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AbstractWe argue that political theory, regardless of whether it is "positive" or "normative" in nature, is structured and unified by social choice theory. We point out that the central conclusions of social choice theory are context-free and thus apply to any aggregation of multiple factors. The generality of the basic framework of social choice theory implies its results are relevant to any consideration of trade-offs and, because any interesting theory must deal with a situation in which there are at least two plausible predictions or prescriptions, these results unify all interesting theories of politics.

In this contribution we begin by noting that empirical analysis of many interesting social science topics-and in particular those popularly associated with 'big data' such as networks, text analysis, and genetics-always require data reduction. Data reduction is achieved through aggregating higher-dimensional data into lower-dimensional measures. In other words, we conceive of the 'bigness' of data as a function of the data's underlying conceptual structure. Much more than being a function of the number of observations or the number of variables, data is 'big' if the concepts underlying the data-the data's raison(s) d'etre-are more complicated than a list of vectors of numbers. Social networks, texts, genomes, and brain scans all satisfy this requirement. Adapted from the source document.

This article describes and investigates a model of strategic sequential decision making in networked policy-making environments with three agents. The primary interest is the effect of network structure on sequential policy making and information aggregation. The model and results illustrate how individual policy decisions of varying weight (in terms of a decision maker's unilateral effect on policy outcomes) can enable information aggregation in decentralized environments. In the studied environment, the incentive compatibility conditions for information aggregation are not invariant to network isomorphisms: individuals' positions in the network matter. The study derives exact conditions for every acyclic network of three or fewer agents and illustrates the counterintuitive nature of comparative statics with respect to both network structure and individual agents' policy preferences and discretionary authority.

This paper models the process through which proposals are placed on the ballot as initiatives. Importantly, proposals that reach the ballot were not enacted by the legislature. We show that this fact has important consequences for the type of policy proposals that reach the ballot: as the legislature would enact any proposal that increases everyone's utility (in expectation), proposals that reach the ballot must be bad for some segment of the population. We partition the population into voters who would benefit from a group's proposal and those who would not and show that voters can use the legislature's inaction to obtain a better estimate of the initiative's expected value. In particular, we show that voters that are not in the sponsoring group infer that proposals that become initiatives have negative expected value and that the expected value of an initiative is decreasing in the size of the group that sponsors it. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWe provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.