Four Essays In Positive Political Economy

Author : Thomas Allen Choate
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (11 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Essays in Political Economy written by Thomas Allen Choate and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation addresses important questions in the social science of democratic political institutions. The three constituent essays use formal models to construct theories of often observed, but under-examined, features of collective decision-making in government. The first essay distinguishes textual ambiguity in laws from other types of uncertainty about policy and proposes an intra-legislature cause of ambiguous laws. Namely, conflict over policy can reduce (even rational, policy-concerned) legislators' incentives to exert effort in searching for and fixing ambiguous text. As a consequence, ambiguous laws are likely to arise under general conditions. Institutional changes adopted in order to reduce ambiguity, e.g., reducing legislators' costs of searching bills, may not have the intended effect in certain strategic settings. The second essay relates three prior literatures on population heterogeneity, state capacity, and the distribution of power between central and local governments. In a multi-state model, diverse citizens vote for the level of government capacity and the spatial policy in both their own state and the entire nation. As in the first essay, policy conflict is shown to undermine provision of what is commonly perceived to be a common good: here, the capacity of a government to implement laws effectively. For plausible population preferences, government capacity can be inefficiently over-provided. The interaction effect between state and national capacity has significant consequences for the distribution of power to implement policy between those two levels of government. When capacities are complements, state-level preference homogeneity can assist in the development of national government capacity. The third essay investigates the well-worn question of strong legislative party formation in the novel setting of distributive politics. In the three-player bargaining model, two legislators with partisan ties decide whether one should delegate his proposal rights to the other, in turn, gaining additional proposal rights through an institutional privilege of the majority party leader. Even with this institutional advantage, partisan ties must still be strong for delegation to be chosen.