Using unique and cutting-edge research, Schofield a prominent author in the US for a number of years, explores the growth area of positive political economy within economics and politics. The first book to explain the spatial model of voting from a mathematical, economics and game-theory perspective it is essential reading for all those studying positive political economy.

This volume brings together eight original essays designed to provide an overview of developments in spatial voting theory in the past ten years. The topics covered are: spatial competition with possible entry by new candidates; the "heresthetical" manipulation of vote outcomes; candidates with policy preferences; experimental testing of spatial models; probabilistic voting; voting on alternatives with predictive power; elections with more than two candidates under different election systems; and agenda-setting behavior in voting. Leading scholars in these areas summarize the major results of their own and other's work, providing self-contained discussions that will apprise readers of important recent advances.

Modern Methods for Evaluating Your Social Science Data With recent advances in computing power and the widespread availability of political choice data, such as legislative roll call and public opinion survey data, the empirical estimation of spatial models has never been easier or more popular. Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment with R demonstrates how to estimate and interpret spatial models using a variety of methods with the popular, open-source programming language R. Requiring basic knowledge of R, the book enables researchers to apply the methods to their own data. Also suitable for expert methodologists, it presents the latest methods for modeling the distances between points—not the locations of the points themselves. This distinction has important implications for understanding scaling results, particularly how uncertainty spreads throughout the entire point configuration and how results are identified. In each chapter, the authors explain the basic theory behind the spatial model, then illustrate the estimation techniques and explore their historical development, and finally discuss the advantages and limitations of the methods. They also demonstrate step by step how to implement each method using R with actual datasets. The R code and datasets are available on the book’s website.

With recent advances in computing power and the widespread availability of preference, perception and choice data, such as public opinion surveys and legislative voting, the empirical estimation of spatial models using scaling and ideal point estimation methods has never been more accessible.The second edition of Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment demonstrates how to estimate and interpret spatial models with a variety of methods using the open-source programming language R. Requiring only basic knowledge of R, the book enables social science researchers to apply the methods to their own data. Also suitable for experienced methodologists, it presents the latest methods for modeling the distances between points. The authors explain the basic theory behind empirical spatial models, then illustrate the estimation technique behind implementing each method, exploring the advantages and limitations while providing visualizations to understand the results. This second edition updates and expands the methods and software discussed in the first edition, including new coverage of methods for ordinal data and anchoring vignettes in surveys, as well as an entire chapter dedicated to Bayesian methods. The second edition is made easier to use by the inclusion of an R package, which provides all data and functions used in the book. David A. Armstrong II is Canada Research Chair in Political Methodology and Associate Professor of Political Science at Western University. His research interests include measurement, Democracy and state repressive action. Ryan Bakker is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Essex. His research interests include applied Bayesian modeling, measurement, Western European politics, and EU politics. Royce Carroll is Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Essex. His research focuses on measurement of ideology and the comparative politics of legislatures and political parties. Christopher Hare is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on ideology and voting behavior in US politics, political polarization, and measurement. Keith T. Poole is Philip H. Alston Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. His research interests include methodology, US political-economic history, economic growth and entrepreneurship. Howard Rosenthal is Professor of Politics at NYU and Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Princeton. Rosenthal’s research focuses on political economy, American politics and methodology.

A pioneering effort to integrate ideology with formal political theory

This book presents a simple geometric model of voting as a tool to analyze parliamentary roll call data. Each legislator is represented by one point and each roll call is represented by two points that correspond to the policy consequences of voting Yea or Nay. On every roll call each legislator votes for the closer outcome point, at least probabilistically. These points form a spatial map that summarizes the roll calls. In this sense a spatial map is much like a road map because it visually depicts the political world of a legislature. The closeness of two legislators on the map shows how similar their voting records are, and the distribution of legislators shows what the dimensions are. These maps can be used to study a wide variety of topics including how political parties evolve over time, the existence of sophisticated voting and how an executive influences legislative outcomes.

The Encyclopedia provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the subject known as public choice. However, the title would not convey suf- ciently the breadth of the Encyclopedia’s contents which can be summarized better as the fruitful interchange of economics, political science and moral philosophy on the basis of an image of man as a purposive and responsible actor who pursues his own objectives as efficiently as possible. This fruitful interchange between the fields outlined above existed during the late eighteenth century during the brief period of the Scottish Enlightenment when such great scholars as David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith contributed to all these fields, and more. However, as intell- tual specialization gradually replaced broad-based scholarship from the m- nineteenth century onwards, it became increasingly rare to find a scholar making major contributions to more than one. Once Alfred Marshall defined economics in neoclassical terms, as a n- row positive discipline, the link between economics, political science and moral philosophy was all but severed and economists redefined their role into that of ‘the humble dentist’ providing technical economic information as inputs to improve the performance of impartial, benevolent and omniscient governments in their attempts to promote the public interest. This indeed was the dominant view within an economics profession that had become besotted by the economics of John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson immediately following the end of the Second World War.

"The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests in large part on the ability of citizens to select leaders who will act in accordance with their policy preferences. In the end, a government lives up to this democratic ideal (or doesn't) through the enactment of specific policies. How, then, do citizens' votes relate to their preferences over government policy outputs? What intervening factors either assist or interfere with voters' selection of candidates who espouse views closest to their own? Understanding the relationship between citizens' policy views and their voting behavior is central to the evaluation of elections and of democratic governance more generally. This book studies the opinions of ordinary citizens on specific policies and the relationships between these policy views and people's vote choices in presidential elections. Specifically, I focus on testing the empirical implications of spatial theories of voting, which, in their simplest form, assume that each citizen's policy views can be represented by a location on some liberal-conservative policy spectrum, with candidates in a given election each taking a position on this same dimension. Each voter then casts his or her ballot for the candidate whose position is closest to the voter's own ideological location"-- Provided by publisher.

This book presents latest research in the field of Political Economy, dealing with the integration of economics and politics and the way institutions affect social decisions. The focus is on innovative topics such as an institutional analysis based on case studies; the influence of activists on political decisions; new techniques for analyzing elections, involving game theory and empirical methods.

“A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is no other book like it.” —Norman Schofield, Washington University “The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a large number of important questions concerning the interaction among voters and elected representatives in the political arena, using a common, rigorous language.” —Antonio Merlo, University of Pennsylvania Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure is the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and David Austen-Smith’s monumental study of the links between individual preferences and collective choice. The book focuses on representative systems, including both elections and legislative decision-making processes, clearly connecting individual preferences to collective outcomes. This book is not a survey. Rather, it is the coherent, cumulative result of the authors’ brilliant efforts to indirectly connect preferences to collective choice through strategic behaviors such as agenda-selection and voting. The book will be an invaluable reference and teaching tool for economists and political scientists, and an essential companion to any scholar interested in the latest theoretical advances in positive political theory.