Suchergebnisse

In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they form (imprecise) beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs with platform selection. Both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with more precise beliefs over their platform. Minority candidates viewed with less precision overall gain relatively more from outliers. Therefore, the Median Voter Theorem is recovered if and only if voters' policy preferences are uncorrelated with the precision of their beliefs about each candidate, and preferences are distributed symmetrically. Otherwise, even election-motivated parties diverge away from each other. As the population becomes polarized in how they form beliefs about politics, they will become polarized on political grounds as well, providing a new explanation for recent political polarization in the United States which, under reasonable assumptions, is more in line with the stylized facts than models with perfect observability. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In developing a theory of the first appropriation of natural resources from the state of nature John Locke tells us that persons must leave enough and as good for others. Detailing exactly what this restriction requires divides right and left libertarians.Briefly, right libertarians interpret enough and as good as requiring no or very minimal restrictions on the first appropriation of natural resources, whereas left libertarians interpret enough and as good as requiring everyone be entitled to an equal share of unappropriated resources, able to claim no more beyond this equal share. This paper approaches the right versus left libertarian debate by developing a formal model that examines the welfare properties of different interpretations of the Lockean proviso. The model shows that underlying philosophical justifications for left libertarianism, when plausible assumptions hold, will be better served by a right libertarian proviso rather than a left libertarian one. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

AbstractIn developing a theory of the first appropriation of natural resources from the state of nature, John Locke tells us that persons must leave "enough and as good" for others. Detailing exactly what this restriction requires divides right and left libertarians. Briefly, right libertarians interpret "enough and as good" as requiring no or very minimal restrictions on the first appropriation of natural resources, whereas left libertarians interpret "enough and as good" as requiring everyone to be entitled to an equal share of unappropriated resources, able to claim no more beyond this equal share. This article approaches the right versus left libertarian debate by developing a formal model that examines the welfare properties of different interpretations of the Lockean proviso. The model shows that underlying philosophical justifications for left libertarianism, when plausible assumptions hold, will actually be better served by a right libertarian proviso rather than a left libertarian one.