Principles of Comparative Politics (9781506318141) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506318141
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2017-03-06T14:40:07+00:00

Note: The three solid gray lines going through P1 are the indifference curves for labor (L), capital (C), and agriculture (A). The shaded triangles are winsets that represent alternative divisions of the subsidies that are preferred by a majority to the status quo; the majority in question is shown in each winset.

Is P2 a stable division of subsidies? The answer is no. Agriculture, which is not getting any share of the subsidies under proposal P2, could propose a 50–50 division of the subsidies between itself and capital. This is proposal P3 in Figure 11.9. This proposal would defeat P2 because agriculture would vote for it (agriculture receives 50 percent instead of 0 percent), and capital would also vote for it (capital receives 50 percent instead of 33 percent). Thus, proposal P3 would dislodge proposal P2 as the new status quo proposal. Because there is always some division of the subsidies that gives the excluded constituency a share of the pot while giving one of the other constituencies a bigger share of the pot than it is receiving with the status quo proposal, this process of ever-shifting divisions of the subsidy pot can be expected to go on forever. This is illustrated in Figure 11.9.

The process of cyclical majorities highlighted in Figure 11.9 exemplifies a famously unsettling theorem about politics relating to majority rule in multidimensional settings (McKelvey 1976; Plott 1967; Schofield 1978). According to the chaos theorem, if there are two or more issue dimensions and three or more voters with preferences in the issue space who all vote sincerely, then except in the case of a rare distribution of ideal points, there will be no Condorcet winner. As a result, whoever controls the order of voting can determine the final outcome.

Figure 11.9 Two-Dimensional Voting with Cyclical Majorities

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