Résumé:Dans cet article nous modélisons la relation entre le revenu et le bien-être déclaré à l'aide de techniques à effet aléatoire appliquées sur des données de panel issues de douze pays européens. Il n'est pas possible de distinguer empiriquement une hétérogénéité des fonctions d'utilité (transformation du revenu en utilité) et une hétérogénéité des fonctions d'expression (transformation de l'utilité en bien-êttre déclaré); néanmoins, nous montrons que l'on peut fermement rejeter l'hypothèse selon laquelle ses deux opérations sont menées de la même façon dans les douze pays étudiés. L'"effet marginal du revenu sur le bien-être" diffère en effet très significativement entre les quatre classes mises en évidence; ce qui laisse supposer des préférences pour la redistribution et des comportements très différents entre ces classes. Nos résultats nous amènent à penser qu'agréger sans précaution des données issues de populations et de pays différents peut s'avérer une pratique dangereuse. Abstract:This paper models the relationship between income and self-reported weel-being using random-effect techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. We cannot distinguish empirically between heterogeneities in the utility function (translating income into utility) and the expression function (turning utility into self-reported well-being), but we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals carry out these joint transformations in same way. The "marginal well-being effect of income" is very different in the four classes we identify; thus we expect preferences for redistribution and behaviour to be different across these classes. Our results suggest that aggregating data across diverse populations, and countries, may be a dangerous practice. Mots clés :Revenu, utilité, bien-être, hétérogénéité, classes latentes.Key Words : Income, Utility, Well-being, Heterogeneity, Latent classes. Abstract This paper models the relationship between income and self-reported well-being using random-effect techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. We cannot distinguish empirically between heterogeneities in the utility function (translating income into utility) and the expression function (turning utility into self-reported well-being), but we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals carry out these joint transformations in the same way. The "marginal well-being effect of income" is very different in the four classes we identify; we thus expect preferences for redistribution and behaviour to be different across these classes. Our results suggests that aggregating data across diverse populations, and countries, may be a dangerous practice.JEL Codes: C14, C23, I30.

Welfare state, Immigration, Income redistribution, Reciprocity, European Social Survey,

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on public spending and on individual support for the welfare state. The survey puts a particular focus on the fast-growing literature that uses experiments to study the effects of ethnic diversity. Many of these studies have appeared since the pioneering survey by Alesina and La Ferrara and have not been covered by a survey before.

We report on laboratory experiments on voting. In a setting where subjects have single-peaked preferences we find that the rational choice theory provides very good predictions of actual individual behavior in one-round and approval voting elections, but fares poorly in explaining vote choice under two-round elections. We conclude that voters behave strategically as far as strategic computations are not too demanding, in which case they rely on simple heuristics (in two-round elections) or they just vote sincerely (in single transferable vote elections).

It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are associated with greater legislative representation for women than single member systems. However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is also hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features are endogenous. In this study, we draw upon an experiment conducted during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections to isolate the effects of different PR electoral systems. Participants in the experiment were given the opportunity to vote for real EP candidates in three different electoral systems: closed list, open list, and open list with panachage and cumulation. Because voter preferences can be held constant across the three different votes, we can evaluate the extent to which female candidates were more or less advantaged by the electoral system itself. We find that voters, regardless of their gender, support female candidates, and that this support is stronger under open electoral rules.

International audienceThis paper presents a large-scale experiment on the Approval Voting rule that took place during the 2002 French presidential election. We describe the experiment and its main results. The findings are as follows: (i) Such an experiment is feasible, and very well accepted by voters. (ii) The principle of approval voting is easily understood and accepted. (iii) Within the observed political context, compared to the official first-round vote, approval voting modifies the overall ranking of candidates. (iv) The candidates Le Pen and Chirac, more than the others, were able to convert approval votes into official first-round votes

For the first time in some years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenry's disaffection with social-democratic policies on immigration. We represent political competition in Denmark as taking place over two issues-the size of the public sector and immigration-and model political equilibrium using the party unanimity Nash equilibrium (PUNE) concept, which generates equilibria on multidimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount between 12% and 36% of one standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens' ideal points of the size of the public sector.

We model political competition as a contest between parties that represent constituents, and which announce policies in a two-dimensional policy space; the first dimension concerns the degree of redistribution, and the second, the race or immigration issue. Given the distribution of voter preferences on this space, a political equilibrium is determined. We study the effect that racist or anti-immigrant preferences in the polity have on equilibrium values of the redistributive policy. For the United States, there is a substantial reduction in distribution below what it counterfactually would have been, absent racism. For the UK, France, and Denmark, there are effects of the same sign, but with different magnitudes. (JEL: D70, D72, D30)