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Altruism Theory Of Voting
The altruism theory of voting is a model of voter behavior which states that if citizens in a democracy have "social" preferences for the welfare of others, the extremely low probability of a single vote determining an election will be outweighed by the large cumulative benefits society will receive from the voter's preferred policy being enacted, such that it is rational for an “altruistic” citizen, who receives utility from helping others, to vote.Edlin, Aaron, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan"Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote To Improve the Well-Being of Others."Rationality and Society. 19.3 (2008): 293–314. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. Altruistic voting has been compared to purchasing a lottery ticket, in which the probability of winning is extremely low but the payoff is large enough that the ''expected'' benefit outweighs the cost. Since the failure of standard rational choice models—which assume voters have "selfish" preferences—to explain voter turnout in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voting Behavior
Voting behavior refers to how people decide how to vote. This decision is shaped by a complex interplay between an individual voter's attitudes as well as social factors. Voter attitudes include characteristics such as ideological predisposition, party identity, degree of satisfaction with the existing government, public policy leanings, and feelings about a candidate's personality traits. Social factors include race, religion and degree of religiosity, social and economic class, educational level, regional characteristics, gender and age. The degree to which a person identifies with a political party influences voting behavior, as does social identity. Voter decision-making is not a purely rational endeavor but rather is profoundly influenced by personal and social biases and deeply held beliefs as well as characteristics such as personality, memory, emotions, and other psychological factors.Beck, PA, et al. (2002). The social calculus of voting: Interpersonal, media, and or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is a Right-wing politics, right-wing political parties in the United States, political party in the United States. One of the Two-party system, two major parties, it emerged as the main rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party in the 1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since then. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists opposing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery in the United States, slavery into U.S. territories. It rapidly gained support in the Northern United States, North, drawing in former Whig Party (United States), Whigs and Free Soil Party, Free Soilers. Abraham Lincoln's 1860 United States presidential election, election in 1860 led to the secession of Southern states and the outbreak of the American Civil War. Under Lincoln and a Republican-controlled Congress, the party led efforts to preserve th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Choice Theory
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science." Gordon Tullock, 9872008, "public choice," '' The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics''. . It includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents (voters, politicians, bureaucrats) and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways—using (for example) standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economics.Alberto Alesina, Torsten Persson, Guido Tabellini, 2006. “Reply to Blankart and Koester's Political Economics versus Public Choice Two Views of Political Economy in Competition,” Kyklos, 59(2), pp. 201–208 In popular use, "public choice" is often used as a shorthand for components of modern public choice theory that focus o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voting System
An electoral or voting system is a set of rules used to determine the results of an election. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, nonprofit organizations and informal organisations. These rules govern all aspects of the voting process: when elections occur, who is allowed to vote, who can stand as a candidate, how ballots are marked and cast, how the ballots are counted, how votes translate into the election outcome, limits on campaign spending, and other factors that can affect the result. Political electoral systems are defined by constitutions and electoral laws, are typically conducted by election commissions, and can use multiple types of elections for different offices. Some electoral systems elect a single winner to a unique position, such as prime minister, president or governor, while others elect multiple winners, such as members of parliament or boards of directors. When electing a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Irrationality
The concept known as rational irrationality was popularized by economist Bryan Caplan in 2001 to reconcile the widespread existence of irrational behavior (particularly in the realms of religion and politics) with the assumption of rationality made by mainstream economics and game theory. The theory, along with its implications for democracy, was expanded upon by Caplan in his book ''The Myth of the Rational Voter''. The original purpose of the concept was to explain how (allegedly) detrimental policies could be implemented in a democracy, and, unlike conventional public choice theory, Caplan posited that bad policies were selected by voters themselves. The theory has also been embraced by the ethical intuitionist philosopher Michael Huemer as an explanation for irrationality in politics. The theory has also been applied to explain religious belief. Theory Two types of rationality, and preferences over beliefs Caplan posits that there are two types of rationality: * ''Epistemic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Ignorance
Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the supposed cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the expected potential benefit that the knowledge would provide. Ignorance about an issue is said to be "rational" when the cost of educating oneself about the issue sufficiently to make an informed decision can outweigh any potential benefit one could reasonably expect to gain from that decision, and so it would be irrational to spend time doing so. This has consequences for the quality of decisions made by large numbers of people, such as in general elections, where the probability of any one vote changing the outcome is very small. The term is most often found in economics, particularly public choice theory, but also used in other disciplines which study rationality and choice, including philosophy (epistemology) and game theory. The term was coined by Anthony Downs in '' An Economic Theory of Democracy''. Example Consider an employer attempting to choose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Choice
Rational choice modeling refers to the use of decision theory (the theory of rational choice) as a set of guidelines to help understand economic and social behavior. The theory tries to approximate, predict, or mathematically model human behavior by analyzing the behavior of a rational actor facing the same costs and benefits.Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, Frank Webster (2000). ''Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present'', London: Sage Publications. Rational choice models are most closely associated with economics, where mathematical analysis of behavior is standard. However, they are widely used throughout the social sciences, and are commonly applied to cognitive science, criminology, political science, and sociology. Overview The basic premise of rational choice theory is that the decisions made by individual actors will collectively produce aggregate social behaviour. The theory also assumes that individuals have preferences out of available choice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paradox Of Voting
The paradox of voting, also called Downs' paradox, is that for a rational and egoistic voter (Homo economicus), the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits. Because the chance of exercising the pivotal vote is minuscule compared to any realistic estimate of the private individual benefits of the different possible outcomes, the expected benefits of voting are less than the costs. Responses to the paradox have included the view that voters vote to express their preference for a candidate rather than affect the outcome of the election, that voters exercise some degree of altruism, or that the paradox ignores the collateral benefits associated with voting besides the resulting electoral outcome. History of scholarship The issue was noted by Nicolas de Condorcet in 1793 when he stated, "In single-stage elections, where there are a great many voters, each voter's influence is very small. It is therefore possible that the citizens will not be sufficiently intereste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Skepticism
Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism (also spelled scepticism), sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is a position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking scientific evidence. In practice, the term most commonly refers to the examination of claims and theories that appear to be Pseudoscience, unscientific, rather than the routine discussions and challenges among scientists. Scientific skepticism differs from philosophical skepticism, which questions humans' ability to claim any knowledge about the nature of the world and how they perceive it, and the similar but distinct Cartesian doubt, methodological skepticism, which is a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs. in The skeptical movement (American and British English spelling differences#Miscellaneous spelling differences, British spelling: sceptical movement) is a contemporary social movement based on the idea of scientific skepticism. The movement ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Irrationality
The concept known as rational irrationality was popularized by economist Bryan Caplan in 2001 to reconcile the widespread existence of irrational behavior (particularly in the realms of religion and politics) with the assumption of rationality made by mainstream economics and game theory. The theory, along with its implications for democracy, was expanded upon by Caplan in his book ''The Myth of the Rational Voter''. The original purpose of the concept was to explain how (allegedly) detrimental policies could be implemented in a democracy, and, unlike conventional public choice theory, Caplan posited that bad policies were selected by voters themselves. The theory has also been embraced by the ethical intuitionist philosopher Michael Huemer as an explanation for irrationality in politics. The theory has also been applied to explain religious belief. Theory Two types of rationality, and preferences over beliefs Caplan posits that there are two types of rationality: * ''Epistemic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Ignorance
Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the supposed cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the expected potential benefit that the knowledge would provide. Ignorance about an issue is said to be "rational" when the cost of educating oneself about the issue sufficiently to make an informed decision can outweigh any potential benefit one could reasonably expect to gain from that decision, and so it would be irrational to spend time doing so. This has consequences for the quality of decisions made by large numbers of people, such as in general elections, where the probability of any one vote changing the outcome is very small. The term is most often found in economics, particularly public choice theory, but also used in other disciplines which study rationality and choice, including philosophy (epistemology) and game theory. The term was coined by Anthony Downs in '' An Economic Theory of Democracy''. Example Consider an employer attempting to choose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Welfare State
A welfare state is a form of government in which the State (polity), state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. There is substantial variability in the form and trajectory of the welfare state across countries and regions. All welfare states entail some degree of Public–private partnership, private–public partnerships wherein the administration and delivery of at least some welfare programs occur through private entities. Welfare state services are also provided at varying territorial levels of government. The contemporary capitalist welfare state has been described as a type of mixed economy in the sense of state interventionism, as opposed to a mixture of planning and markets, since economic p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
