Suchergebnisse

Most of the theoretical work on purely redistributive taxation has presumed a two-party model in which the parties choose (affine) tax policies to attract a majority of voters. However, while majoritarian decision rules are the norm in legislatures, relatively few democratic electoral systems use simple majority rule at the electoral stage, adopting instead some form of multiparty proportional representation. Moreover, aggregate data suggest that average income tax-rates are higher and distributions of post-tax income flatter, in countries with proportional representation than in those with plurality rule. While there are other differences between these countries, this paper explores how variations in the political system per se influence equilibrium redistributive tax-rates and income distributions. In particular, a three-party proportional representation model is developed in which taxes are determined through legislative bargaining among successful electoral parties, and the fundamental economic decision for individuals is occupational choice. Political-economic equilibria for this model and for a two-party, winner-take-all, majoritarian system are derived and compared.

The focus of this paper is on individuals' decisions to seek access to influence a legislator's policy choice from a given binary agenda under uncertainty. In the model, influence is exclusively through the provision of information regarding the true state of the world, and money is used exclusively to seek access to the legislator to exert such influence. However, bias can occur through differences in individuals' willingness to contribute to seek access and through choice of argument at the lobbying stage, conditional on access being granted. Among the results are that the decision of moderates (i.e. those with state-dependent induced preferences over the agenda) to seek access is independent of others' decisions, but this is not true of extremists (those who unequivocally favour one or other of the two alternatives); that although the policy preferences of the legislator coincide with those of the moderates, the legislator often sets the required contribution from moderates higher than that from extremists and, moreover, this is so despite the fact that extremists seeking access offer an argument to the legislator which, although informative, gives negligible payoff gains to the legislator; and, finally, that (expected) "bias« in decision making typically exists and persists even when the size of extremist groups is negligible relative to that of the moderate group.

An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.

Talk in politics is effective only insofar as the speaker is able to persuade his or her audience of the relevance of some point, or the validity of some claim, contained in the speech. From a rational choice perspective, therefore, such speech making is a strategic activity in which speakers seek to influence the beliefs of decision makers. This paper is an informal introduction to rational choice models of political decision making involving the strategic use of speech.