John W Patty
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 976763 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John W Patty |
| PRENOMES | John W |
| SOBRENOME | Patty |
| ASSINATURA | PATTY J W |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1142-9334 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 658 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Classification algorithms and social outcomes
Classification algorithms are increasingly important in areas such as obtaining credit, employment, health care, housing, law enforcement, and national security. These classification decisions affect people's lives and, accordingly, can shape their behaviors. We present a formal model of optimal classification by an algorithm designer who may want to affect the distribution of behavior in a population. Our model allows the designer to have a wide…
Designing Deliberation for Decentralized Decisions
I describe and analyze a model of strategic communication and deliberation in decentralized decision‐making settings. I show that, in a cheap‐talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of messaging between agents and, accordingly, the quality of policy decisions and overall social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents can aid information aggregation and social welfare even when the added agent…
Working Towards Policy
Much of policy-making involves prioritization—deciding not only what to do but also when—and uncertainty—not knowing exactly how the choices made will affect actual policy outcomes. I present a theory of dynamic prioritization within a hierarchical organization. The model illustrates how notions such as an agency’s performance, mission, and critical tasks are linked with details such as institutional structure and the preferences of both front-li…
Ban the Box? Information, Incentives, and Statistical Discrimination
“Banning the Box” refers to a policy campaign aimed at prohibiting employers from soliciting applicant information that could be used to statistically discriminate against categories of applicants (in particular, those with criminal records). In this article, we examine how the concealing or revealing of informative features about an applicant’s identity affects hiring both directly and, in equilibrium, by possibly changing applicants’ incentives…
Algorithmic Fairness and Statistical Discrimination
Algorithmic fairness is a new interdisciplinary field of study focused on how to measure whether a process, or algorithm, may unintentionally produce unfair outcomes, as well as whether or how the potential unfairness of such processes can be mitigated. Statistical discrimination describes a set of informational issues that can induce rational (i.e., Bayesian) decision-making to lead to unfair outcomes even in the absence of discriminatory intent…
Ex Post Review and Expert Policy Making
Ex post review is a common feature of policy-making institutions. We consider an environment in which an expert agent makes a policy recommendation, which can then be accepted or rejected by an overseer whose policy goals differ from those of the agent. The theory suggests that both behavior and optimal institutional design are sensitive to several factors, including actors’ preference alignment, the importance of the policy decision, and the unc…
Measuring Fairness, Inequality, and Big Data
Kenneth J. Arrow was one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his “impossibility theorem” is arguably the starting point of modern, axiomatic social choice theory. In this review, we begin with a brief discussion of Arrow's theorem and subsequent work that extended the result. We then discuss its implications for voting and constitutional systems, including a number of seminal results—both positive and negative—that c…
A defense of Arrow’s independence of irrelevant alternatives
Giving Advice Versus Making Decisions
We generalize standard delegation models to consider policymaking when both information and authority are dispersed among multiple actors. In our theory, the principal may delegate partial authority to a privately informed agent while also reserving some authority for the principal’s use after observing the agent’s decision. Counterintuitively, the equilibrium amount of authority delegated to the agent is increasing in the preference divergence b…
Preventing Prevention
Preventing climate change and damage from natural disasters typically requires policies with up‐front costs that promise a flow of benefits over time. Why has obtaining such policies in a competitive electoral democracy proved so intractable? We develop a formal model of electoral accountability in this context, in which politicians have private information about their motivations. The model shows why fully rational voters, though certain that in…
Valence, Elections, and Legislative Institutions
To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to position…
Are Moderates Better Representatives than Extremists? A Theory of Indirect Representation
Few, if any, elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms. Rather, they choose between options generated by other actors and/or external events. We present a theory of voters' preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf, and show that in this setting voters' preferences over candidates' platforms will not look like voters' preferences over policies. We demonstrate that these induced pre…
What Is Pivotal Politics (and What Else Can It Be)
In this article, we discuss what Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics theory does (and does not) imply and then turn to ways that this parsimonious and highly influential theory of lawmaking can and should be extended. An overarching theme is that Pivotal Politics continues to teach us much about lawmaking. While (like all theories) it may be critiqued and interrogated, it remains true that “you can’t beat something with nothing
Why Do Courts Delay
Answering one question often begets another. We present a decision-theoretic model that describes how this affects the sequencing of decisions over time. Because answering an easy question may raise a more difficult one, a rational judge may delay resolution even if he has perfect information about the correct decision. Furthermore, because otherwise unrelated questions may raise similar follow-ups, he may optimally clump decisions together. Our …
Uncertainty, polarization, and proposal incentives under quadratic voting
Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Collective Decisions
In practical terms, political legitimacy is a subjective phenomenon, based on individuals' perceptions. These perceptions are based on four factors: the distributive efficiency of the outcomes from the decision, the distributive fairness of those outcomes, the equal access of the process used to make the decision, and the accountability of that process. In addition to discussing those factors, I also address the related questions of what factors …
Participation, process and policy
We develop a model of “notice and comment” rulemaking, focussing on strategic issues facing agencies and interest groups in light of judicial review in this process. Specifically, we analyse the incentives for agencies and groups to produce and reveal information during rulemaking. We show that judicial review can produce informed policymaking, but that participatory rulemaking can bias agency policymaking in favour of groups with access to the r…
Signaling through Obstruction
Obstruction is a time‐honored tradition in legislative politics. In many cases, obstruction can be foreseen to be ultimately unsuccessful, and in some of these cases, purely costly even to the obstructor. In this article, I construct a model of obstruction in which the individual obstruction of a fait accompli policy proposal is potentially informative precisely and ironically because it is inefficient. The theory, based on the legislators' reele…
Aggregation, Evaluation, and Social Choice Theory
We argue that political theory, regardless of whether it is “positive” or “normative” in nature, is structured and unified by social choice theory. We point out that the central conclusions of social choice theory are context-free and thus apply to any aggregation of multiple factors. The generality of the basic framework of social choice theory implies its results are relevant to any consideration of trade-offs and, because any interesting theor…
Valence and Campaigns
We present a model of two‐candidate elections in which candidates are office‐motivated, campaigning is voluntary and costly, and one candidate has a valence advantage. In equilibrium, the order of campaign announcements matters: Each candidate would prefer to announce his or her position after the other candidate has announced his or hers. The fundamental predictions of the model are (1) the impact of valence and campaigning costs on candidates' …
Analyzing Big Data
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
Social Choice and Legitimacy
Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both …
Social choice and legitimacy
Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both …
Sequential Decision Making and Information Aggregation in Small Networks
This article describes and investigates a model of strategic sequential decision making in networked policy-making environments with three agents. The primary interest is the effect of network structure on sequential policy making and information aggregation. The model and results illustrate how individual policy decisions of varying weight (in terms of a decision maker's unilateral effect on policy outcomes) can enable information aggregation in…
Learning While Governing
Slackers and Zealots
We investigate how aspects of “civil service” systems of personnel management interact with bureaucratic discretion to create expert bureaucracies populated by policy‐motivated agents. We construct a dynamic model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship‐specific) policy expertise and may or may not be interested in policy choices per se. The legislature makes sequentially rational grants of discretion, which serve as incentives for exper…
Formal Models of Bureaucracy
In the past decade, political science has witnessed a substantial amount of research using formal models to explicate the rationale for and effects of myriad aspects of bureaucratic institutions. Whereas previous waves of formal modeling on bureaucratic structure emphasized bureaucracy as a device for making policy commitments last, more recent formal research has grappled with information asymmetries and more explicitly considered the principal-…
Business as usual
We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly…
Equilibrium Party Government
In this article, I present an equilibrium model of party government within a two‐party legislature. The theory is predicated upon members of the majority party having potentially conflicting individual and collective interests. In response to this potential conflict, the members of the majority party endogenously choose a degree of control to grant to their leadership. The equilibrium level of party strength is decreasing in the size of the major…
Preventing Prevention
Preventing climate change and damage from natural disasters typically requires policies with up‐front costs that promise a flow of benefits over time. Why has obtaining such policies in a competitive electoral democracy proved so intractable? We develop a formal model of electoral accountability in this context, in which politicians have private information about their motivations. The model shows why fully rational voters, though certain that in…
Signaling through Obstruction
Obstruction is a time‐honored tradition in legislative politics. In many cases, obstruction can be foreseen to be ultimately unsuccessful, and in some of these cases, purely costly even to the obstructor. In this article, I construct a model of obstruction in which the individual obstruction of a fait accompli policy proposal is potentially informative precisely and ironically because it is inefficient. The theory, based on the legislators' reele…
The Politics of Biased Information
The effects of any important political decision are always to some degree uncertain. This uncertainty may be ameliorated by the collection of policy-relevant information. Predictably, if such information is biased, then political decisions based on that information will be biased as well. This paper explores the converse of this statement: if the policymaker is biased, will the information provided to him or her also be biased? It is shown in thi…
Manipulation and Single-Peakedness
This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single-peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy-proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is …
Loss aversion, presidential responsibility, and midterm congressional elections
Sequential Decision Making and Information Aggregation in Small Networks
This article describes and investigates a model of strategic sequential decision making in networked policy-making environments with three agents. The primary interest is the effect of network structure on sequential policy making and information aggregation. The model and results illustrate how individual policy decisions of varying weight (in terms of a decision maker's unilateral effect on policy outcomes) can enable information aggregation in…
The House Discharge Procedure and Majoritarian Politics
This paper discusses the details of the discharge procedure in the House of Representatives and their implications for theories of legislative politics. While the discharge procedure is frequently cited as the tool by which committee obstruction within the House can be overcome, I argue that, under close examination, the procedure actually is far from purely majoritarian. Specifically, I argue that the details of the discharge procedure imply tha…
Stovepiping
In hierarchical organizations lower-level agents can often censor the information that a higher-level principal has available to make a decision. We present a model of this interaction in which the principal can also access an independent source of unfiltered but lower-quality information besides that provided by the agent. This provision of outside information can be thought of as ‘stovepiping,’ the transmission of unfiltered information from an…
Ex Post Review and Expert Policy Making
Ex post review is a common feature of policy-making institutions. We consider an environment in which an expert agent makes a policy recommendation, which can then be accepted or rejected by an overseer whose policy goals differ from those of the agent. The theory suggests that both behavior and optimal institutional design are sensitive to several factors, including actors’ preference alignment, the importance of the policy decision, and the unc…
Valence and Campaigns
We present a model of two‐candidate elections in which candidates are office‐motivated, campaigning is voluntary and costly, and one candidate has a valence advantage. In equilibrium, the order of campaign announcements matters: Each candidate would prefer to announce his or her position after the other candidate has announced his or hers. The fundamental predictions of the model are (1) the impact of valence and campaigning costs on candidates' …
Letting the good times roll
Participation, process and policy
We develop a model of “notice and comment” rulemaking, focussing on strategic issues facing agencies and interest groups in light of judicial review in this process. Specifically, we analyse the incentives for agencies and groups to produce and reveal information during rulemaking. We show that judicial review can produce informed policymaking, but that participatory rulemaking can bias agency policymaking in favour of groups with access to the r…
The Structure of Heresthetical Power
This article considers manipulation of collective choice — in such environments, a potential alternative is powerful only to the degree that its introduction can affect the collective decision. Using the Banks set (Banks, 1985), we present and characterize alternatives that can, and those that can not, affect sophisticated collective decision-making. Along with offering two substantive findings about political manipulation and a link between our …
Are Moderates Better Representatives than Extremists? A Theory of Indirect Representation
Few, if any, elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms. Rather, they choose between options generated by other actors and/or external events. We present a theory of voters' preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf, and show that in this setting voters' preferences over candidates' platforms will not look like voters' preferences over policies. We demonstrate that these induced pre…
Arguments-Based Collective Choice
This article presents a model of collective choice when group decisions must be justified by arguments from first principles. Individuals may have preferences over both the actions chosen and the arguments used to justify them. Defining a notion of stability in the arguments made and actions supported within a group, I characterize the set of actions that can be justified as well as the arguments that will be used to justify these actions. Of par…
Agreeing to fight
In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely g…
Equivalence of Objectives in Two Candidate Elections
Algorithmic Fairness and Statistical Discrimination
Algorithmic fairness is a new interdisciplinary field of study focused on how to measure whether a process, or algorithm, may unintentionally produce unfair outcomes, as well as whether or how the potential unfairness of such processes can be mitigated. Statistical discrimination describes a set of informational issues that can induce rational (i.e., Bayesian) decision-making to lead to unfair outcomes even in the absence of discriminatory intent…
Giving Advice Versus Making Decisions
We generalize standard delegation models to consider policymaking when both information and authority are dispersed among multiple actors. In our theory, the principal may delegate partial authority to a privately informed agent while also reserving some authority for the principal’s use after observing the agent’s decision. Counterintuitively, the equilibrium amount of authority delegated to the agent is increasing in the preference divergence b…
Valence, Elections, and Legislative Institutions
To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to position…
Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium
In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attentio…
Equivalence of Objectives in Two Candidate Elections
Agreeing to fight
In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely g…
Loss aversion, presidential responsibility, and midterm congressional elections
Letting the good times roll
The House Discharge Procedure and Majoritarian Politics
This paper discusses the details of the discharge procedure in the House of Representatives and their implications for theories of legislative politics. While the discharge procedure is frequently cited as the tool by which committee obstruction within the House can be overcome, I argue that, under close examination, the procedure actually is far from purely majoritarian. Specifically, I argue that the details of the discharge procedure imply tha…
Incommensurability and Issue Voting
In this article, I examine several models of voter behavior that are consistent with recent work in political psychology (Fiske and Tetlock, 1997) concerning incommensurability and individuals’ reluctance to make decisions involving explicit trade-offs between competing ideals or principles. In so doing, I show that one ramification of such cognitive dissonance is policy convergence in multidimensional (i.e. multi-issue) electoral competition bet…
Slackers and Zealots
We investigate how aspects of “civil service” systems of personnel management interact with bureaucratic discretion to create expert bureaucracies populated by policy‐motivated agents. We construct a dynamic model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship‐specific) policy expertise and may or may not be interested in policy choices per se. The legislature makes sequentially rational grants of discretion, which serve as incentives for exper…
Arguments-Based Collective Choice
This article presents a model of collective choice when group decisions must be justified by arguments from first principles. Individuals may have preferences over both the actions chosen and the arguments used to justify them. Defining a notion of stability in the arguments made and actions supported within a group, I characterize the set of actions that can be justified as well as the arguments that will be used to justify these actions. Of par…
Equilibrium Party Government
In this article, I present an equilibrium model of party government within a two‐party legislature. The theory is predicated upon members of the majority party having potentially conflicting individual and collective interests. In response to this potential conflict, the members of the majority party endogenously choose a degree of control to grant to their leadership. The equilibrium level of party strength is decreasing in the size of the major…
Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium
In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attentio…
The Politics of Biased Information
The effects of any important political decision are always to some degree uncertain. This uncertainty may be ameliorated by the collection of policy-relevant information. Predictably, if such information is biased, then political decisions based on that information will be biased as well. This paper explores the converse of this statement: if the policymaker is biased, will the information provided to him or her also be biased? It is shown in thi…
The Structure of Heresthetical Power
This article considers manipulation of collective choice — in such environments, a potential alternative is powerful only to the degree that its introduction can affect the collective decision. Using the Banks set (Banks, 1985), we present and characterize alternatives that can, and those that can not, affect sophisticated collective decision-making. Along with offering two substantive findings about political manipulation and a link between our …
Dilatory or anticipatory? Voting on the Journal in the House of Representatives
Manipulation and Single-Peakedness
This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single-peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy-proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is …
Formal Models of Bureaucracy
In the past decade, political science has witnessed a substantial amount of research using formal models to explicate the rationale for and effects of myriad aspects of bureaucratic institutions. Whereas previous waves of formal modeling on bureaucratic structure emphasized bureaucracy as a device for making policy commitments last, more recent formal research has grappled with information asymmetries and more explicitly considered the principal-…
Learning While Governing
Stovepiping
In hierarchical organizations lower-level agents can often censor the information that a higher-level principal has available to make a decision. We present a model of this interaction in which the principal can also access an independent source of unfiltered but lower-quality information besides that provided by the agent. This provision of outside information can be thought of as ‘stovepiping,’ the transmission of unfiltered information from an…
Business as usual
We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly…
Social Choice and Legitimacy
Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both …
Social choice and legitimacy
Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both …
Sequential Decision Making and Information Aggregation in Small Networks
This article describes and investigates a model of strategic sequential decision making in networked policy-making environments with three agents. The primary interest is the effect of network structure on sequential policy making and information aggregation. The model and results illustrate how individual policy decisions of varying weight (in terms of a decision maker's unilateral effect on policy outcomes) can enable information aggregation in…
Aggregation, Evaluation, and Social Choice Theory
We argue that political theory, regardless of whether it is “positive” or “normative” in nature, is structured and unified by social choice theory. We point out that the central conclusions of social choice theory are context-free and thus apply to any aggregation of multiple factors. The generality of the basic framework of social choice theory implies its results are relevant to any consideration of trade-offs and, because any interesting theor…
Valence and Campaigns
We present a model of two‐candidate elections in which candidates are office‐motivated, campaigning is voluntary and costly, and one candidate has a valence advantage. In equilibrium, the order of campaign announcements matters: Each candidate would prefer to announce his or her position after the other candidate has announced his or hers. The fundamental predictions of the model are (1) the impact of valence and campaigning costs on candidates' …
Analyzing Big Data
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
Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Collective Decisions
In practical terms, political legitimacy is a subjective phenomenon, based on individuals' perceptions. These perceptions are based on four factors: the distributive efficiency of the outcomes from the decision, the distributive fairness of those outcomes, the equal access of the process used to make the decision, and the accountability of that process. In addition to discussing those factors, I also address the related questions of what factors …
Political science (37 obras) · Economics (35 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 obras) · Microeconomics (20 obras) · Law and economics (18 obras) · Game Theory and Voting Systems (15 obras)