Publication: Essays in political economy
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2016-05
Defense date
2016-06-24
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Abstract
This thesis is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter, I examine
a voting model where two political parties have fixed positions on a unidimensional
policy space but where the implemented policy is the convex
combination of the two positions and study the effects of opinion polls on
election results and social welfare. Voters are completely agnostic about
the distribution of preferences and gain sequential and partial information
through series of opinion polls. Voters' behavior is driven in part by regret
minimization. The mass of undecided voters decreases monotonically with
the number of polls, but may not necessarily disappear. Voters who remain
undecided have centrist ideologies. Finally, social welfare is not necessarily
increasing in the number of polls: having more polls is not always better.
Features of the model are con firmed by empirical evidence.
In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Agustin Casas and
Guillermo Diaz, we evaluate the effect of an institutional provision designed
to increase accountability of local officials, and we show that its implementation
can lead to a distribution of power within the legislature which is not
consistent with voters' true preferences. The cause of this inconsistency is
the ballot design which asymmetrically affects the officials listed on it. We
analyze the case of the Lima's 2013 city legislature recall referendum and
show that the design of the referendum ballot had adverse and signifficant effects on the composition of the Lima's city legislature. We also show that
the election results with more \neutral" ballot designs would have been signifficantly different, and the composition of the legislature would have been
more representative of voters' true preferences. More specifically, we use our
results to simulate the outcome of the election with a random order of candidates.
Even though the voters' fatigue is still present, it affects all parties
equally, obtaining a more faithful representation of the voters' preferences.
Finally, the third chapter is a joint work with Marco Serena. For small
electorates, the probability of casting the pivotal vote drives one's willingness
to vote, however the existence of costs of voting incentivizes ones abstention. In two-alternative pivotal-voter models, this trade-off has been extensively
studied under private information on the cost of voting. We complement the
literature by providing an analysis under complete information, extending
the analysis of Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting.
Public Choice. 41, 7-53]. If the cost of voting is sufficiently high at least
for supporters of one of the two alternatives, the equilibrium is unique,
and fully characterized. If instead the cost of voting is sufficiently low for
everyone, we characterize three classes of equilibria and we find that all
equilibria must belong to one of these three classes, regardless of the number
of individuals. Furthermore we focus on equilibria which are continuous in
the cost of voting. We show that this equilibrium refinement pins down a
unique equilibrium. We conclude by discussing an application of our findings
to redistribution of wealth.
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Keywords
EconomÃa polÃtica, Elecciones, Análisis matemático, Modelo matemático