Political Disagreement and Minimal Epistocracy

Minimal (Disagreement About) Semantics

Political disagreement and information in elections

We study the role of re-election concerns in the incentives of incumbent parties to engage in policy experimentation. In a probabilistic voting model, candidates representing two groups of voters compete for o ce. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority group wins with a probability that increases in the degree of political disagreement — the di↵erence in expected payo↵s from th...

Political Disagreement, Lack of Commitment and the Level of Debt

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to quantify the effects of imperfect commitment, political disagreement and political turnover. Imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement debt is a size...

Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political Disagreement?

To what extent do online discussion spaces expose participants to political talk and to cross-cutting political views in particular? Drawing on a representative national sample of over 1000 Americans reporting participation in chat rooms or message boards, we examine the types of online discussion spaces that create opportunities for cross-cutting political exchanges. Our findings suggest that ...

Epistocracy for online deliberative bioethics.

The suggestion that deliberative democratic approaches would suit the management of bioethical policymaking in democratic pluralistic societies has triggered what has been called the "deliberative turn" in health policy and bioethics. Most of the empirical work in this area has focused on the allocation of healthcare resources and priority setting at the local or national level. The variety of ...