Mini Conferences
2000 Wallis Institute Summer Workshop
Models of Candidate Entry, Exit, and Positioning
June 14 and 15, 2000
Jointly sponsored by Department of Political Science and W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
Schedule
| Wednesday, June 14 | |
| 12:00 - 1:30 | lunch |
| 1:45 - 3:30 | (1) Probabilistic Voting with Office-Motivated Candidates |
| John Duggan (Rochester) | |
| 3:30 - 4:00 | break |
| 4:00 - 5:45 | (2) Term Limits and Pork Barrel Politics |
| Dan Bernhardt (Rochester and Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) | |
| 7:30 | dinner |
| Thursday, June 15 | |
| 10:00 - 11:45 | (3) Mixed Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate |
| Tom Palfrey (Caltech) | |
| 12:00 - 1:30 | lunch |
| 1:45 - 3:30 | (4) Sequential Candidate Entry: Osborne's Conjecture and a Related Model |
| Mark Fey (Rochester), with a guest appearance by Martin Osborne (Toronto) | |
| 3:30 - 4:00 | break |
| 4:00 - 5:45 | (5) Non-Majoritarian Policy Outcomes and the Role of Citizen Initiatives |
| Steve Coate (Cornell) | |
| 7:30 | dinner |
All sessions will be held in Harkness 112
Details
1. John Duggan's presentation is based on two papers, ``The Theory of Probabilistic Voting in the Spatial Model of Elections,'' coauthored with Jeff Banks (Caltech), and ``Equilibrium Equivalence under Expected Plurality and Probability of Winning Maximization.''
In the paper with Jeff Banks, we give an overview of the theory of probabilistic voting with vote maximizing candidates, unifying and generalizing known results on several topics, e.g., equilibrium existence, policy coincidence (a.k.a. ``policy convergence''), and robustness of equilibrium. In the second paper, I examine connections to equilibria in models with probability-of-winning maximizing candidates. In a specific model of probabilistic voting, equivalence of local equilibria obtains as long as the second derivatives of voters' utility functions are negative. The equivalence does not hold if the condition on voters' utility functions is weakened to merely strict concavity (allowing for zero second derivatives at some points).
2. Dan Bernhardt's presentation is based on a paper of the same title, coauthored with Sangita Dubey (Government of Canada) and Eric Hughson (Colorado):
We develop a dynamic model of democratic politics in which both potential office-holders and the electorate have heterogeneous ideologies. Voters have incomplete information about candidate ideologies, so they must use information from previous positions taken in office to make informed re-election decisions. We characterize the effects of term limits and legislator compensation on the evolution over time of the ideological positions taken by office-holders and derive the implications for voter choice and welfare. Contributions of our paper include:
1. We detail how pork provision by more senior incumbents interacts with term limits to affect electoral outcomes. Pork provision - transfers of resources from districts with junior legislators to districts with more senior legislators - induces voters to be more forgiving of extreme location by incumbents, especially incumbents in small or poor districts. Pork provision can explain why re-election probabilities in Congress exceed those for governors.
(a) Term limits reduce voter welfare when all that matters are the ideological positions taken by the office-holder.