Amrita Dhillon

Economic theories of voter turnout

(i) The voting paradox Why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed, go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue? Why would a rational voter vote? (Downs, 1957) (ii) The paradox of indeterminacy If they vote why do they care who they vote for? (Kirchgassner, 1992; Kirchgassner and Pommerehne, 1993) (iii) The paradox of ignorance To the extent that information is costly, the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making (Downs, 1957).

A generalised wage rigidity result

Abstract This paper provides an alternative explanation of the empirically observed wage rigidity in industrialized economies. We provide sufficient conditions under which the negotiated wage in unionized imperfectly competitive industries is independent of a number of product market features, as well as of the bargaining institution (Right-to-Manage or Efficient Bargains), as long as negotiations are centralised at the industry level. The wage rate turns out to be the same independently of e.g. the number of firms, the degree of product substitutability, or the intensity of market competition, and this result is shown to hold in a broad class of industry specifications widely used in the literature.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND COALITION FORMATION

This chapter gives a flavour of recent theoretical work on coalition formation and political parties. I survey recent work on both pre-election coalition formation and post election coalition (or government) formation. A number of alternative rationales for the formation of parties are compared with the help of some illustrative examples.

Multiple Equilibria in the Citizen‐Candidate Model of Representative Democracy

The Besley-Coate model of representative democracy has the problem of multiple equilibria (Besley-Coate 1997). We show that requiring the Besley-Coate political equilibria to be iteratively undominated at the voting stage refines the set of (pure strategy) political equilibrium outcomes only for those cases where at least four candidates stand for election. This note complements the results of De Sinopoli and Turrini (1999). Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Inc.

Scoring rule voting games and dominance solvability

This article studies the dominance solvability (by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) of general scoring rule voting games when there are three alternatives. The scoring rules we study include Plurality rule, Approval voting, Borda rule, and Relative Utilitarianism. We provide sufficient conditions for dominance solvability of general scoring rule voting games. The sufficient conditions that we provide for dominance solvability are in terms of one statistic of the game: sufficient agreement on the best alternative or on the worst alternative. We also show that the solutions coincide with the set of Condorcet Winners whenever the sufficient conditions for dominance solvability are satisfied. Approval Voting performs the best in terms of our criteria.

Protests and reputation

Protests take place for a variety of reasons. In this paper we focus on protests that have a well defined objective that is in conflict with the objectives of the government. Hence the success or failure of a protest movement depends crucially on how the government responds. We assume that government types are private information so that governments have an interest in building a reputation to deter protestors. We extend the standard reputation framework to one where potential protesters in the domestic jurisdiction are competing in a common market with protestors of a foreign jurisdiction, resulting in a situation where domestic governments care about the decisions of foreign governments. We derive conditions under which an equilibrium with “contagion” in protests might exist: protests that start in one jurisdiction spread to others. Finally we use our results to interpret the Fuel tax protests in France and England that took place in 2000 as well as the three successive pro-democracy revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

An impossibility theorem with von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences

We prove an impossibility theorem in the context of VNM preferences when Pareto and an analogue of Maskins Monotonicity are used. We show the crucial weakening required to avoid this

Electoral Accountability and the Natural Resource Curse: Theory and Evidence from India

The literature on the effects of natural resource abundance on economic growth is converging to the view that institutions play a central role. In this paper, we exploit the break up of three of the biggest Indian states, comprising areas with some of the largest endowments of natural resources in the country, to explore how the link between electoral accountability and natural resource abundance can explain differences in outcomes. Our theoretical framework shows that while states inheriting a larger share of natural resources after break up are potentially richer, the spatial distribution of these natural resources within these state can worsen economic outcomes by lowering electoral accountability. We employ a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of secession and concentrated resources on growth and inequality at the sub-regional level, using data on satellite measurements of night-time lights. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the economic effect of secession is generally favourable. However, states that inherit a large fraction of mineral rich constituencies experience worse outcomes. This may be accounted for by lower electoral accountability in those areas.