The good, the bad and the populist: A model of political agency with emotional voters

Abstract

This paper extends the political agency approach to an environment in which voting may be divided between informed and instrumental, informed and 'expressive' and uninformed due to 'rational irrationality'. It constructs a model where politicians may be good, bad or populist. Initially the existence of only good and populist politicians is assumed and the incentives for good politicians to pool with or separate from populists are investigated and the implications for voter welfare are explored. The paper goes on to consider the inclusion of bad politicians. The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a rational choice analysis of populism as populism is commonly understood. Second, it locates a potential role for government as a persuasive provider of information regarding the quality of policy. Third, when bad politicians are added to the analysis it is found that a little bit of potential corruption could improve voter welfare.

Brexit, paz y Trump: enseñanzas para los economistas

“…Si se siguieran los pocos modelos contemporáneos que incorporan las emociones en procesos electorales, se caracterizaría a los ganadores de las tres elecciones que nos ocupan como populistas racionales que saben que se pueden beneficiar a corto plazo de políticas subóptimas que coincidan con las emociones de los electores ( Jennings, 2011), o como empresarios de las emociones, es decir, como individuos o grupos que intentan desarrollar una agenda política mediante la manipulación de las emociones generadas en el proceso político (Maor y Gross, 2015; Maor, 2016). La limitante en ambos casos es que parten de suponer que el político es un individuo racional que no se ve afectado por las emociones.…”

Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications

“…More optimistically, Jennings (2007) argues that if a constitution must be passed by referendum then additional institutional apparatus may be required within that constitution that may not have been required from a purely instrumental perspective. It is especially useful if these institutions could be designed so as to have little actual impact, as illustrated by reference to the 1998 Belfast Agreement where it could be argued that aspects of that Agreement were included primarily to stave off expressive rejection at the stage of the popular referendum.…”

“…36 See also Coate and Morris (1995). 37 See Jennings (2009) for an analysis of populism and expressive voting in the context of a political agency model.…”

Populism in Search of its Model

“…In keeping with Kögl's (2010) argument that conceptions of populism need to be cognizant of levels of analysis, there are recent studies that are attempting to measure populism not only through discourse or content analysis, or focusing on the strategic behavior of elites, but at the individual level (Jennings 2011). Also, experimental and simulation methods are being developed to add to the exploratory toolbox of the inductive model of populism.…”