Dimitri Landa

Challenger Entry and Voter Learning

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voters positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

Consumption or Investment? On Motivations for Political Giving

We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and the sensitivity of pay to company performance and show that the intensity of this relationship varies across groups of executives in ways that are consistent with instrumental giving but not with alternative, taste-based, accounts. Together with earlier findings, our results suggest that contributions are often best understood as purchases of “good will” whose returns, while positive in expectation, are contingent and rare.

Cognition and Strategy: A Deliberation Experiment

A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals’ choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests speak or listen before voting over a common outcome. An important feature of our strategic setting is that introspective agents may, upon hearing an unpersuasive argument, update away from the speakers preferred position. While subjects are responsive to strategic incentives, they also deviate from Bayesian predictions by “overspeaking” when speech is likelier to alienate than persuade. Subjects thus come closer to the deliberative democratic ideal of a free exchange of arguments than equilibrium predictions suggest. We interpret evidence from subjects’ deliberative choices and policy votes in terms of a cognitive hierarchy among subjects, defined by differing abilities to grasp the strategic implications of different kinds of information.

Do the Advantages of Incumbency Advantage Incumbents

We develop a model that calls into question some longstanding presumptions about incumbency advantage. Our results show that increases in some of the ostensible benefits of incumbency frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of higher quality. Whether the net electoral consequence for high-quality incumbents is positive or negative depends on whether the source of incumbency advantage affects candidate entry and exit decisions directly or indirectly, as mediated through voters’ choices. Our findings suggest, further, that fundamental tensions may exist between different sources of incumbency advantage, and point to obstacles to disaggregating the sources of incumbency advantage empirically.

Rational Choices as Social Norms

This article develops an account of a theory of rational choice based on the conception of rationality as a normatively justified correspondence between interests and choices. In this conception, rationality is best thought of as a property not of individual actions, but of a complex two-level phenomenon comprised of the social justification of behavioral norms and of the everyday choices made under these norms.

Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts

Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the structure and content of legal rules, as well as for the coherence, determinacy, and complexity of legal doctrine. We provide conditions for the occurrence of these doctrinal attributes in the output of collegial courts. Finally, we consider the connection between the problems that arise in the collegial aggregation of a set of legal rules and those previously noted in the collegial application of a single, fixed legal rule.

Disclosure of the genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease.

As many as 5.3 million people in the United States are estimated to be afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, with the overall costs of Alzheimers and other dementias to Medicare, Medicaid and businesses estimated at upwards of

Common Problems (or, What’s Missing from the Conventional Wisdom on Polarization and Gridlock)

148 billion each year. Issues related to treatment, care, and research into the disease have, understandably, had a high public policy profile and attracted considerable public attention. One such issue is the desirability of genetic testing of relatives of Alzheimer’s patients for their own predisposition to Alzheimer’s. A key concern in the debate is the possible psychological effects of the test: does knowing that one is genetically predisposed have harmful psychological consequences apart from those that may be wrought by the onset of the disease itself? And in light of those potential consequences, should testing be encouraged?

The Political Economy of Compensatory Federalism

We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased polarization but may also simultaneously yield net welfare-enhancing policy adjustments rather than entrenchment of gridlock. The association of polarization and gridlock is contingent on how the problem responds to the policy solution, institutional structure, and the location of the status quo policy when the extent of the problem changes. We illustrate the model’s logic by comparing US national policy making in the Progressive Era and the present.

Debating Conceptions of Rational Choice

To what extent does the federal structure of policymaking in the United States mitigate or exacerbate national political conflict? We develop a model of two-level governance in a federal system in the presence of interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. The key underlying intuition is that states with high demand for public spending or regulation are better positioned to adjust state-level policies to compensate for perceived inadequacies in national policy than corresponding states with low demand. We explore the normative and behavioral implications of this asymmetry under majoritarian and supermajoritarian national policymaking institutions, and use the model to account for a number of empirical regularities in U.S. politics and policymaking.