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We study a multi-dimensional collective decision under incomplete information. Agents have Euclidean preferences and vote by simple majority on each issue (dimension), yielding the coordinate-wise median. Judicious rotations of the orthogonal axes -- the issues that are voted upon -- lead to welfare improvements. If the agents' types are drawn from a distribution with independent marginals then, under weak conditions, voting on the original issues is not optimal. If the marginals are identical (but not necessarily independent), then voting first on the total sum and next on the differences is often welfare superior to voting on the original issues. We also provide various lower bounds on incentive efficiency: in particular, if agents' types are drawn from a log-concave density with I.I.D. marginals, a second-best voting mechanism attains at least 88% of the first-best efficiency. Finally, we generalize our method and some of our insights to preferences derived from distance functions based on inner products.

Selective immigration policies set lower barriers to entry for skilled workers. However, simple economic intuition suggests that skilled majorities should welcome unskilled immigrants and protect skilled natives. This paper studies the voting over a selective policy in a two-country, three-factor model with skilled and unskilled labor, endogenous migration decisions, costly border enforcement and aversion to immigration. Results show that heterogeneity in capital distribution forces skilled voters to form a coalition with unskilled voters, who become pivotal. The voting outcome is therefore biased towards the preferences of the latter, and consists in a selective protectionism . Finally, immigration aversion helps to explain why skilled majorities do not bring down entry barriers against unskilled workers.

Why are social security transfers associated with retirement rules? This paper focuses on the political interactions between retirement and social security. Using a probabilistic voting approach, it analyzes why old people are induced to retire in order to receive pension transfers from the young. A crucial hypothesis is that leisure in old age represents a “merit good,” which is positively valued by all agents in the society, young and old. Thus, the politicians choose to tax the labor income of the old, to induce them to retire. Retirement increases the level of ideological homogeneity of the old. In fact, once retired, the elderly are more “single-minded,” since they only care about redistributive issues, such as pensions. This increase in their political power allows them to win the political game and to receive a positive transfer from the young (social security). Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

This article illustrates how voting rules used to pass a piece of legislation and the structure of the legislation, in terms of whether or not it has single or multiple issue dimensions, influence the frequency and the purpose of position changes in legislative negotiations. Through analysis of data on a set of legislative proposals negotiated in the European Union, I show that position changes are less common under unanimity rule than under majority rule. More importantly, I argue and show that when the negotiated legislation is multidimensional (i.e., contains multiple issues) and the voting rule is unanimity, position changing is a lucrative strategy for legislators. Multidimensional legislation creates opportunities for logrolling, and legislators' veto power under the unanimity rule enables them to exploit these opportunities. Accordingly, under this scenario, legislators often engage in what I call a within-legislation logroll and secure favorable legislative outcomes.

Using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), we estimate voter turnout and vote choice within deeply interacted subgroups: subsets of the population that are defined by multiple demographic and geographic characteristics. This article lays out the models and statistical procedures we use, along with the steps required to fit the model for the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Though MRP is an increasingly popular method, we improve upon it in numerous ways: deeper levels of covariate interaction, allowing for nonlinearity and nonmonotonicity, accounting for unequal inclusion probabilities that are conveyed in survey weights, postestimation adjustments to turnout and voting levels, and informative multidimensional graphical displays as a form of model checking. We use a series of examples to demonstrate the flexibility of our method, including an illustration of turnout and vote choice as subgroups become increasingly detailed, and an analysis of both vote choice changes and turnout changes from 2004 to 2008.

Item response theory models for roll-call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which those votes are about common issues. We demonstrate our approach with votes and opinion texts from the U.S. Supreme Court, using latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the extent to which different issues were at stake in different cases and estimating justice preferences within each of those issues. This approach can be applied using a variety of unsupervised and supervised topic models for text, community detection models for networks, or any other tool capable of generating discrete or mixture categorization of subject matter from relevant vote-specific metadata.

In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized as historical,multidimensional,disaggregated, and transparent. We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice.

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), a common simplification of the main theme is that because the rate of return on capital r exceeds the growth rate of the economy g, the inequality of wealth is destined to increase indefinitely over time. In my view, the magnitude of the gap between r and g is indeed one of the important forces that can explain historical magnitudes and variations in wealth inequality. However, I do not view r > g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century, or for forecasting the path of income and wealth inequality in the 21st century. In this essay, I will take up several themes from my book that have perhaps become attenuated or garbled in the ongoing discussions of the book, and will seek to re-explain and re-frame these themes. First, I stress the key role played in my book by the interaction between beliefs systems, institutions, and the dynamics of inequality. Second, I briefly describe my multidimensional approach to the history of capital and inequality. Third, I review the relationship and differing causes between wealth inequality and income inequality. Fourth, I turn to the specific role of r > g in the dynamics of wealth inequality: specifically, a larger r − g gap will amplify the steady-state inequality of a wealth distribution that arises out of a given mixture of shocks. Fifth, I consider some of the scenarios that affect how r − g might evolve in the 21st century, including rising international tax competition, a growth slowdown, and differential access by the wealthy to higher returns on capital. Finally, I seek to clarify what is distinctive in my historical and political economy approach to institutions and inequality dynamics, and the complementarity with other approaches.

We develop a framework for optimal taxation when agents can earn their income both in traditional activities, where private and social products coincide, and in rent-seeking activities, where private returns exceed social returns either because they involve the capture of pre-existing rents or because they reduce the returns to traditional work. We characterize Pareto optimal income taxes that do not condition on how much of an individual's income is earned in each of the two activities. These optimal taxes feature an externality-corrective term, the magnitude of which depends both on the Pigouvian correction that would obtain if rent-seeking incomes could be perfectly targeted and on the relative impact of rent-seeking externalities on the private returns to traditional and to rent-seeking activities. If rent-seeking externalities primarily affect other rent-seekers, for example, the optimal correction lies strictly below the Pigouvian correction. A calibrated model indicates that the gap between the Pigouvian and optimal correction can be quantitatively important. Our results thus point to a hefty informational requirement for correcting rent-seeking externalities through the income tax code.