Richard Van Weelden

Partisanship and the Effectiveness of Oversight

We examine the welfare effects of partisanship in a model of checks and balances. An executive makes a policy proposal and an overseer then decides whether or not to veto the executives proposal. Both the executive and the overseer have private information as to the correct policy to pursue, and both are motivated by the desire to appear competent. A partisan overseer is one who, in addition to seeking to promote her own reputation, cares how her decision will impact the executives reputation. Our main result is that partisanship can improve the efficacy of an oversight regime, as the distortions caused by a partisan overseers desire to affect the executives reputation can offset the distortions caused by her desire to enhance her own. Our results provide a new rationale for divided government, as partisan considerations are often necessary to prevent the overseer from rubber stamping all executive proposals.

Ideology and information in policymaking

We consider how the incentives for politicians to pander to public opinion depend on preference heterogeneity and information. Politicians are more likely to pander on issues where politicians’ preferences are divided than on issues where there is a clear majority view. As pandering involves ignoring socially valuable information that goes against the ex ante preferred action of the majority, an increase in the ex ante probability that a politician may hold a minority view can then lead to policy outcomes more biased towards the action ex ante preferred by the majority. In addition, because the updating about the politician’s type is dampened when the voters are uncertain about the state of the world, politicians are more likely to pander when voters are more informed about which action is in their interest. It is then possible that increasing the information available to the voters, by increasing the likelihood of pandering by politicians, can make all voters worse off.

Deliberation Rules and Voting

Most models of pre-vote deliberation assume that voters send messages simultaneously. In practice, however, communication is almost always sequential. This review shows that sequential communication makes it even more difficult to induce truthful communication. Specifically, I show that for any voting rule truthful communication can only be achieved if all voters will agree on the preferred outcome in any state.

Electoral Ambiguity and Political Representation

We introduce a Downsian model in which policy-relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election. The electorate benefits from giving the elected politician some discretion to adapt policies to his information. But limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do not share the electorates policy preferences. Optimal political representation generally consists of a mixture of the delegate (no discretion) and trustee (full discretion) models. Ambiguous electoral platforms are central to achieving beneficial representation. Nevertheless, electoral competition does not ensure optimal representation: the elected politicians platform is generally overly ambiguous. While our theory rationalizes a positive correlation between ambiguity and electoral success, it shows that the relationship need not be causal.