The workings of democracy : voter attention, long-term policies, and party collusion
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How are good, long-term policies produced in competitive democracies when voters reward politicians for the more easily observable benefits of short-term policies? In Chapter 1, I develop a theoretical model to address this question and show how, and under what conditions, the government and the opposition cooperate with each other to implement good, long-term policies, even though these policies are unpopular and the parties have divergent policy interests on other issues. A problem of this cooperation is that it can also be used by the government and the opposition to implement policies that benefit only the political elite and are not in the public interest. In Chapter 2, I investigate when voters prefer to---and how voters are able to---prevent this cooperation; respectively, party collusion against the voters. In Chapter 3, I explore the consequences of how voters allocate their limited attention to different policy issues, showing how voter attention can result in some good reforms to be avoided by purely office-seeking politicians, even though a majority of voters prefer the reforms. This is because these reforms take attention away from other---electorally more beneficial---reforms and because the losers of the reforms would pay the most attention to them.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Brammer, Holke |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. |
| Primary advisor | Bendor, Jonathan B |
| Primary advisor | Shotts, Kenneth W |
| Thesis advisor | Bendor, Jonathan B |
| Thesis advisor | Shotts, Kenneth W |
| Thesis advisor | Malhotra, Neil Ankur |
| Advisor | Malhotra, Neil Ankur |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Holke Brammer. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Holke Brammer
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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