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Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors--politicians as well as voters--are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor's aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later. Based on this idea of adaptation, the authors construct formal models of party competition, turnout, and voters' choices of candidates. These models predict substantial turnout levels, voters sorting into parties, and winning parties adopting centrist platforms. In multiparty elections, voters are able to coordinate vote choices on majority-preferred candidates, while all candidates garner significant vote shares. Overall, the behavioral theory and its models produce macroimplications consistent with the data on elections, and they use plausible microassumptions about the cognitive capacities of politicians and voters. A computational model accompanies the book and can be used as a tool for further research.

In Bounded Rationality and Politics, Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics--the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor sho.

Democracy promises accountability via elections; bureaucracy promises coordination via hierarchy. Many scholars believe these properties conflict. We prove, however, that accountability is precisely what unifies democracy and meritocratic (Weberian) bureaucracy. Central to the concept of meritocracy are performance reviews. We prove that a review system where all individuals and groups are accountable must also be democratic. Thus, meritocratic hierarchy, accountability, and democracy are intertwined. But accountability in modern political systems confronts a significant issue. Such systems include many knowledge-intensive specialties, and since specializations are limited to some but not all members of an institution, the full accountability of democracies entails review of specialists by amateurs. We prove that modern political systems necessarily exhibit this tension. It is a hallmark of modern institutions rather than a problem to be solved.

The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996) an intriguing development, given game theories individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory offers little comfort to prescriptive theories of communitarian rules: a hardheaded strategic analysis supports the Enlightenment view that such norms tend to be Pareto inefficient or distributionally unjust. This paper uses a specific criterion -- supporting cooperation as a Nash equilibrium -- to compare communitarian norms, which turn on peoples ascriptive identities, to universalistic ones, which focus on peoples actions. We show that universalistic rules are better at stabilizing cooperation in a broad class of circumstances. Moreover, communitarian norms hurt minorities the most, and the advantages of universalism become more pronounced the more ascriptively fragmented a society is or the smaller is the minority group. Adapted from the source document.

Organizations such as the Food and Drug Agency can make both type I (approving bad drugs) and type II errors (rejecting good ones). Optimal reliability entails balancing these two kinds of mistakes just so. This paper addresses the question of whether and when an imperfectly rational agency - in particular, one using an adaptive decision-making policy - would become optimally reliable. We establish a necessary condition that an adaptive scheme must satisfy if it is to guide the agency to optimal reliability. The necessary condition takes the form of a constraint on the agency's propensity to explore the space of alternatives: it must become 'stoic' in the face of errors. The paper supplements this normative analysis by providing a descriptive examination of a common class of adaptive rules that could be used by an agency coping with type I and type II errors. Here we analyze how technological factors, external political pressure, and changes in the quality of information affect the agency's reliability, both dynamically and in the steady-state.

Organizations such as the Food & Drug Agency can make both type I (approving bad drugs) & type II errors (rejecting good ones). Optimal reliability entails balancing these two kinds of mistakes just so. This paper addresses the question of whether & when an imperfectly rational agency -- in particular, one using an adaptive decision-making policy -- would become optimally reliable. We establish a necessary condition that an adaptive scheme must satisfy if it is to guide the agency to optimal reliability. The necessary condition takes the form of a constraint on the agency's propensity to explore the space of alternatives: it must become "stoic" in the face of errors. The paper supplements this normative analysis by providing a descriptive examination of a common class of adaptive rules that could be used by an agency coping with type I & type II errors. Here we analyze how technological factors, external political pressure, & changes in the quality of information affect the agency's reliability, both dynamically & in the steady-state. 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 29 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2005.]