Physical Strength as a Heuristic Cue of Political Conservatism

Social bargaining models posit physically formidable men tend to pursue strategies for acquiring resources and status through direct competition and promoting hierarchical social organization. Previous research indicates that formidable men espouse more conservative political viewpoints, as a means of advancing social policies favoring use of aggressive bargaining and hierarchy-maintenance strategies. If the mind is designed to utilize probabilistic cues of behavioral strategies, physical strength may function as a heuristic cue of political conservatism. Participants in three studies inferred conservatism of physically strong and weak men. Physically strong men were consistently perceived as more conservative (Studies 1 and 2). Inferences from strength cues were moderated neither by type of conservatism (i.e., fiscal versus social) nor presence of wealth cues. Inferences further extended to tradition-based and libertarian moral foundations domains (Study 3). We frame results using an affordance management framework, suggesting individuals utilize cues to formidability as heuristics to infer political attitudes.

Bargaining outcomes and success in EU economic governance reforms

We assess the accuracy of procedural and bargaining models in predicting the outcomes of the reforms of the economic governance of the European Union (EU) that took place between 1997 and 2013. These negotiations were characterized by high costs of failure. We confirm the accuracy and robustness of the compromise model, but a procedural model with a costly reference point performs well, indicating that misestimation of the no-agreement cost may be a reason for its commonly reported poorer accuracy. However, this model is more sensitive to measurement errors. We also show how both models contribute to understanding bargaining success and how the conditional influence of the European Parliament should not be ignored. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for our understanding of the EU.

Nonunitary Parties, Government Formation, and Gamson’s Law

Following the coalition literature highlighting intraparty politics (e.g., Giannetti and Benoit 2009; Laver 1999; Strøm 2003), I address the well-known “portfolio allocation paradox” (Warwick and Druckman 2006) by introducing a new model of government formation based on two main assumptions. First, no actor has a structural advantage in the negotiations leading to government formation. Second, all actors who can deprive the coalition of a majority (or other critical threshold size) must be included in the negotiations—not just parties. Whereas standard bargaining models are inconsistent with Gamson’s Law, the model proposed here implies that equilibrium portfolio allocations should be mostly Gamsonian but with a small-party bias, as the empirical literature has long found. Empirically, I show that my model outperforms the literature’s standard specification (due to Browne and Franklin 1973). Moreover, one of the model’s new predictions—that candidate-centered electoral rules should promote more Gamsonian portfolio allocations—is supported.

Rationalist Explanations for Two-Front War

By extending the extant costly-lottery models of dyadic war to three-party bargaining scenarios, we offer rationalist explanations for two-front war, where a state at the center is fought by two enemies at opposing peripheries. We found that even though private information exists only in one front, war can break out in both fronts. Because the war outcome in one front can affect the outcome in the other through the shift of military balance, a peripheral state may preventively join the war ongoing in the other front to leverage its power (e.g. Napoleonic Wars), or the central state may preemptively initiate war in one front to establish its preponderance in the other (e.g. World War I). These findings echo Waltz’s neorealism concern that a multi-polar system may not be so stable as the bipolar system that bargaining models of dyadic war commonly presume.

China Collective Negotiation in COVID-19: What We learn from a Comparative Analysis of China, the United States and Germany

Labor conflicts can be solved by an efficient collective bargaining system with consensus-based. Since the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19, employers have been shut down or have had to reduce operations drastically and many employers want to furlough or dismiss employees under certain circumstances in China. Meanwhile, many workers have lost income. Since workers have gone back to the worksite in March 2020, labor unrest has spread out in order to ask for wage arrears in the manufactory, construction, and service sectors in terms of strikes map from China Labor Bulletin. The paper targets on three different countries with top economies, and examines its bargaining models to keep industrial peace. The paper argues that China bargaining model under state-control strongly depends on government intention for intervention where there is labor unrest, and the system less focuses on self-governance which may result in a hard time to maintain industrial resources, even though the state issued the related policies to highly encouraged companies to hold a negotiation before the lay off workers, reduce wages or work time in order to be employed. While fewer polices and China traditional command-and-control regulation models could not provide an efficient approach to relief labor unrest in the pandemic, Germany's bargaining model is more flexible to provide an example for new governance and co-determination. Also, the bargaining model with sector-level reforms could do more for the United States private sectors in order to the corporation instead of adversarialism. From a comparison among three collective bargaining models, the paper concludes the approaches to protect workers’ rights from global perspectives.

The effects of electoral anticipation on portfolio allocation

Whereas much of the existing literature on coalition formation has focused on the disparity between Gamsonian payoffs and the outcomes of bargaining models, dangers of ministerial drift, party ideal points, issue salience/emphasis, and negotiation complexity, very little has been said on the role of the way public opinion affects political behavior via expectation of future electoral returns. Following the logic of “issue yield,” this article argues that politicians allocate ministerial portfolios according to the distribution of public opinion in the hopes of obtaining better returns in subsequent elections and find compelling evidence linking public opinion with portfolio allocation.