An adaptive niching scheme called coevolutionary shared niching (CSN) is proposed, implemented, analyzed and tested. The scheme overcomes the limitations of fixed sharing schemes by permitting the locations and radii of niches to adapt to complex landscapes, thereby permitting a better distribution of solutions in problems with many badly spaced optima. The scheme takes its inspiration from the model of monopolistic competition in economics and utilizes two populations, a population of businessmen and a population of customers, where the locations of the businessmen correspond to niche locations and the locations of customers correspond to solutions. Initial results on straightforward test functions validate the distributional effectiveness of the basic scheme, although tests on a massively multimodal function do not find the best niches in the allotted time. This result spurs the design of an imprint mechanism that turns the best customers into businessmen, thereby making better use o...

In this paper, I discuss recent developments in political economy. By focusing on the microeconomic side of the discipline, I present an overview of current research on four of the fundamental institutions of a political economy: voters, politicians, parties and governments. For each of these topics, I identify and discuss some of the salient questions that have been posed and addressed in the literature, present some stylized models and examples, and summarize the main theoretical findings. Furthermore, I describe the available data, review the relevant empirical evidence, and discuss some of the challenges for empirical research in political economy.

Scholars have recently reworked the traditional calculus of voting model by adding a term for benefits to others. Although the probability that a single vote affects the outcome of an election is quite small, the number of people who enjoy the benefit when the preferred alternative wins is large. As a result, people who care about benefits to others and who think one of the alternatives makes others better off are more likely to vote. I test the altruism theory of voting in the laboratory by using allocations in a dictator game to reveal the degree to which each subject is concerned about the well-being of others. The main findings suggest that variation in concern for the well-being of others in conjunction with strength of party identification is a significant factor in individual turnout decisions in real world elections. Partisan altruists are much more likely to vote than their nonpartisan or egoist peers. For decades, social scientists have sought to explain why people vote (Campbell et al. 1960;

Socio-economic theories have long been the cornerstone of political participation studies. However, these theories are incomplete and particularly unsuited to explaining behavior found within immigrant minority communities. While increases in age and education provide skills that ease political participation, if these variables do not concurrently socialize an individual to stronger beliefs about the efficacy of voting and democratic ideals, they will not result in the expected higher participation levels. Prior studies over-simplify the effects of socio-economic status on political participation. Here, evidence is presented that socio-economic status variables merely provide the skills necessary for political activity in a suitable political context. Socialization determines how these skills will be manifested. Turnout rates for American elections have generally lagged behind those in other democracies (Burnham 1965; Powell 1986). After peaking in 1960, American turnout has steadily d...

This paper investigates between-voter interactions in a social network model of turnout. It shows that if 1) there is a small probability that voters imitate the behavior of one of their acquaintances, and 2) individuals are closely connected to others in a population (the “smallworld” effect), then a single voting decision may affect dozens of other voters in a “turnout cascade. ” If people tend to be ideologically similar to other people they are connected to, then these turnout cascades will produce net favorable results for their favorite candidate. By changing more than one vote with one’s own turnout decision, the turnout incentive is thus substantially larger than previously thought. We analyze conditions that are favorable to turnout cascades and show that the effect is consistent with real social network data from Huckfeldt and Sprague’s South Bend and Indianapolis-St. Louis election surveys. We also suggest that turnout cascades may help explain over-reporting of turnout and the ubiquitous belief in a duty to vote. I thank Robert Bates, Lars-Erik Cederman, Eric Dickson, Paul E. Johnson, Orit Kedar, Gary King, Ferran Martinez I Coma, and Ken Shepsle for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. How does the turnout decision of a single person affect an election? Decision-theoretic models of voting show that the probability of one vote being “pivotal ” in a large electorate is extremely small (Tullock

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite—that many do vote—would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that messages emphasizing low expected turnout are less effective at motivating voters than messages emphasizing high expected turnout. The findings suggest that descriptive social norms affect vote intention only among citizens who vote infrequently or occasionally. Practically, the results suggest that voter mobilization efforts should emphasize high turnout, especially when targeting occasional and low rate of participation voters. More generally, our findings suggest that the common lamentation by the media and politicians regarding low participation may undermine turnout. In the weeks leading up to the 2004 Presidential election, Women’s Voices Women Vote (WVWV), a leading political organization, sent out approximately 1 million mailings aimed at increasing political participation by single women. The WVWV mailings presented only one fact about turnout: ‘‘4 years ago, 22 million single women did not

Social capital is a concept that can facilitate a friendly merger between sociological and economic theories of political behavior. Rational-choice theories emphasize resources and constraints, and political-cultural theories focus on normative rules and habitual behavior; social capital integrates both. Mutual obligations instituted among members of society function as “credit slips ” which are both derived from preexisting cultural norms and subject to cost-benefit analysis by the individual. Previous research has suggested that elections constitute one such institution, composed of widely diffused mutual obligations. The decision to turn out is reanalyzed here in light of this approach, focusing on the respondent’s exposure to normative contexts that foster mutual obligations. Respondents act rationally upon the information represented by their political-cultural attitudes toward self, government, and regime. Nonvoters who are alienated and excluded from the political community, particularly the racial and ethnic minorities, can be distinguished from satisfied or apathetic nonvoters when these contextual controls are included. Civic engagement (membership in voluntary associations) is demonstrated to be a significant predictor of turnout in the 1996 presidential election. The

This paper has benefits from numerous discussions with David Levy, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Robin Hanson, Brian Caplan, Don Witman, John Lott, and many other colleagues over the years. They, of course, remain blameless for the analysis developed below. reforms to improve political and economic performance. That literature demonstrates that thoughtful institutional design can assure majoritarian stability and reduce rent-seeking losses. This paper addresses a quite different, although complementary question. The question addressed below concerns the informational limits of public policy. That is to say, suppose that all the normative agency and stability problems focused on by the mainstream public choice literature are solved with institutional reforms; how well would democracy work, given the information available to voters? There is considerable survey evidence that voters know very little about government policies or the backgrounds and personalities of important governmental officials. Clearly, if democratic outcomes were based entirely on the limited information available to a "typical voter," democratic policies could not be very effective, and polities based on majority rule would evidently be doomed to endless mistakes and failure. That is to say, even the best democratic government imaginable might adopt policies that are far from perfect, because voters know so little about public policy issues. Fortunately, as developed below, majority rule, itself, aggregates voter information in a manner that allows far better policy decisions to be chosen via elections than would be possible if policies were made directly by a "typical" voter. Condorcet's jury theorem implies that majoritarian outcomes are often better informed than any of the participating voters. ...

Incentives in voting models typically hinge on the event that a voter is pivotal. But voting can also in‡uence the future behavior of political elites. In this paper, we consider a model in which voters have private information about their policy preferences and an election is held in each of two periods. In this setting, a vote in the …rst period can have two types of consequences; it may be pivotal in deciding who wins the …rst election and it provides a signal that informs the beliefs that candidates running in the second election use when selecting equilibrium platforms. Pivot events are exceedingly unlikely, but when they occur the e¤ect of a single vote is enormous, determining the electoral outcome. In contrast, vote totals always have some signaling e¤ect on future policies, but the e¤ect of a single vote is always very small. We investigate whether the former, pivot, e¤ect or the latter, signaling, e¤ect drives equilibrium voting behavior in large electorates.

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