Motivating political support with group-based rewards
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6298832 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alastair Smith (0000-0002-5291-1442, New York University, corresponding author), Bruce Bueno De Mesquita (0000-0001-8582-8330, New York University) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 156-182 |
| Publication date | 2019-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Theoretical Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0951-6298 • E-ISSN: 1460-3667 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819833179 |
| OpenAlex | W2915528721 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 37 |
To compete in political contests, politicians need their supporters to contribute resources. We investigate how politicians can best allocate group-based prizes on a contingent basis to incentivize individual members of a group to exert effort on their behalf. We contrast contingent contracts with tournament style contests (Lazear and Rosen (Rank-order tournaments as optimum labor contracts. J Political Econ 1981; 89(5): 841–864)) and characterize when tournaments that create intergroup contests for prizes elicit more contributions than contingent contracts. By tying the allocation of prizes to the observed level of effort made by each group, politicians ameliorate the collective action problem that is created by the fact that each individual’s effort has only a minimal impact on the overall political contest. We examine the relative performance and stability of intergroup tournaments as a function of the number of groups and asymmetric group size
Collective action · CONTEST · Economics · Function (biology · Group (periodic table · Microeconomics · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Rank (graph theory · Tournament · Tying · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Game Theory and Applications · Law · Mathematics
Lobbying and Policy Change
Rent Seeking
Moral Hazard and Observability
Contest success functions
Politically Contestable Rents and Transfers
On the Theory of Strategic Voting1
Prizes and Incentives
Moral Hazard in Teams
Participation and the provision of discrete public goods
The Provision of Incentives in Firms
Interest Group Politics
The Logic of Collective Action
A strategic calculus of voting
Your vote counts on account of the way it is counted
Rent-seeking for pure public goods
The pure theory of large two-candidate elections
Conflict and rent-seeking success functions
A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts
Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts
Turnout and Power Sharing
Collective Rent Dissipation
A Theory of Protest Voting
Group incentives and rational voting
Electoral Rules, Mobilization, and Turnout
Contingent Prize Allocation and Pivotal Voting
Leading the Party
Collective Action and the Group Size Paradox
Voter Participation and Strategic Uncertainty
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |