Working Papers 

These papers (possibly in older versions) are also available to download from SSRN.

Constitutions and Policy Comparisons (March 2008)

Accepted for publication in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics. Voters in democracies can learn from the experience of neighbouring states: about policy in a direct democracy (“policy experimentation”), about the quality of their politicians in a representative democracy (“yardstick competition”). Learning between states creates spillovers from policy choice, and also from constitutional choice. I model these spillovers in a simple principal-agent framework, and show that voter welfare may be maximized by a mixture of representative and direct democratic states. Because of this, we may need to reinterpret empirical work relating direct democracy to voter welfare. Also, I show that the optimal mix of constitutions cannot always be achieved in a constitutional choice equilibrium involving many states.

Latest changes: new section on weakening model assumptions; changes in response to comments from various presentations.

Sophisticated Voting on Competing Ballot Measures: Spatial Theory and Evidence (March 2008) 

Under Revise and Resubmit at the BJPS. Are voters sophisticated? Rational choice theories of voting assume that they are. Students of voting behaviour are more doubtful. I examine voting in a particularly demanding setting: direct democratic elections in which two competing proposals are on the ballot. I develop a spatial model of voting and proposal qualification with competing proposals. If voters are naïve, then competing proposals can be used to block the direct democratic route to change. But if voters vote strategically, competing proposals can bring outcomes closer to the median voter. Examining voting intention data from California polls, I find evidence that some votes are cast strategically even in these demanding circumstances. However, the level of strategic voting appears to be affected by the tenor of the election campaign.

Latest changes: retitled from "Counter-Initiatives: Spatial Theory and Evidence"; simplified and reworked proofs in appendix; simplified presentation of proofs in main paper; focus on testing voter sophistication; new data sources found and empirics redone.

Work in Progress

Anonymity, Signaling and Ritual (July 2008)

First draft. Actors who need to convince others of their preferences or abilities may do so by sending a costly, hard-to-fake signal. Across the social sciences, costly signaling has been proposed as an explanation for many kinds of behaviour. These explanations face a problem: unless the signal's cost and the future benefits of commitment are about equal, freeriders will have an incentive to send the signal and behave selfishly later. Signaling may then either fail in its function of weeding out selfish behaviour, or be prohibitively costly for participants. The problem is partly solved if the average level of signaling in a group is observable, but individual effort is not. Then, as freeriders can and will behave selfishly without being detected, group members learn about the average level of commitment among the group. I develop a formal model, and give examples of institutions to preserve anonymity, focusing particularly on the anthropological study of rituals including music and dance. Other applications include voting, anonymous comments and charitable donations. The importance of anonymity in signaling to outsiders is also discussed.