I. Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote. Given this assumption, the analyst could express the outcome of the voting process in one of two ways. One possibility was to make the heroic assumptions necessary to obtain the median voter theorem, in which case, the political demands of the citizenry are simply the preferences of the median voter. The alternative was to make Arrow's Impossibility Theorem in which case even though individual preferences are well ordered, no collective preference function exists. On either of these approaches, institutions such as interest groups, political parties, or the structures ofpolitical representation played no role in the analysis. The work of "Chicago" scholars especially George Stigler, Gary Becker and Sam Peltzman took a different approach and emphasized the importanceoforganizationinmakingpoliticaldemandseffective, shifting thefocus from voting topolitical "pressure" byinterestgroups. However, in these models, voting as an instrument of political action simply disappears and the relationship between interest group pressures and electoral processes has never been clarified.

Klappentext

This book is a selection of papers presented at the Fourth Villa Colombella seminar on the topic of the relationship between the preferences of citizens for public policies and how (or whether) these get expressed as political demands by interest groups, political parties and governments. Preferences and Democracy features contributions from prominent North American and European scholars with up-to-date commentary and surveys of standard topics, including probabilistic voting, the convergence of political parties, and redistribution. New topics are addressed, including how political institutions provide bridges between demand and supply; how the political process in a democracy sometimes `represses' political demand. Preferences and Democracy addresses the important issue of how the democratic political process succeeds or fails in facilitating the expression of the political demands of the people. The book is a vital reference for students and specialists in economics and political science.

Inhalt
One: Unsatisfied Political Demands.- Unpopular Policies and The Theory of Representative Democracy.- Equilibrium Political Inaction in a Democracy.- Two: Bridges Between Demand and Supply.- A Theory of Demand for Governmentally Supplied Goods and Services.- Organized Groups and the (Mis?) transmission of Public Preferences.- Public Goods Provision Institutions.- Three: Equilibrium Political Platforms: Convergence and Divergence.- The Silent Revolution of Probabilistic Voting.- Pivotal Voters and Political Equilibria of Party Equilibrium.- Political Exchange and the Allocation of Surplus: A Model of Two-Party Competition.- Four: The Behaviour of Political Parties.- Fourteen Ways to Credibly Escape a Credible Commitment (and Still Get Re-Elected).- Issues and Party Alignments: A Review with Canadian Examples.- Five: Redistribution.- The Demand for the Public Sector In the Rich Welfare State of Denmark: Two Polls from 1990.- Voting Rights and the Demand for Public Expenditure: An Analysis of the Redistributive Impact of Universal Suffrage.- Coercive Redistribution and the Franchise: A Preliminary Investigation Using Computable General Equilibrium Modelling.