Many policies in the United States are jointly determined by federal and state actions. In the game theoretic model offered here, politicians in both the state and national governments seek credit for providing goods desired by the public and avoid blame for the taxes necessary to provide the goods. In line with Peterson’s (1995) theory of functional federalism, the level of government that is ...

In many developed countries, the concept of ra tioning healthcare services is treated as a taboo in the political debate. If someone argues in favor of certain types of explicit rationing, s/he immediately encounters fierce reactions by politicians and medical leaders and is sometimes even treated as if s/he had proposed euthanasia. The quotation above from the former German Health Minister Rös...

Reputational Concerns in Political Agency Models Andrew Yuichi Lemon 2005 Citizens in democracies can be thought of as hiring politicians to run the government. In this sense, elections are contracts. The citizens are the principals and retain politicians as agents who are responsible for making policy decisions. Provided politicians value holding office in the future, elections generate incent...

Abstract As deliberative and participatory practices play a greater role in political decision-making of democratic systems many parts the world, parties must adapt to demands an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry. While there is growing body literature about functioning such procedures different social contexts, little known politicians’ reasons behind introducing them. Based on...

This paper deals with the problem of estimating an appropriate hand posture to grasp an object, from 2D object’s visual cues in a many-to-many (objects,grasp) configuration. A statistical learning protocol implementing vector-valued regression is adopted for both classifying the most likely grasp type and estimating the hand posture. An extensive experimental evaluation on a publicly available ...

This article focuses on how, why and with whom local politicians engage on Facebook. Based on a literature review of the public sphere, eParticipation and research related to social media, we propose a theoretical framework that identifies thematic areas integral to understanding the nature of political participation. The explanatory potential of our ‘ENGAGE’ model (Exchange, Narcissist, Gather...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection hurdle, signals will tend to cluster just above the threshold needed for reelection. This generates a skew ...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

The scope of the public sector (i.e. what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities) is a decision made by politicians. While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: By privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to o...