Karine Van Der Straeten

The Political Economy of Xenophobia and Distribution: The Case of Denmark

For the first time in many years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenrys dissatisfaction with social-democratic policies on immigartion. We represent political competition in denmark as taking place on two issues -- the size of the public sector and immigration -- and model political equilibrium using the party-unanimity- Nash-equilibrium concept (PUNE), which generates equilibria on multi-dimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount equal to one-half of a standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens views as to what the optimal size of public sector is.

Strategic Vote Choice in One-Round and Two-Round Elections: An Experimental Study

The authors test a model of strategic vote choice in which the decision to support or not to support a candidate depends on the benefit associated with the election of a given candidate and the candidate’s perceived viability. They test the model with data collected in a series of experiments in which the participants voted in eight successive elections, four in one round and four in two rounds. Results show that the same model applies to both voting systems, although the impact of perceived viability is slightly weaker in two-round elections. The authors conclude that strategic considerations are almost as important in two-round as in one-round elections.

Voting Under Ignorance of Job Skills of Unemployed: The Overtaxation bias

Abstract Usual models on voting over basic income–flat tax schedules rest on the assumption that voters know the whole distribution of skills even if at equilibrium some individuals do not work. If individuals’ productivity remains unknown until they work, it may be more convincing to assume that voters have only beliefs about the distribution of skills and that a learning process takes place. In this paper, at each period, individuals vote according to their beliefs which are updated when getting new information from the job market. The voting process converges towards some steady-state equilibrium that depends on both the true distribution of skills and the initial beliefs. The equilibrium tax rate is higher than (or equal to) the tax rate achieved in the perfect information framework. An illustration is provided on French data: if voters are over-pessimistic as to the potential productivity of unemployed people, majority voting may lock the economy in an “informational trap” with a high tax rate and a high level of inactivity.

Ethnic Diversity and Attitudes Towards Redistribution: A Review of the Literature

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on the welfare state and on individual attitudes. The outcome variables that we cover in the survey are on the one hand public spending, and on the other hand individual attitudes and behaviour, including charity spending. We also review the fast-growing literature that uses experiments to study the effects of ethnic diversity. Many of these studies have appeared since the pioneering survey by Alesina and La Ferrara (2005a), and have not been covered by a survey before.

Strategic Voting in the Laboratory

The claim upon which most experiments in laboratories are conducted is that the random allocation of a treatment among various groups or individuals makes it possible to draw accurate inferences about causality. The laboratory is a context insulated from outside influences so that variations in behavior can be attributed to differences in treatment. Yet, the laboratory is not remote from all noises characterizing the ‘real world’. The issue of internal validity is probably overlooked too often because threats to external validity appear to be the most important (McDermott, 2002; Green and Gerber, 2004). Most experiments in political science are faced with potential threats to internal validity which are often unavoidable. The good news is that most of these problems have no significant impact on the results; the outcomes of an experiment prove to be rather resilient to marginal changes of core characteristics (as remarked earlier by Fiorina and Plott, 1978). This is our general argument, supported by a series of experiments on electoral systems and strategic voting.