Journal ArticleDOI
An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy
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TLDR
For example, this article argued that the private sector is a self-regulating mechanism and that any government action beyond maintenance of law and order is "interference" with it rather than an intrinsic part of it.Abstract:
IN SPITE of the tremendous importance of government decisions in every phase of economic life, economic theorists have never successfully integrated government with private decision-makers in a single general equilibrium theory. Instead they have treated government action as an exogenous variable, determined by political considerations that lie outside the purview of economics. This view is really a carry-over from the classical premise that the private sector is a self-regulating mechanism and that any government action beyond maintenance of law and order is "interference" with it rather than an intrinsic part of it.2 However, in at least two fields of economic theory, the centrality of government action has forced economists to formulate rules that indicate how government "should" make decisions. Thus in the field of public finance, Hugh Dalton states:read more
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Some Generalizations of Social Decisions under Majority Rule
TL;DR: In this article, the existence of equilibrium points under majority rule for an n-dimensional issue space and an expanded class of indifference contours is investigated, and the authors generalize previous problem formulations and results.
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Discrete opinion dynamics with M choices
TL;DR: The new model is obtained as an extension of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model, where there are M possible discrete choices and there is a need to model how strong each agent choice is.
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The determination of local public expenditures and the principal and agent relation: A case study
TL;DR: In this paper, the importance of the budget referendum, which allows the principals to approve or disapprove the proposal of a set of agents, in the context of local public expenditure decisions, is examined.
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The impact of gender quotas on electoral participation: Evidence from Italian municipalities
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the effect of gender quotas on electoral participation by using a dataset regarding Italian municipal elections from 1993 to 1995 and found that female voters react more than males to gender quotas more positively than males.
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Budget-maximizing governmental agencies: An empirical test
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the first direct empirical tests of Niskanen's ideas, showing that the demand for public services will appear to be elastic, which is not supported by existing empirical research on government activity.