Turnout

Within the past seventy years, citizens have cast some twenty-seven billion votes in national elections across the world. This impressive figure would likely double if votes cast in local elections and referenda were included. Electoral participation is a mass phenomenon. However, what exactly motivates people to vote? The question of why people vote has been at the center of positivist political theory. Political scientists and economists have devised numerous theories for why people may or may not vote, in addition to gathering an impressive amount of empirical evidence on the determinants of electoral participation. This chapter offers a bird’s-eye view of historical trends in voter turnout, theories of rational voting motivation, and the role of embedding political or socioeconomic environments, as exposed by empirical research.

Social Contract versus Invisible Hand

The purpose of this chapter is to take a closer look at the relation between the invisible hand paradigm that is at the heart of economists’ theoretical outlook at markets and its “visible hand” counterpart, the social contract paradigm as a theory of government. It is argued that in its generalized interpretation as an individualistic model of organized collective action the social contract paradigm consistently complements the invisible hand paradigm as an individualistic theory of spontaneous social order. What Hayek has referred to as “the two kinds of order,” spontaneous order and corporate order, can thus be accounted for within one coherent individualistic theoretical framework.

Collective Action

The theory of collective action, as outlined by Mancur Olson, is presented. Olson argued that individuals are subject to free-riding behavior, which can be overcome by selective incentives. The larger is the potential group, the greater the hurdles to successful formation. Thus, smaller groups with more narrow interests are more likely to form, leading to an emphasis on policy reform that concentrates benefits to the group while diffusing the costs on greater society. The accumulation of such groups will slow growth, and this sclerotic effect is reversed due to institutional instability. This chapter develops a critical appraisal of the theory and the accumulated evidence in the literature that follows from Olson.

Spatial Social Choice

A key concept of social choice is the idea of the Condorcet point or core. For example, consider a voting game with four participants so any three will win. If voters have Euclidean preferences, then the point at the center will be unbeaten. Earlier spatial models of social choice focused on deterministic voter choice. However, it is clear that voter choice is intrinsically stochastic. This chapter employs a stochastic model based on multinomial logit to examine whether parties in electoral competition tend to converge toward the electoral center or respond to activist pressure to adopt more polarized policies. The chapter discusses experimental results of the idea of the core explores empirical analyses of elections in Israel and the United States.

Spatial Voting Models of Party Competition in Two Dimensions

This chapter broadly surveys spatial voting models of party competition in two dimensions, where, in Western democracies, the first dimension is typically the left-right dimension pertaining to policy debates over income redistribution and government intervention in the economy. The second dimension may encompass policy debates over issues that cross-cut the left-right economic dimension, or it may encompass universally valued “valence” dimensions of party evaluation such as parties’ images for competence, integrity, and leadership ability. The chapter reviews models with office-seeking and policy-seeking parties. It also surveys both the theoretical and the empirical literatures on these topics.

Institution-Induced Stability

Simple majority rule is badly behaved. This is one of the earliest lessons learned by political scientists in the positive political theory tradition. Discovered and rediscovered by theorists over the centuries (including, famously, the Majorcan Franciscan monk Raymon Llull in the thirteenth century, the Marquis de Condorcet in the eighteenth, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in the eighteenth, and Duncan Black in the twentieth), the method of majority rule cannot be counted on to produce a rational collective choice. In many circumstances (made precise in the technical literature), it is very likely (a claim also made precise) that whatever choice is produced will suffer the property of not being “best” in the preferences of all majorities: for any candidate alternative, there will always exist another alternative that some majority prefers to it. This chapter suggests that while a collection of preferences often cannot provide a collectively “best” choice, institutional arrangements, which restrict comparisons of alternatives, may allow majority rule to function more smoothly. That is, where equilibrium induced by preferences alone may fail to exist, institutional structure may induce stability.

Supreme Values, Totalitarianism, and Terrorism

Totalitarian regimes and terrorist groups striving to create them are characterized by ideologies with lexicographic preference orderings. This means that they demand that their followers sacrifice everything, if required, including the lives of others and of themselves to reach the aims postulated. More than twenty such regimes have existed, from the Mongolian and Aztec Empires among the first, to much later Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, and in recent years to the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This means that the respective ideologies are usually very different, but that all follow a lexicographic preference order. This chapter studies the development, success, and demise of such regimes, which usually persecute, torture, and even kill nonbelievers, and often are engaged in bloody wars of expansion with many victims. This is also the case concerning their secularly or religiously based aims, which, moreover, characteristically control their behavior concerning the lifestyle of their populations, the arts, and their culture. Totalitarian regimes that have reached their aims are called mature ideocracies. They are characterized by the fact that the whole population has accepted (or at least pretends to accept) the ruling ideology.

Corruption

Corruption, understood as a special means by which private agents may seek to pursue their interest in competition for preferential treatment by government officials or politicians and where the “means” are valued by the recipient, is viewed by most social scientists as a major obstacle to economic, political, and social development and a source of inefficiency. This chapter presents a framework and taxonomy for the study of corruption. Within this framework, corruption is conceptualized as a particular instance of the more general social phenomena we call influence-seeking activities. The chapter provides an overview of theoretical models of corruption, summarizes cross-country evidence on the causes and consequences of corruption, and evaluates the recent literature on laboratory, field, and quasi-natural experiments.

The Political Economy of Trust

This chapter provides a selective survey of the literature on social trust in public choice and political economy. It outlines the empirical evidence and discusses theoretical channels through which social trust can affect the quality of institutions and policies, and the conditions under which such mechanisms are likely to work. It also addresses the discussion of reverse causality, that is, whether good institutions or policies actively create trust. It then discusses whether trust can be created or destroyed by activist government policy or accidental institutional changes. Its main focus is on the set of theories and evidence of the association between social trust and institutions of governance.

Public Choice and Libertarianism

This chapter investigates the relationship between public choice and libertarianism. Public choice is a positive enterprise, the application of methodological individualism to the study of political processes and institutions. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that stresses individual liberty from the arbitrary power of the state. This chapter argues that public choice has had a substantial influence in the development of libertarian thought in the second half of the twentieth century. First, public choice theory reaches several conclusions that are consistent with libertarian assumptions about politics. Second, some public choice theorists have also directly contributed to the development of libertarianism in their politico-philosophical writings. In particular, this chapter focuses on the work of James Buchanan, one of the founders of the discipline and a major contributor to the philosophical debates in the 1970s about the proper role of the state in a free society. Finally, the chapter argues that some of the major criticisms of public choice, by both professional economists and libertarian purists, fail to understand the distinction between positive and normative in the writing of public choice theorists.