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"Majorities"
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Rule by multiple majorities : a new theory of popular control
What does it mean to say that citizens have control over their leaders? In a democracy, citizens should have some control over how they are governed. If they do not participate directly in making policy, they ought to maintain control over the public officials who design policy on their behalf. Rule by Multiple Majorities develops a novel theory of popular control: an account of what it is, why democracy's promise of popular control is compatible with what we know about actual democracies, and why it matters. While social choice theory suggests there is no such thing as a 'popular will' in societies with at least minimal diversity of opinion, Ingham argues that multiple, overlapping majorities can nonetheless have control, at the same time. After resolving this conceptual puzzle, the author explains why popular control is a realistic and compelling ideal for democracies, notwithstanding voters' low levels of information and other shortcomings.
Book
What Do We Learn about Voter Preferences from Conjoint Experiments?
Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (AMCE), is not well defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result, we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed.
Journal Article
When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?
Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus-building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93rd–110th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.
Journal Article
Coups and Democracy
This study uses new data on coups d’état and elections to document a striking development: whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections. The article argues that after the Cold War, international pressure influenced the consequences of coups. In the post-Cold War era, countries that were most dependent on Western aid were the first to embrace competitive elections after their coups. This theory also helps explain the pronounced decline in the number of coups since 1991. While the coup d’état has been (and still is) the single most important factor leading to the downfall of democratic governments, these findings indicate that the new generation of coups has been far less harmful for democracy than their historical predecessors.
Journal Article
Some characterizations of resolute majority rules
In this paper we consider decision functions in which voters have three options and one of them is abstention or indifference and the output is a binary decision between two alternatives so that a tie is not possible. These resolute decision functions appear frequently in grading, in some sport competitions, in voting situations in which the status quo is put to the vote, etc. It is a more restricted case of the voting context considered in the seminal article by Kenneth May on decision functions, published in Econometrica in 1952, because the output set does not admit a tie. Among these resolute decision functions we focus on the study of majority functions, in which the number of favorable votes to an alternative must be strictly greater than the number of votes against it. This work provides an axiomatic characterization for the set of majority functions and for the relative majority function with status quo bias. Both characterizations are based on weaker versions of neutrality. Other complementary characterizations are also provided.
Journal Article
Persuading Voters
In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a nonunanimous voting rule, she exploits voters' heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple-majority rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse off due to the politician's influence. We characterize voters' preferences over electoral rules and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the politician to supply a more informative experiment.
Journal Article
The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending
Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.
Journal Article