Randall L. Calvert

A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion

Focuses on the theory of political control and government agency discretion in the United States. Process of policy execution; Definition of agency discretion; Roles of players in determination of policy.

REPUTATION AND HEGEMONIC STABILITY: A GAME-THEORETIC ANALYSIS

We develop and explicate a game-theoretic model in which repeated play, incomplete information, and reputation are major elements. A significant advance of this model is the way it represents cooperation under incomplete information among rational actors of different sizes. The model is used to formalize certain aspects of the “theory of hegemonic stability.” It shows that the “dilemma” or “limits” of hegemonic stability look like natural attributes of games where reputation is involved, unifying both “benevolent” and “coercive” strands of hegemony theory. An example, drawn from recent developments in the Organization of Petroleum-exporting Countries, shows how our model of reputation guides the study of hegemonic regime construction. We conclude by comparing the nature of cooperative behavior under conditions of complete and incomplete information.

Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections

This article presents a method for analyzing the extent and strength of coattail voting in presidential elections. This method allows the authors to estimate the magnitude of coattail voting and then to decompose this estimate into more “basic†elements. Estimates are given for presidential elections beginning with 1956.The determination of the coattail vote and its decomposition depend on the theory of the voting decision that is assumed. In this article we present a model of vote determination that is similar in most respects to the traditional SRC model; the vote for congressional representation in a presidential election year is determined jointly by partisan affiliation, attitudes toward the presidential candidates, and local forces unique to the congressional race (such as may be captured by an incumbency variable). This model permits the separate estimation of the strength of short-term forces and of the efficiency of the presidential coattails.Application of the model to survey data since 1956 indicates that efficiency of presidential coattails has declined during this period. Furthermore, the 1980 election does not appear to be an exception to this trend. On the other hand there has not been any particular trend in the strength of short-term forces during this period; instead events peculiar to the context of a specific election generate short-term forces at the level of the presidential election, but the degree to which these forces are carried over to local races seems to have declined.

A battle-of-the-sexes game with incomplete information

A battle-of-the-sexes game with incomplete information presents two different efficiency problems: coordination, and maximizing ex ante expected utility by favoring a player facing high stakes. Communication and mediation can allow an optimal tradeoff between the two problems. This paper gives (1) necessary conditions for (and specification of) an incentive-efficient mediation mechanism and (2) necessary and sufficient conditions for mediation to be required for efficiency. These conditions yield additional results concerning the necessity of privacy in communications and the superfluity of enforcement. Contrary to some recent studies, our results demonstrate that unmediated communication is insufficient to achieve incentive efficiency. An application to the theory of regulation is suggested.

Legislative Coalitions in a Bargaining Model with Externalities

Previous work modeling a legislature in which bill proposals and voting take a form analogous to offer-counteroffer bargaining offer a new view of what legislative parties are and why they are formed. However, such models either represent preferences as being purely distributive in nature, so that there are no variations in preference similarity across legislators and thus no reason for any particular group of legislators to form a party; or else used a full spatial model of legislative preferences, which lacks tractability. To gain the advantages from both approaches, this paper analyzes a distributive model with simple externalities. The model is employed to gain an improved understanding of the conditions under which legislative parties can be said to effect outcomes beyond what could be expected from purely myopic, rational behavior among legislators with similar preferences.

The Rational Choice Theory of Institutions: Implications for Design

Almost all accounts of policymaking organizations stress two important features. First, the process of policymaking, and the life of any organization, consists of a sequence of similar or related situations in which members of the organization must take actions. Second, the actions they take tend to fall into patterns: they behave in similar ways in similar situations, which is how we recognize a policy, an organization, or an institution in the first place

Political decision making with costly and imperfect information

In political decision making, a rational actor often faces a complex simultaneous choice problem of gathering costly information and choosing among several risky alternatives. This situation can be modelled as a repeated decision problem in which the decision maker purchases an item of costly information, uses it to update beliefs and then decides whether to purchase more information or to stop and choose the alternative having highest expected utility. The problem is shown to have a well-defined solution, and the effects of differing levels of information costs and risks upon this solution are derived. Applications to the bureaucrats choice among policy alternatives and to the voters candidate choice problem are sketched. The model represents a full-rationality foundation for bounded-rationality models of politcal (and other) decision making.

Strategic rationality and endogenous institutional change

In Coleman’s (1994) portrayal of corporate action, an implicit “constitution” governs the relationship between the corporate body and its individual members, granting certain “rights” to the members and other rights to the corporate actor. The coherence of the corporate actor depends upon that grant of rights being compatible with individual maximization by individuals within the corporate body. The necessary relationship is maintained in part by the ability of the corporate actor, and the willingness of other individuals, to sanction individual deviation. A change in the resulting stable institutional structure may spring from different sources. Top-down change occurs when the corporate actor engineers a reallocation of rights. Alternatively, subgroups of members— themselves constituting a corporate actor for limited purposes—may act collectively to violate or change the original implicit constitution, and bring about a reallocation of rights. As DellaPosta, Nee, and Opper (henceforth DNO) (2016: 6)1 note, such “meso-level” institutional change is the most common focus of sociological study. The study of social movements (e.g. McAdam, 1982) and contentious politics (e.g. McAdam et al., 2001) are prominent examples of such analysis that, while giving attention to individual action, analytically privilege the actions of social movement “organizations.” DNO (2016: 6), however, distinguish a third, “emergent” form of institutional change. It occurs when initially unorganized deviant actions of

William H. Riker

John D. Millett, 81, president of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1953-64; first chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents 1964-72, and senior vice president of the Academy for Educational Development, Washington, D. C , 1972-80, died November 14, 1993, at Twin Towers Retirement Community, 5343 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati, where he and Mrs. Millett had made their home since shortly after his cardiac arrest in 1988. Funeral services in Oxford United Methodist Church, November 18, were followed by burial in Oxford Cemetery. Mrs. Millett remains at Twin Towers.