Political Science

Computational Social Choice

Boutilier et al. (2012): "Optimal Social Choice Functions: A Utilitarian View" pdf
Procaccia (2011): "Computational Social Choice: The First Four Centuries" pdf
Procaccia et al. (2009): "The learnability of voting rules" pdf

Influence

Minozzia et al. (2015): "Field experiment evidence of substantive, attributional, and behavioral persuasion by members of Congress in online town halls" link
summary
This paper shows via a field experiment using online town meetings that national politicians have direct influence on consituents they interact with along three dimensions: political attitude, sentiment towards the politician, and whether to vote for the politician. The experimental design was to manipulate whether the politician was present at the online town meeting. The authors identify the largest effect on trust in and voting for the politician.

Philosophy

List and Spiekermann (2012): "Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation" pdf

Political Economics

Acemoglu (2002): "Why Not A Political Coase Theorem? Social Conflict, Commitment and Politics" pdf
Kollman et al. (1996): "Computational Political Economy" pdf
Palfrey (2005): "Laboratory Experiments in Political Economy" pdf

Social Choice Theory

Ladha et al. (2003): "INFORMATION AGGREGATION BY MAJORITY RULE: THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS" pdf
List et al. (2001): "Deliberation, Preference Structuration, and Cycles: Evidence from Deliberative Polls" pdf
Miller (1992): "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice" link
*Regenwetter et al. (2009): "Behavioural social choice: a status report" pdf
Stadelmann and Torgler (2013): "Bounded Rationality and Voting Decisions over 160 Years: Voter Behavior and Increasing Complexity in Decision-Making" link

War

Jackson and Nei (2015): "Networks of military alliances, wars, and international trade" link
summary
This paper addresses a basic and important question: What causes war? The paper studies the effect of nations forming trade networks (rather than coalitions of allies, as appears to be typical). The authors show that dynamic networks of military alliances are unstable as long as at least one country has weak defenses, but that networks of military alliances combined with trade networks can be. The combined networks are stable because of lack of incentive to attack trade partners, and because of incentive to defend trade partners. (The results seem to suggest that quite specific types of networks are required. Testing if those networks exist might provide stronger evidence for the theory.) The authors provide observational evidence that frequency of war has decreased with increase in international trade. (Obviously there are major causality and selection bias problems here, though, so the paper is quite speculative. A field experiment is needed. Countries should trade more!) The most interesting part of this paper is the model. The impossibility war-stable networks imposes a fundamental property of foreign policy, and suggests that some other aspect of international relations maintains stable relationships between countries. The existence of war-and-trade-stable networks is suggestive. The concluding sentence of the paper is quite interesting and thought-provoking: Could these results also help us explain interpersonal relations?

Peter M Krafft Last modified: Tue May 6 13:54:48 EDT 2014