Abstract
This issue contains several papers covering broad areas within political economy, ranging from the effects of private information in lobbying and international conflict to the role of uncertainty and political turnover on policy stability; from the origins and source of partisan cohesion and delegation in legislatures to the political economy of military conscription and inequality. These six articles jointly represent the type of substantively engaged, applied theoretical work that we seek to publish in JTP.
In ‘Subpoena power and informational lobbying,’ Dellis and Oak develop a model in which interest groups seek access to attention-constrained policymakers in order to provide verifiable evidence. They show that if the policymaker is unable to implement policy change on all issues, then he or she is made better off by having subpoena power. However, if the policymaker has unconstrained power to implement policy change, then he or she can be made worse off by having subpoena power, because possession of subpoena power alters the amount of information voluntarily provided by interest groups through lobbying.
In ‘War and diplomacy on the world stage: Crisis bargaining before third parties,’ Scott Wolford analyzes a three-actor model of crisis bargaining in which diplomatic opposition by the third party can raise the costs of war and, while an ‘informed’ state can avoid such increased costs by conveying restraint during the crisis, the means of conveying restraint may lead the other disputant to doubt the ‘restrained’ state’s willingness to fight and thereby lead to conflict. In this setting, Wolford demonstrates that the probability of conflict is higher when the third party believes the informed state to be generally restrained. In addition, when diplomatic opposition modestly affects the cost of war, bluffing is made less attractive. Finally, when diplomatic opposition greatly increases the cost of war, disputants have a strong incentive to mask their true willingness to fight. Thus, ironically, strong norms against international conflict might actually increase its occurrence by reducing the amount of credible communication between states about their resolves.
In ‘Delegation and political turnover,’ Greg Sasso presents a two-period delegation model in which the identity of the principal in the second period is uncertain. A key insight drawn by Sasso from the model is that the principal in the first period can exploit an agent’s uncertainty about the second-period principal in order to extract surplus from the agent in the first period. This power results from the fact that the agent’s uncertainty about the second-period principal induces the agent to choose a policy in the first period that is acceptable to both the first-period principal and his or her potential replacement in the second period. Because this incentive is increasing in the uncertainty (or ‘competitiveness’) about the identity of the second-period principal, such uncertainty can, somewhat surprisingly, result in greater inter-period policy stability.
In ‘Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation,’ Choate, Weymark, and Wiseman present a model of distributive legislative bargaining with partisanship. Partisanship is captured by pseudo-altruistic preferences, in which legislators value not only their own allocations but also the allocations received by copartisan members. Choate et al. then explore the implications of such preferences for a legislative backbencher’s willingness to surrender his or her ability to offer legislative proposals and instead delegate proposal-making authority to his or her party leader. They show that this delegation of agenda control will occur in equilibrium only if three conditions are satisfied: the leader’s resulting proposal recognition probability as a result of delegation must be larger than the probability that a member of the leader’s party would be recognized in the absence of delegation, the partisan affiliation (i.e., the degree to which members value their copartisans’ allocations) must be sufficiently strong, and the legislators must be sufficiently impatient. Choate et al. then apply the insights from this model to broader debates about parties and party leaders in Congress.
In ‘Military conscription, external security, and income inequality: The missing link,’ Nikitas Konstantinidis considers a political economy model of military conscription policy and national security. Konstantinidis models national security as a public good that is produced either through conscripted armed forces or by competitively recruited military labor. Military conscription is equivalent to a tax on citizens’ labor endowment and, under the presumption of quasilinear preferences, Konstantinidis demonstrates that there are three qualitative cases, depending on whether the marginal value of labor is low, moderate, or high. Interestingly, citizens will prefer an all-volunteer army if their marginal value of labor is either high or low, though they will prefer militaries of different sizes in these two cases. Conversely, moderately skilled citizens will prefer a positive level of conscription. The model’s predictions offer insight into the relationship between conscription policy, the level of external security threat, and pre-tax income inequality.
Finally, in ‘Parties, agendas, and roll rates,’ Patterson and Schwartz consider what we can infer about the strength of legislative parties from ‘roll rates’—the frequency with which a majority of the members of a legislative party vote against the party’s leadership’s position. Patterson and Schwartz demonstrate that the roll rates observed in the US House of Representatives are similar to what might result from chance alone. In line with this, they argue that the occurrence of a roll is not evidence of any lapse in partisan agenda control. Indeed, Patterson and Schwartz argue that rolls may be the intended consequence of agenda setting by the majority party.