Partisan and “Opportunistic” Behaviour: A Restatement of Alesina’s Model with endogenous voting and ideological-opportunistic policy makers
In this paper we would like to discuss a simple version of a famous Alesina’s model in order to give a more “realistic” description of the voting mechanism (on the demand side of political-economical market) and to move towards an integrated perspective between political-business cycle and partisan theory (on the supply side).
By endogenizing the process used by electors to select their ballots behaviours, is a goal of great importance in our vision. We would like to stress in this way the importance of individual choice, so turning the accent on microfoundations of Political Economy. These kinds of topics were in the centre of the early scholars analysis, and had a great role in first generation models on economic-electoral cycle, but the second wave of works on these issues considered this type of relations as exogenous facts.
Studies on voting functions, show us as electoral results could be put under a unique model of analysis with reaction functions of political parties. Following this line, which see politics and economics as integrated systems both on demand and supply side we moved towards the endogenization of electoral probability for each party to an element endogenously determined.
Moreover our work tries to reconcile partisan theory and opportunistic view of political business cycle, choosing a research line partially different from Zurich school’s one which shows the appearance of opportunistic behavior, as a phenomenon strictly connected with electoral deficit situation for political actors (More clearly, we are speaking of popularity of the government below a certain critic grade). Moving away from this kind of model we have preferred to assume that politicians work on the base of ideological and opportunistic forces in each part of the game considered. It seem us really hard to think at a complete scission between this two causes, because it would tend to serious shocks in current policy making choices surely less efficient than a coordinated programmatic line.
By endogenizing the process used by electors to select their ballots behaviours, is a goal of great importance in our vision. We would like to stress in this way the importance of individual choice, so turning the accent on microfoundations of Political Economy. These kinds of topics were in the centre of the early scholars analysis, and had a great role in first generation models on economic-electoral cycle, but the second wave of works on these issues considered this type of relations as exogenous facts.
Studies on voting functions, show us as electoral results could be put under a unique model of analysis with reaction functions of political parties. Following this line, which see politics and economics as integrated systems both on demand and supply side we moved towards the endogenization of electoral probability for each party to an element endogenously determined.
Moreover our work tries to reconcile partisan theory and opportunistic view of political business cycle, choosing a research line partially different from Zurich school’s one which shows the appearance of opportunistic behavior, as a phenomenon strictly connected with electoral deficit situation for political actors (More clearly, we are speaking of popularity of the government below a certain critic grade). Moving away from this kind of model we have preferred to assume that politicians work on the base of ideological and opportunistic forces in each part of the game considered. It seem us really hard to think at a complete scission between this two causes, because it would tend to serious shocks in current policy making choices surely less efficient than a coordinated programmatic line.
posted by MDS at 2:17 PM
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