I am an economics professor and have been interested in applying economic methods to study political decision-making since my days as a graduate student. Too often, we think about government in terms of what we would like government to do rather than what government actually is capable of doing. In many cases, political decision-makers would be unable to obtain sufficient information to actually carry out the policies we think would be ideal, and even if they have the information, often they don’t have the incentive to do so. An economic approach to politics offers a more realistic way to understand political decision-making.
I wrote
Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy
Downs does a great job of explaining how democratic decision-making links voter preferences to public policy outcomes. He looks at political preferences as existing on a left-to-right continuum and concludes that democratic elections tend to select the candidates whose preferences most closely reflect the median voter—the voter whose preferences fall in the middle of that left-right continuum. He offers a few caveats, one being that because one vote has a vanishingly small chance to affect an election outcome, voters tend to be rationally ignorant on political matters. There is no payoff to becoming informed because an election outcome will be the same regardless of how any individual voter votes.
Olson focuses on the impact of interest groups on public policy. He emphasizes the way that economic interests lobby governments to produce policies favorable to them, but at the expense of the general public. Interests lobby for subsidies, tax breaks, trade barriers to protect them from foreign competition, regulatory barriers to inhibit domestic competitors, and more. Over time, the connection between interest groups and policymakers strengthens, so that increasingly, profits are the result of political connections rather than producing value for consumers. The growth of interest group influence over time leads to the decline of nations.
"A convincing book that could make a big difference in the way we think about modern economic problems."-Peter Passell, New York Times Book Review
"Clearly, this is no ordinary theory. Equally clearly, it sprang from the mind of no ordinary economist."-James Lardner, Washington Post
The years since World War II have seen rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions. Leading political economist Mancur Olson offers a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune and then tests his theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts of the world.
Brennan and Lomasky build on the idea that voters know their one vote will not affect an election outcome, and conclude that therefore the utility people get from voting comes solely from the value they get from expressing their opinion. Because of this, they explain why voters may vote for alternatives they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone. They vote for options that make them feel good about casting their vote, so tend to vote more based on emotional reasons than based on what is best for themselves, or what is in the public interest.
Do voters in large scale democracies reliably vote for the electoral outcomes most in their interest? Much of the literature on voting predicts that they do, but this book argues that fully rational voters will not, in fact, consistently vote for the political outcomes they prefer. The authors offer a theory of voting which they term an 'expressive' theory of electoral politics. This theory is shown to be more coherent and more consistent with actual observed voting behaviour. This important book offers a compelling challenge to the central premises of the prevailing theories of voting behaviour.
Caplan also builds on the observation that one vote will not affect an election outcome, so voters have little incentive to cast an informed vote. Caplan notes that people tend to have biased beliefs about public policy, leading them to vote for candidates and policies that are not in the public interest. Voters tend to be, in Caplan’s terms, rationally irrational. To examine this idea, Caplan compares the public policy views of economists with those of the general public and finds significant differences. Under the assumption that economists are correct about the public policies that best further the public interest, Caplan concludes that popular opinion often pushes public policies in a counterproductive direction.
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions…
Acemoglu and Robinson note that a productive and orderly society requires a government strong enough to protect the rights of its citizens, but that a government with sufficient power to protect people’s rights also has the potential to violate their rights and oppress its citizens. The power of government can be constrained by a strong civil society to balance that government power. Because societies are best off when the power of government is balanced by the power of civil society, there is a narrow corridor where the two are balanced. They discuss the challenges of remaining in that narrow corridor.
"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post
From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.
Democratic governments are often viewed as accountable to their citizens and acting in their best interests. Political parties and candidates are assumed to design their platforms to correspond to the preferences of the voters. My book explains why voters tend to adopt the political preferences of political elites, so rather than candidate preferences reflecting those of voters, voter preferences reflect those of the candidates. When adopting policy preferences, citizens tend to follow their leaders. Democratic governments are not as accountable to their citizens as superficially it appears.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
