues—particularly redistribution attitudes—and by self-interest considerations. We also find that aggregate variables measuring individuals' local economies have significant effects on symbolic and self-interest preferences.

AbstractA model based upon the common concept of rent‐seeking behavior avoids an exclusive focus on the pecuniary motive in private institutions and the power motive in public institutions. Using this model, the case for privatization ranges from very strong to unpersuasive, with some fascinating intermediate cases. Where purchases are frequent, information is abundant, costs of a bad decision are small, externalities are minimal, and competition is the norm, privatization ought to be pursued. At the other extreme, in situations where externalities and collective interests abound, natural monopolies are dominant, distributional goals are important, or debate and experience will alter preferences, governmental determination of service levels and public provision should continue. Intermediate situations such as those involving education, health, and some aspects of enterprise development provide the most interesting and hotly debated areas. These intermediate situations have both private and collective characteristics, choices are made infrequently with little information, have monumental consequences, distributional considerations are critical, and public debate about the level and type of service substantially affects individual behavior.

This article presents a model of individuals' party identification that contrasts with previous models. Past models, with the few recent exceptions noted, assume a hierarchical relationship either from identification to other aspects of political behavior, such as the perception and evaluation of issues and candidates, or from these behaviors to party identifications. The model discussed here places party within a dynamic concept of the electoral process and tests several hypotheses about factors producing changes in identifications. The first factor, consistent with the spatial-type issue voting models, estimates the effects of the relative proximity of each party to the individual's own policy preferences. Second, we examine the effect of the actual voting decision on subsequent identifications, with the expectation that if votes differ from previous identifications, there is a resulting shift in partisanship. Finally, we examine the hypothesis that identifications become less susceptible to change as people age and accumulate political experience. When combined with other research, the results indicate a model of the electoral process in which party identifications are both influenced by circumstances specific to each election and influence other behaviors. This nonrecursive model has a number of implications for the development and evolution of individual and aggregate partisanship. These implications are discussed at the end of the article.