Phillip J. Nelson

Signaling Goodness: Social Rules and Public Choice

Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness, which has itself been berated and defended -- yet little understood. As a corrective, Nelson and Greene look at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance ones reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.Phillip Nelson and Kenneth Greene are Professors of Economics in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

If extremists vote how do they express themselves? An empirical test of an expressive theory of voting

The expressive theory of voting needs more specification of the motives for expression if it is not merely to be a theory of non-instrumental voting. Brennan and Hamlin provide such a specification. Unfortunately, using individual U.S. data from the General Social Surveys we find their predictions are contradicted. Nor if other evidence in the literature purported to be evidence of expressive voting actually implied by it. We believe that this is because the reason people express themselves in voting is to signal others.

Redistribution and the Income of the Median Voter

The income of the median voter has been measured by median income. This measure fails to consider the income distribution of both voters and number of adults per family. Proper measures of the income of the median voter change standard results. This income is no longer less than mean income; its ratio to mean income is only slightly related to the ratio of median to mean income.

Political Party Purpose, Individual Votes, and Political Action Committee Contributions

The authors use two different data sources to confront the questton of whether a partys primary economic purpose is to sell spectal favors or alternatively to provide information and serve as an ideological label. Although not denying the proposition that politicians sell special favors, it does present results consistent with the subordination of favor specialization to ideological specialization. Besides referring to earlier published results, this article analyzes individual voting data in presiden tial and congressional elections in the United States and contributions by groups of individuals and types of special interest classes to incumbent members of the U.S. Senate and House. These results also imply that there is no need to assume differential abilities to provide favors to special interest groups to explain differential success rates in more or less aggregated political jurisdictions.

Morality and the Political Process

The premise of this paper is that morality has a significant effect on voting, where morality is defined by the source of its returns: what others think about one’s trustworthiness or its internalization conscience. We will show that morality leads people to advocate more interferences with the market than if simple self-interest dominated their decisions. Many aspects of voting are inconsistent with simple self-interest, where voters are only concerned with the consequences of the policies on which they vote. But self-interest models have been virtually the only fruitful models in the social sciences. Hence, we use an expanded self-interest model where we focus on the returns to trustworthiness in addition to the miniscule returns to policy consequences.