Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics contains five original articles. Two of the articles discuss elections and, among other connections, share a focus on the effect of crises on policy outcomes. The other three articles consider key questions about institutional design. Coming from different substantive corners of political science, all three articles share a concern with sustaining cooperative outcomes in the face of potentially costly coordination failures. As editors, we view this set of articles as indicative of the type of research we want the Journal of Theoretical Politics to support and publish: analytical theoretical models applied to substantive concerns within political science. As we believe each of these contributions demonstrates, analytical models are important for clarifying and guiding the broader understanding of political phenomena.
In ‘Clarity or collaboration: Balancing competing aims in bureaucratic design’, Christopher Carrigan develops a theory of institutional design that combines the possibility of multiple tasks with the notion of goal ambiguity in delegation settings. Goal ambiguity is modelled as the agent’s (or agents’) uncertainty about which of two tasks is considered more important by the principal. The theory provides an important and elegant insight into how the impact of goal ambiguity on the optimal design choice (i.e., whether to task a single agent with both tasks or separate the responsibility across two agents) is driven by the principal’s desire for coordination of the performances of the two tasks. Carrigan’s theory also represents an important contribution to expanding the applicability and scope of the principal-agent literature on institutional design.
In ‘The electoral strategies of a populist candidate: Does charisma discourage experience and encourage extremism?’, Gilles Serra presents a theory of elections that blends both personality traits and populist electoral appeals. The theory highlights an important and fundamental trade-off: Because voters want both experienced and charismatic candidates, they will tend to get either one or the other in competitive elections. The theory also provides a causal mechanism for linking populist policies with times of economic or social unrest.
In ‘Elections and durable governments in parliamentary governments’, David Baron presents a dynamic theory of government formation that includes policy-motivated parties and strategic voters. Baron’s theory illustrates how the possibility of punishment in subsequent elections can constrain parties when forming a coalition government. The theory offers many testable implications. For example, it predicts that voters will condition their vote choices based on the coalition that is likely to form after the election and that the parties in the coalition will choose a compromise policy that is independent of the identity of the formateur (that is, the governing coalition members split policy rents equally).
In ‘Mediation in the shadow of an audience: How third parties use secrecy and agenda-setting to broker settlements’, Shawn Ramirez develops and analyses a model of mediation. Providing an important extension to a growing body of literature on dispute resolution mechanisms, Ramirez’s theory illustrates how the combination of secrecy and agenda-setting power can enable successful third-party mediation in crises. While it is possible for dispute resolution to fail in equilibrium, the information revealed by the mediation process increases the likelihood that the leader and her audience prevail in the ensuing conflict. Ramirez’s theory contributes to the literature on audience costs by demonstrating how a participant in mediation processes can credibly demonstrate his or her resolve even if he or she faces no audience costs.
Finally, in ‘Power-sharing “discontinuities”: Legitimacy, rivalry, and credibility’, Saurabh Pant develops a theory that simultaneously captures the legitimacy and credibility trade-offs faced by both potential participants in a power-sharing relationship. The central conclusion of the elegant model is a classic and important one: when one’s rival also faces legitimacy costs from participating in a power-sharing arrangement, the power-sharer needs to offer a minimal level of power to compensate the rival for participating. This distinguishes Pant’s theory from other theories of power-sharing in terms of its predictions for suboptimal power-sharing arrangements: on the one hand, sharing too little power will result in rejection and conflict; sharing too much power, on the other hand, is merely ‘wasteful’ from the power-sharer’s perspective.