Kenneth W. Shotts

Leadership and Pandering: A Theory of Executive Policymaking

We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We ...nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters’ interests may or may not pander to voters by choosing it; under certain conditions, the executive can actually increase his probability of reelection by choosing an unpopular policy that is in the public interest. However, we also show that an executive will sometimes face electoral incentives to enact a policy that is both unpopular and contrary to voters’ interests. We illustrate our model with examples involving President Abraham Lincoln, California Governor Earl Warren, and President Gerald Ford. ¤For helpful comments we thank Steve Ansolabehere, David Austen-Smith, Dan Carpenter, Cary Covington, Patricia Conley, Daniel Diermeier, Tim Fedderson, Fred Greenstein, Keith Krehbiel, Dan Kryder, Jim Snyder, Craig Volden, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, NYU Law School, Princeton, Stanford, and SUNY Stony Brook. yAssistant Professor of Political Science, MIT. zAssistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University. xCorresponding author. Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston IL 60208-1006. Email: k-shotts@nwu.edu. Phone: (847) 491-2628. Fax: (847) 491-8985. “There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the Executive to a prevailing current...as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted...When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests.” Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 71

Delegates or Trustees? A Theory of Political Accountability

Politicians vary in both their competence and their policy preferences. We show that how voters trade off competence against ideological congruence has key implications for the type of representation incumbents provide. When voters privilege competence, they encourage trustee representation, and when voters emphasize ideological congruence, they encourage delegate representation. Selection on competence is most likely to occur when uncertainty about the policy preferences of politicians is minimal. A surprising implication of our analysis is that ideological congruence between incumbents and voters is not a necessary precondition for trustee representation to be rewarded at the ballot box.

A Signaling Model of Repeated Elections

I develop a two period model of elections in which voters’ first period actions affect candidates’ estimates of voter preferences and thus affect second period electoral and policy outcomes. I find an equilibrium in which centrist voters abstain in the first election, despite facing zero costs of voting and having a strict preference between the alternatives before them. The reason centrists abstain is to signal their preferences to future candidates and thereby promote future policy moderation.

Term Limits and Pork

We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self-interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.

Law and Data : The Butterfly Ballot Episode

Cornell University On televisions Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the programs dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires. In Law and Data, data analysts track down the facts and prove their theories, but often have trouble explaining them simply and clearly. Lawyers find it hard to obtain, or even define, justice. And the law sometimes goes in odd directions, missing the biggest facts and emphasizing seemingly trivial ones. Justice is not always done. Our episode of Law and Data involves political scientists from Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of California, Berkeley, who came together through a series of accidents

The Politics of Investigations and Regulatory Enforcement by Independent Agents and Cabinet Appointees

We develop a game-theoretic model that identifies conditions under which a political executive will be satisfied with the actions of an appointee who decides whether to investigate possible legal violations. Because investigations are a necessary precondition for enforcement, the investigator exerts significant influence over whether, and the extent to which, laws are enforced. In our model, an executive can exert power over the investigators actions only indirectly, via the threat of replacement. This threat is most effective when the investigator has preferences that diverge from those of the executive. In contrast, when the investigator and executive share similar preferences, the replacement threat can induce the investigator to behave dogmatically, contrary to the executives interests. More subtly, we show how the replacement threats effects on investigator behavior hinge on whether the executive is able to predict the behavior of potential replacements: an executive can sometimes gain leverage over the investigator if he can credibly threaten to replace her with a dogmatist. Our results have broad implications for the politics of regulatory enforcement in the United States and other developed democracies, and for the qualitative differences between regulation by independent investigators and less politically insulated agents.

Assessing Robustness of Findings About Racial Redistricting’s Effect on Southern House Delegations

Abstract We assess whether racial redistricting increases the number of Southern representatives to the left of the US House median. Our results, which are based on Monte Carlo simulations and an alternative measure of representatives’ preferences, are generally null findings. The data do not support the claim that racial redistricting promotes liberal policy outcomes; nor do they support the claim that it promotes conservative policy outcomes. At a methodological level, we suggest techniques that researchers can use to assess how robust their findings are to noise in variables based on estimated values like DW-Nominate scores.

Chance, Preferences, and Predictions in Garbage Can Theory

We build three stochastic models of garbage can processes in an organization populated by boundedly rational agents. Although short-run behavior in our models can be quite chaotic, they generate systematic, testable predictions about patterns of organizational choice. These predictions are determined, in fairly intuitive ways, by the degree of preference conflict among agents in the organization, by their patterns of attention, and by their tendencies to make errors. We also show that nontrivial temporal orders can arise endogenously in one of our models, but only when some form of intentional order, based on agents’ preferences, is also present.