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Many risks have the property that large numbers of people are exposed and have little or no individual control over the risks they face. Dams, nuclear power plants, and recombinant DNA research have proven controversial not simply because there is vast uncertainty about the true level of risk associated with each, but because a fundamental issue is that in each case social risks can be lessened by spending more on safety: dams can be designed to withstand larger earthquakes, nuclear plants can have additional safety equipment, and DNA research could be done in yet more carefully isolated laboratories. Since each person will have preferences regarding the proper trade‐off between increased cost and increased safety, there is little possibility of consensus. More importantly, we show that a voting process for expressing individual preferences can be manipulated and is seriously flawed in the sense that it does not lead to an "efficient" outcome. In addition, we show that virtually all people are unhappy with the safety decision, in the sense that each would prefer either a safer or a cheaper outcome. Thus, making safety decisions that affect a large group of people who will not be able to control the outcome is even more difficult than has been appreciated. We suggest some ways of handling some of the difficulties.

AbstractWe use a policy change that occurred in Oregon in the late 1980s to re‐visit the budget‐maximizing agenda setter theory of local public expenditure. Prior to 1987, Oregon school districts held operating levy elections with an exogenous, often zero or very low, spending reversion. From 1987 through 1990, districts experienced a "safety net" regime where the reversion was at least the previous year's nominal spending. We find that the "safety net" sharply limited the agenda setter's ability to use the reversion as a threat to obtain voter approval of relatively large expenditures.

This article analyzes election data that permit simple tests of rational voting and agenda setting. The voting test pertains to aggregate election results. The prediction is that when voters have single-peaked preferences, there will be more opposition to the second of two budget proposals that are voted on simultaneously. Unlike the standard binary choice setting, not all voters have weakly undominated voting strategies, but the game among the voters can be solved simply by iterative application of weak dominance. The agenda-setting prediction tested is that agenda setters should make one proposal rather than two when given the option. The data come from Oregon school district financial elections from 1980-83, years in which the rules for these elections were abruptly changed. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyzes election data that permit simple tests of rational voting and agenda setting. The voting test pertains to aggregate election results. The prediction is that when voters have single-peaked preferences, there will be more opposition to the second of two budget proposals that are voted on simultaneously. Unlike the standard binary choice setting, not all voters have weakly undominated voting strategies, but the game among the voters can be solved simply by iterative application of weak dominance. The agenda-setting prediction tested is that agenda setters should make one proposal rather than two when given the option. The data come from Oregon school district financial elections from 1980–83, years in which the rules for these elections were abruptly changed.

Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates inelectionsand when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives ingovernment. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularly if modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizen preferences through government outcomes. To strike a balance between complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatial models of electoral competition and governmental policy-making to study how components of partisanship—such as candidate platform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, national partisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—are related to policy outcomes. We definepartisan biasas the distance between the following two points in a conventional choice space: the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislative district and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature. The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditions is capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specified combinations of conditions, however, can significantly increase the bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes in subtle ways.