Political Economy, Social Choice and Game Theory - Series II

Dear colleagues,

The topics covered in this Special Issue are embedded within political economy and social choice traditions using game theory tools that study the strategic interactions among the players in these games.

Political economy lies at the intersection of economics and political science and studies how self-interested actors (voters, politician, political parties, and other agents) make joint decisions over the public policies when their preferences are not aligned. Social choice combines welfare economics and voting theory to study the aggregation of individual preferences taking into account the interests or the welfare of those involved in the decision process with the aim of reaching collective decisions or social welfare objectives. The goal of social choice theory is to find a mechanism that ranks all possible outcomes according to some social preferences and if possible, to determine a winning alternative. These models seek to find voting equilibria over public policies (e.g., tax rates or the provision of public goods).

Social choice and political economy offer an integrated theoretical apparatus that studies the response of voters in democratic societies to governmental policies or to the policies with which candidates compete in elections. A wide range of game theory concepts and tools are used to model the strategic interaction among these players. Public economics, political economy, social choice and other strands of economic and political science literature aim to find the equilibria of these models. Yet even the simplest of these models are plagued by equilibrium existence problems. Studying the existence or lack thereof of equilibria in these models is of paramount importance when making predictions or performing comparative static analysis of the issues under study.

Social choice and political economy address similar issues using game theory tools. Social choice focuses on the properties of the social preference relation induced by the voting rule and examines whether these social preferences may be cyclical (leading to an empty core under majority rule and unrestricted preference domains). Political economy emphasizes the existence of equilibria (which is problematic if the core of the voting game is empty). Yet these two approaches are close, since the dominance condition that is used in discussing the core of a voting game is precisely the social preference relation that social choice theorists’ study.

The papers included in this issue give insights the following topics.

• Using the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) set up, Goetz studies how voters in large electorates with common interests facing more than two alternatives choose between alternatives.
• Using the CJT set up in a laboratory experiment, Goertz and Chernomaz examine the efficiency of information aggregation in five member committees that face three alternatives.
• Studying the optimal majority rule (simple majority and supermajorities) in referenda where voters choose between two options (reform vs. the status quo), Cheng and Li bring light into the hotly debated 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
• Mayer studies Luxembourg’s voting power in the Council of Ministries (CM) during the first period (1958-1972) of the European Economic Community (EEC) to show that Luxemburg was not a “null” player but that instead its positive voting power emanated from a strong alliance with the Benelux Countries.
• Kaminski extends backwards induction to games with imperfect information and develops a generalized backwards induction algorithm to solve political economy games.
• Sadanand introduces a new equilibrium concept, the Ideal Reactive Equilibrium, that refines equilibria in dynamic/sequential games where players find the equilibrium without having to rely on their beliefs of actions taken of the off the equilibrium path.

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• Political Economy
• Social Choice
• Political Regimes
• Institutional Structures
• Elections
• Bargaining And Conflict
• Voters
• Special Interest Groups
• Parties/Candidates
• Information Aggregation
• Repeated Elections