Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or imagerelated) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this “overjustification effect” can induce a partial or even net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. We also identify the settings that are conducive to multiple social norms and more generally those that make individual actions complements or substitutes, which we show depends on whether stigma or honor is (endogenously) the dominant reputational concern. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal level of incentives and how monopolistic or competitive sponsors depart from it. Sponsor competition is shown to potentially reduce social welfare.

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Incentives and Prosocial Behavior

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states--has become a cliche. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes--most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

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Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this "overjustification effect" can result in a net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. The model also allows us to identify settings that are conducive to multiple social norms of behavior, and those where disclosing one's generosity may backfire. Finally, we analyze the equilibrium contracts offered by sponsors, including the level and confidentiality or publicity of incentives. Sponsor competition may cause rewards to bid down rather than up, and can even reduce social welfare by requiring agents to engage in inefficient sacrifices.

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The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the "better" of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred Most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote "sincerely" in the collective decision making, a seemingly innocuous assumption, given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative However, in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference In particular, sincere voting does not constitute a Nash equilibrium A satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably "do better" than individuals, therefore, has yet to be derived

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Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem

Predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters' beliefs about how parties will perform following an election. Similarly, party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards. We develop a multistage game-theoretic model of three-party competition under proportional representation. The final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature. This game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election, and the parties' electoral policy positions. At the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome. We solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes.

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Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes

This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer eect entitled 'acting white'. 'Acting White'is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary: signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer eects, equilibria involve all ability types choosing dierent levels of education. 'Acting White'alters the equilibrium dramatically: the (possibly empty) set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type through investments in education; ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level. Only those in the lower intervals are accepted by the group. The model's predictions …t many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members.

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An Economic Analysis of “Acting White”

An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.

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Campaign contributions and access

This essay develops a simple model to analyze the impact of campaign contributions on electoral-policy decisions of candidates for office. Interest groups here are firms that select contributions under the assumption that candidates' policies and opposing groups' donations remain unaltered. Candidates, however, recognize that their policy choices affect contributions. Campaign contributions are used by candidates to affect policy-oriented voters' perceptions of candidates' positions. In this framework the introduction of campaign contributions may affect candidates' electoral policies, and if they do then they benefit surely exactly one of the two interest groups.

David Austen-Smith

Papers

Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem

Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes

An Economic Analysis of “Acting White”

Campaign contributions and access

Interest groups, campaign contributions, and probabilistic voting