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.

/pdf/international-norm-dynamics-and-political-change-37ig9r9dlq.pdf

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.

/pdf/incentives-and-prosocial-behavior-tzz3wh6cov.pdf

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.

/pdf/the-institutional-dynamics-of-international-political-orders-4v1onuni6t.pdf

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.

/pdf/polarized-america-the-dance-of-ideology-and-unequal-riches-15461pw1nr.pdf

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.

/pdf/incentives-and-prosocial-behavior-1fmfrk0247.pdf

This paper is a progress report from the early stages of some research we are doing into grant-giving by the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) and others to provincial repertory theatres in England. The aims of the project are to develop and test operational models of theatre managements' behaviour in response to subsidies(l), and to examine the interdependences between donors and potential donors of subsidies (which will require models of their behaviour as well). This contribution, however, is considerably more restricted in scope. Some preliminary analysis of grant giving by one donor the ACGB is described, and our aim here is more to highlight the conceptual problems we have faced, rather than to provide definitive empirical results. A natural approach to take in this context, is to derive a grant-supply schedule from some constrained optimization problem. (2) In future work we will be examining ACGB grant-giving using a public choice-theoretic analysis, but in this paper, we work within a framework suggested by classical welfare economics and the optimal tax literature.(3) In particular, we are concerned with the extent to which the ACGB can be conceived of as selecting a particular distribution of grants in a similar way to a welfare-maximizing government's choice of a tax-system. Since this formulation of the ACGB's problem is rather general, it is unsurprising that little guidance is given by the model about the likely empirical nature of an optimal grant-allocation function. (4) However, explicit derivation of optimal grant-allocation functions is not the only way to investigate properties of actual distributions. An alternative approach is to consider a particular principle on which grant

Grant-giving to provincial repertory theatres by the arts council of Great Britain: A preliminary analysis

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/austen-smith/htm/papers/subsidies.pdf

Majority preference for subsidies over redistribution

Steiner's principal objection to our paper is that deliberators in a committee are permitted to speak strategically whereas deliberative theory requires ‘that actors do not lie but are truthful and authentic in their statements’. In this response we observe that such a prescription is relevant only to the extent that individuals might be expected to behave otherwise. Our paper explores conditions under which deliberators' strategic (descriptive) incentives are aligned with the (prescriptive) advice to tell the truth.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.eps.2210187.pdf

In Response to Jurg Steiner's ‘Concept Stretching: The Case of Deliberation’

An assumption of sincere voting for one's most preferred candidate is frequently invoked in models of electoral competition in which the elected legislature consists of more than a single candidate or party. Voters, however, have preferences over policy outcomes--which are determined by the ex post elected legislature--and not over candidates per se. This observation provokes the following question. For what methods of translating election results into legislative policy outcomes is sincere voting rational in the legislative election? This paper provides the answer. One of the principal implications is that for sincerity to be rational, there necessarily exists a candidate for office whose electoral platform is the final legislative outcome, whether or not that candidate is elected to the legislature.

Sincere Voting in Models of Legislative Elections

We augment the standard Crawford-Sobel (Econometrica 1982) model of cheap talk communication by allowing the informed party to use both costless and costly messages. The issues on which we focus are the consequences for cheap talk signaling of the option to use a costly signal ("burned money"); the circumstances under which both cheap talk and burned money are used to signal information; and the extent to which burning money is the preferred instrument for information transmission.

David Austen-Smith

Papers

Grant-giving to provincial repertory theatres by the arts council of Great Britain: A preliminary analysis

Majority preference for subsidies over redistribution

In Response to Jurg Steiner's ‘Concept Stretching: The Case of Deliberation’

Sincere Voting in Models of Legislative Elections

Cheap Talk and Burned Money