Suchergebnisse

Esta tesis es de carácter interdisciplinario, entre economía y ciencias políticas. Usando métodos bien explotados en economía explico como las instituciones electorales afectan las decisiones de los individuos en varios contextos políticos. El capítulo 2 es normativo y propone dos modificaciones en los sistemas electorales. Ambos resultan en una participación más alta y dan incentivos a los partidos políticos a que sean de mejor calidad. Primero, analizo un sistema electoral donde el número de los candidatos que obtienen representación en el parlamento es endógeno y depende del nivel de la participación. Segundo, analizo el efecto de un quorum de participación en elecciones parlamentarias. Según mis resultados, las dos modificaciones implican beneficios más bajos para los partidos, y bienestar más alto para los ciudadanos. Dichos resultados explican porqué los partidos usan otros tipos de medidas para incrementar la participación en las elecciones. Además, mis resultados explican la evolución del uso de un quorum en algunos países. El capítulo 3 es un trabajo junto con Sabine Flamand. Estudiamos el efecto de un quorum de participación en reuniones de pocos miembros. Usando un modelo de reuniones repetitivas, demostramos que la decisión se retrasa cuando el quorum es alto, y que los miembros no pierden utilidad por el hecho de retrasar la decisión. Finalmente, la presencia de un quorum puede tanto aumentar como reducir el número de miembros tomando la decisión final. El capítulo 4 ofrece un análisis empírico de las decisiones de votar en blanco y votar nulo. El análisis es innovador porque por primera vez se tratan las dos decisiones por separado. Demuestro que el voto blanco contiene un mensaje de insatisfacción contra los partidos políticos, mientras que el voto nulo contiene insatisfacción contra las instituciones y los niveles de democracia. ; The present thesis lies at the intersection of economics and political science. Using methods, well developed in economics, I try to understand how electoral ...

I consider a two-party parliamentary election where parties compete on a quality (or valence) dimension. First I motivate why in such an election a voter may decide to cast a blank vote. Second I define a new voting system, inspired in the standard proportional representation system, where the percentage of blank votes is translated into vacant seats in the parliament. I analyze party competition assuming adapted versions of the models of "Bertand" and "Cournot". I compare the equilibrium outcomes on parties' quality and profits obtained with both the alternative proportional system and the standard one. I show that society and parties may have interests in conflict.

We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework we prove a) generic existence of equilibria where only two parties receive a positive fraction of the votes and therefore lead to single-party governments and b) generic inexistence of equilibria that lead to coalition governments. That is, contrary to common wisdom, a proportional rule is found not to promote sincere voting and to be favorable towards single-party governments. The existence of two-party equilibria that lead to single-party governments is robust to parties having ideological concerns.

Meetings of shareholders, societies, and clubs often require a minimal participation quorum. In the absence of a quorum, no valid decisions can be made; thus, decisions are postponed to a later meeting. This paper examines the effect of such quorum constraints on both individual behavior and collective outcomes in a model of costly meetings. We show that when a binding quorum constraint delivers an immediate decision, it also induces a welfare loss with respect to the outcome that prevails when no quorum applies, potentially including policy distortions. When the quorum requirement is high and causes the decision to be postponed, the number of participants in the (second) meeting may decrease with respect to the zero-quorum rule. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractDespite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy‐motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality. We then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms. This effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used Dalton index. Constructing a data set covering more than 300 elections, our main theoretical findings are empirically supported, pointing toward the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization.