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Publications

Constitutions and Policy Comparisons (March 2008)

Published in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Working Papers

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

Secret Santa: Anonymity, Signaling, and Conditional Cooperation (July 2009)
with David Reinstein

Costly signalling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal's cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signalling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of signalling in a group is observable, but individual effort is not, then freeriders can behave selfishly without being detected, and group members will learn about the average level of commitment among the group. We develop a formal model, and give examples of institutions that enable anonymous signalling, including ritual, religion, music and dance, voting, charitable donations, and military institutions. We explore the value of anonymity in the laboratory with a repeated two-stage public goods game with exclusion. When first-stage contributions are anonymous, subjects are better at predicting second-stage behavior, and maintain a substantially higher level of cooperation.

Latest changes: Model finalized. Experiment run and written up. New title.

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

Accepted for publication in the British Journal of Political Science. 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: expanded conclusion; appendix of competing proposals; appendix summarizing stage 1 logits.

Explaining Institutional Change: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy (January 2009)

In existing models of direct democratic institutions, the median voter benefits, but representative politicians are harmed since their policy choices can be overridden. This is a puzzle, since representative politicians were instrumental in creating these institutions. I build a model of direct democracy that explains why a representative might benefit from tying his or her own hands in this way. The key features are (1) that voters are uncertain, both about their representative’s preferences, and about the best policy to adopt; (2) that direct and representative institutions interact: referendums are introduced in response to government policy choices, and the availability of referendums alters the voting decision in representative elections. The model shows that some politicians benefit from the introduction of direct democracy, since they are more likely to survive representative elections. Historical evidence from the introduction of the initiative, referendum and recall in America broadly supports the theory, which also explains two empirical results that have puzzled scholars: legislators are trusted less, but reelected more, in US states with direct democracy. I conclude by discussing the potential for incomplete information and signaling models to improve our understanding of institutional change.

Latest changes:  correction to Proposition 2. Shortened introduction.


Work in Progress

(Papers here may have gaps, informal comments, et cetera, and may change rather fast. You have been warned!)

Cooperation in Volent Conflict: a Model of Common Fate (March 2009)

The stylized facts of intergroup conflict include the following: most groups live at peace; violence can erupt suddenly, and has an important symbolic dimension; group identity is easily created even by outsiders, especially by threats. No current theory satisfactorily explains all of these features. I suggest a simple explanation for all these: the dynamics of cooperation in conflicts. When these are taken into account, participation in conflict may be rational for materially self-interested individuals, even without incentives such as punishment from one's own side. Modelling the collective action problem formally leads to different predictions from a model with unified groups. The conclusion discusses possible applications to the formal theory and social psychology of group conflict.

First draft.