Dimitri Landa
Biographic Data
| ID | 1134899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dimitri Landa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dimitri |
| FAMILY NAME | Landa |
| SIGNATURE | LANDA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6241-3762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 361 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Political Meritocracy and Democracy
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluat…
Argumentation strategies in party competition
Political parties' rhetorical strategies play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and electoral outcomes. To gain insight into what kind of arguments parties present to the public, and under what conditions, we develop a model of argumentation where parties compete to persuade voters before engaging in platform competition. Our model allows us to explore when parties present arguments that highlight the strengths of their ideological positio…
Competence and advice
We develop a theory of policy advice that focuses on the relationship between the competence of the advisor (e.g., an expert bureaucracy) and the quality of advice that the leader may expect. We describe important tensions between these features present in a wide class of substantively important circumstances. These tensions point to the presence of a trade‐off between receiving advice more often and receiving more informative advice. The optimal…
Strategic Discrimination in Hierarchies
In a laboratory setting, we explore strategic discrimination in principal-agent relationships, which arises from mutually reinforcing expectations of identity-contingent choices. Our experimental design isolates the influence of the strategic environment from effects of other sources of discrimination, including statistical differences between subpopulations and outright prejudice. We find that, in a strategic setting, principals who reward agent…
Is Random Selection a Cure for the Ills of Electoral Representation
National Conflict in a Federal System
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national policy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding policy demand constant. We also s…
Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy
Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this …
Information, Knowledge, and Deliberation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Polarized preferences versus polarizing policies
Does Unbundling Policy Authority Improve Accountability
We develop a model to analyze the effects of complexity of policy areas on the desirability of bundling or unbundling policy-making authority. We find that bundling tends to increase political accountability when the complexities of bundled policy areas are sufficiently symmetric and decrease it when the complexities are sufficiently asymmetric. When bundling is beneficial, its advantage comes from the possibility of sustaining in equilibrium a m…
Common Problems (or, What’s Missing from the Conventional Wisdom on Polarization and Gridlock)
We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased pol…
Coercive Leadership
We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice b…
Behavioral Political Economy, Argumentation, and Democratic Theory
A developing research program of behavioral political economy can help shed light on important social and political practices that fall outside the strict rational actor model but that are of central importance to democratic theory. Those practices include the deliberative activities of argumentation, information acquisition, and learning. Game theoretic models and experimental studies of collective decisions that are part of the behavioral polit…
Learning from Debate
We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness of debate, varying both informational and institutional variables. The informational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent to which audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments. The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she finds unpersuasive, the greater the risk that the speaker will alienate this listener when she fails…
Social Identity and Electoral Accountability
In a laboratory experiment, we explore the effects of group identities on the principal‐agent relationship between voters and representatives. In an adverse selection framework with observable effort, voters can choose to condition their reelection choices on representatives' effort alone, beliefs about representatives' competence, or both of those jointly. We show that inducing social identities increases the weight of representatives' effort in…
Issue Advocacy and Mass Political Sophistication
We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make informative arguments, increasing the informed speech for speakers who are less likely to be successful in carrying the majority of the audience, and with it…
On the Possibility of Kantian Retributivism
One of the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present article challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a social practice that conflicts with the consider…
Do the Advantages of Incumbency Advantage Incumbents
We develop a model that calls into question some longstanding presumptions about incumbency advantage. Our results show that increases in some of the ostensible benefits of incumbency frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of hi…
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
Game Theory, Information, and Deliberative Democracy
We contend that, with a suitably broad notion of rationality and a diverse set of motivations, the game‐theoretic tradition is particularly well suited for generating insights about effects of deliberative institutions and that progress in the development of deliberative democratic theory hinges on making proper sense of the relationship between game‐theoretic and normative theoretic approaches to deliberation. To advance this view, we explore th…
Voter responses to challenger opportunity costs
Cognition and Strategy
A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals' choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests speak or listen before voting over a common outcome. An important feature of our strategic setting is that introspective agents may, upon hearing an unpersuasive argument,…
Public Goods in Federal Systems
We study a political-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and regional levels of provision. Although the voters’ preferences are not single-peaked, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of voting equilibria and…
Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political Speech
We present a game-theoretic model of the social dynamics of belief change in which the (relevant) logically non-omniscient audience becomes convinced that the speakers' messages are `true' because its own prior beliefs logically entail them, rather than — as in cheap-talk models — because the speaker is (endogenously) trustworthy. We characterize the equilibria of the game and consider how their aggregate informational properties change with the …
Consumption or Investment? On Motivations for Political Giving
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and th…
Challenger Entry and Voter Learning
We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well …
Consumption or Investment? On Motivations for Political Giving
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and th…
Game Theory, Information, and Deliberative Democracy
We contend that, with a suitably broad notion of rationality and a diverse set of motivations, the game‐theoretic tradition is particularly well suited for generating insights about effects of deliberative institutions and that progress in the development of deliberative democratic theory hinges on making proper sense of the relationship between game‐theoretic and normative theoretic approaches to deliberation. To advance this view, we explore th…
Is Random Selection a Cure for the Ills of Electoral Representation
Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political Speech
We present a game-theoretic model of the social dynamics of belief change in which the (relevant) logically non-omniscient audience becomes convinced that the speakers' messages are `true' because its own prior beliefs logically entail them, rather than — as in cheap-talk models — because the speaker is (endogenously) trustworthy. We characterize the equilibria of the game and consider how their aggregate informational properties change with the …
Do the Advantages of Incumbency Advantage Incumbents
We develop a model that calls into question some longstanding presumptions about incumbency advantage. Our results show that increases in some of the ostensible benefits of incumbency frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of hi…
Cognition and Strategy
A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals' choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests speak or listen before voting over a common outcome. An important feature of our strategic setting is that introspective agents may, upon hearing an unpersuasive argument,…
Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy
Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this …
Social Identity and Electoral Accountability
In a laboratory experiment, we explore the effects of group identities on the principal‐agent relationship between voters and representatives. In an adverse selection framework with observable effort, voters can choose to condition their reelection choices on representatives' effort alone, beliefs about representatives' competence, or both of those jointly. We show that inducing social identities increases the weight of representatives' effort in…
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
Inequality, Growth, and Democracy
The analysis of the relationship between inequality and economic growth in distinct politi-coeconomic environments has been one of the central preoccupations of the extensive theoretical and empirical work on growth in the last decade. The authors argue that the empirical evidence available to date strongly indicates the relevance of this work for understanding the elusive causal connection between economic development and democracy. The state of…
Coercive Leadership
We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice b…
Public Goods in Federal Systems
We study a political-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and regional levels of provision. Although the voters’ preferences are not single-peaked, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of voting equilibria and…
Does Unbundling Policy Authority Improve Accountability
We develop a model to analyze the effects of complexity of policy areas on the desirability of bundling or unbundling policy-making authority. We find that bundling tends to increase political accountability when the complexities of bundled policy areas are sufficiently symmetric and decrease it when the complexities are sufficiently asymmetric. When bundling is beneficial, its advantage comes from the possibility of sustaining in equilibrium a m…
Common Problems (or, What’s Missing from the Conventional Wisdom on Polarization and Gridlock)
We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased pol…
Learning from Debate
We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness of debate, varying both informational and institutional variables. The informational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent to which audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments. The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she finds unpersuasive, the greater the risk that the speaker will alienate this listener when she fails…
Voter responses to challenger opportunity costs
Rational Choices as Social Norms
This article develops an account of a theory of rational choice based on the conception of rationality as a normatively justified correspondence between interests and choices. In this conception, rationality is best thought of as a property not of individual actions, but of a complex two-level phenomenon comprised of the social justification of behavioral norms and of the everyday choices made under these norms
Competence and advice
We develop a theory of policy advice that focuses on the relationship between the competence of the advisor (e.g., an expert bureaucracy) and the quality of advice that the leader may expect. We describe important tensions between these features present in a wide class of substantively important circumstances. These tensions point to the presence of a trade‐off between receiving advice more often and receiving more informative advice. The optimal…
National Conflict in a Federal System
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national policy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding policy demand constant. We also s…
Behavioral Political Economy, Argumentation, and Democratic Theory
A developing research program of behavioral political economy can help shed light on important social and political practices that fall outside the strict rational actor model but that are of central importance to democratic theory. Those practices include the deliberative activities of argumentation, information acquisition, and learning. Game theoretic models and experimental studies of collective decisions that are part of the behavioral polit…
Debating Conceptions of Rational Choice
Political Meritocracy and Democracy
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluat…
Argumentation strategies in party competition
Political parties' rhetorical strategies play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and electoral outcomes. To gain insight into what kind of arguments parties present to the public, and under what conditions, we develop a model of argumentation where parties compete to persuade voters before engaging in platform competition. Our model allows us to explore when parties present arguments that highlight the strengths of their ideological positio…
Strategic Discrimination in Hierarchies
In a laboratory setting, we explore strategic discrimination in principal-agent relationships, which arises from mutually reinforcing expectations of identity-contingent choices. Our experimental design isolates the influence of the strategic environment from effects of other sources of discrimination, including statistical differences between subpopulations and outright prejudice. We find that, in a strategic setting, principals who reward agent…
Inequality, Growth, and Democracy
The analysis of the relationship between inequality and economic growth in distinct politi-coeconomic environments has been one of the central preoccupations of the extensive theoretical and empirical work on growth in the last decade. The authors argue that the empirical evidence available to date strongly indicates the relevance of this work for understanding the elusive causal connection between economic development and democracy. The state of…
Deliberation and Social Polarization
Rational Choices as Social Norms
This article develops an account of a theory of rational choice based on the conception of rationality as a normatively justified correspondence between interests and choices. In this conception, rationality is best thought of as a property not of individual actions, but of a complex two-level phenomenon comprised of the social justification of behavioral norms and of the everyday choices made under these norms
Debating Conceptions of Rational Choice
Public Goods in Federal Systems
We study a political-economic model of federations with both federal and supplemental regional provision of a local (impure) public good with spillover effects. Regional differences in average income levels and externalities of provision induce differences in preferences over federal and regional levels of provision. Although the voters’ preferences are not single-peaked, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of voting equilibria and…
Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political Speech
We present a game-theoretic model of the social dynamics of belief change in which the (relevant) logically non-omniscient audience becomes convinced that the speakers' messages are `true' because its own prior beliefs logically entail them, rather than — as in cheap-talk models — because the speaker is (endogenously) trustworthy. We characterize the equilibria of the game and consider how their aggregate informational properties change with the …
Consumption or Investment? On Motivations for Political Giving
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and th…
Challenger Entry and Voter Learning
We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well …
Voter responses to challenger opportunity costs
Cognition and Strategy
A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals' choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests speak or listen before voting over a common outcome. An important feature of our strategic setting is that introspective agents may, upon hearing an unpersuasive argument,…
On the Possibility of Kantian Retributivism
One of the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present article challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a social practice that conflicts with the consider…
Do the Advantages of Incumbency Advantage Incumbents
We develop a model that calls into question some longstanding presumptions about incumbency advantage. Our results show that increases in some of the ostensible benefits of incumbency frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of hi…
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
Game Theory, Information, and Deliberative Democracy
We contend that, with a suitably broad notion of rationality and a diverse set of motivations, the game‐theoretic tradition is particularly well suited for generating insights about effects of deliberative institutions and that progress in the development of deliberative democratic theory hinges on making proper sense of the relationship between game‐theoretic and normative theoretic approaches to deliberation. To advance this view, we explore th…
Issue Advocacy and Mass Political Sophistication
We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make informative arguments, increasing the informed speech for speakers who are less likely to be successful in carrying the majority of the audience, and with it…
Behavioral Political Economy, Argumentation, and Democratic Theory
A developing research program of behavioral political economy can help shed light on important social and political practices that fall outside the strict rational actor model but that are of central importance to democratic theory. Those practices include the deliberative activities of argumentation, information acquisition, and learning. Game theoretic models and experimental studies of collective decisions that are part of the behavioral polit…
Learning from Debate
We present a model and a laboratory experiment on the informativeness of debate, varying both informational and institutional variables. The informational variable we focus on is a novel factor affecting the extent to which audience members can learn from exposure to unpersuasive arguments. The more easily a listener can learn from an argument she finds unpersuasive, the greater the risk that the speaker will alienate this listener when she fails…
Social Identity and Electoral Accountability
In a laboratory experiment, we explore the effects of group identities on the principal‐agent relationship between voters and representatives. In an adverse selection framework with observable effort, voters can choose to condition their reelection choices on representatives' effort alone, beliefs about representatives' competence, or both of those jointly. We show that inducing social identities increases the weight of representatives' effort in…
Common Problems (or, What’s Missing from the Conventional Wisdom on Polarization and Gridlock)
We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased pol…
Coercive Leadership
We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice b…
Polarized preferences versus polarizing policies
Does Unbundling Policy Authority Improve Accountability
We develop a model to analyze the effects of complexity of policy areas on the desirability of bundling or unbundling policy-making authority. We find that bundling tends to increase political accountability when the complexities of bundled policy areas are sufficiently symmetric and decrease it when the complexities are sufficiently asymmetric. When bundling is beneficial, its advantage comes from the possibility of sustaining in equilibrium a m…
Information, Knowledge, and Deliberation
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Is Random Selection a Cure for the Ills of Electoral Representation
National Conflict in a Federal System
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national policy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding policy demand constant. We also s…
Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Microeconomics (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (9 works)