Jonathan Bendor

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors--politicians as well as voters--are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor's aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later. Based on this idea of adaptation, the authors construct formal models of party competition, turnout, and voters' choices of candidates. These models predict substantial turnout levels, voters sorting into parties, and winning parties adopting centrist platforms. In multiparty elections, voters are able to coordinate vote choices on majority-preferred candidates, while all candidates garner significant vote shares. Overall, the behavioral theory and its models produce macroimplications consistent with the data on elections, and they use plausible microassumptions about the cognitive capacities of politicians and voters. A computational model accompanies the book and can be used as a tool for further research.

Some ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, are complex symbolic structures. Mastering them requires specialization, and because we are all amateurs in almost all symbolically rich domains, most people are not ideologically sophisticated. Instead, they reason about politics in a maturationally natural way, via friend-foe representations and inferences based on those representations (for example, friends of foes are foes). However, even complex ideologies are much simpler than the political, economic, and social systems that they are supposed to represent. Hence, all ideologies are inaccurate to varying degrees. More subtly, all are incomplete in various ways; in particular, they fail to anticipate some crucial events (for example, global warming), which leads to unanticipated value trade-offs and strategic conundrums. Ideologists sometimes adapt to incompleteness via recombinant innovation, producing hybrid ideologies (for example, ecosocialism). In turn, this tends to produce inconsistencies between new and old parts of an ideology. Thus, inaccuracy, incompleteness, and inconsistency are not pathologies of political belief systems. They are the inevitable result of ideologists grappling with a reality that is far more complex than their symbolic constructions can be. Therefore, evaluations of ideologies that identify errors, incompleteness, or inconsistency at a single point in time are often unenlightening. Following Imre Lakatos, evaluations should focus on how a sequence of ideologies—an ideological tradition—evolves.

To understand the meaning of evolutionary equilibria, it is necessary to comprehend the ramifications of the evolutionary model. For instance, a full appreciation of Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation requires that we identify assumptions under which conditionally cooperative strategies, like Tit For Tat, are and are not evolutionarily stable. And more generally, when does stability fail? To resolve these questions we re-examine the very foundations of the evolutionary model. The results of this paper can be analytically separated into three parts. The first part is conceptual: it identifies the evolutionary model's assumptions and shows how different assumptions imply different types of evolutionary stability. The second part is deductive: it establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for the types of evolutionary stability identified in the first part, and demonstrates in which games these kinds of stability can (and cannot) be attained. The third and final part is applied: it relates the general findings (which are independent of the specific payoffs of any particular evolutionary game) to the issue of the evolutionary stability of cooperation. Results on cooperation appear throughout the paper as they both exemplify and motivate the general results. These results essentially explain when cooperation is and is not stable, and why, thus shedding new light on the meaning and applicability of Axelrod's widely known claims.

ABSTRACT The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials? competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens.