IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v158y2014i3p383-397.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cycles and instability in politics. Evidence from the 2009 Danish municipal elections

Author

Listed:
  • Malthe Munkøe

Abstract

Social choice theory predicts that political processes are prone to instability or outright chaos, yet the evidence that actual politics is dominated by the phenomena identified in the literature is somewhat anecdotal and widely contested. In order to systematically assess the degree to which politics is affected by cyclicality or chaos as predicted by social choice theorists we study the outcome of the 2009 municipal elections in Denmark. This yields a total of 97 cases, which allows for a systematic assessment of the frequency of cycling through a large-n study. Evidence of four cyclical results is presented. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Malthe Munkøe, 2014. "Cycles and instability in politics. Evidence from the 2009 Danish municipal elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 383-397, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:158:y:2014:i:3:p:383-397
    DOI: 10.1007/s11127-012-0021-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-012-0021-2
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11127-012-0021-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. van Deemen, Adrian M A & Vergunst, Noel P, 1998. "Empirical Evidence of Paradoxes of Voting in Dutch Elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 97(3), pages 475-490, December.
    2. Baron, David P., 1991. "A Spatial Bargaining Theory of Government Formation in Parliamentary Systems," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 85(1), pages 137-164, March.
    3. Mackie,Gerry, 2003. "Democracy Defended," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521534314, September.
    4. Norman Schofield, 1978. "Instability of Simple Dynamic Games," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 45(3), pages 575-594.
    5. Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter, 2001. "An Empirical Example of the Condorcet Paradox of Voting in a Large Electorate," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 107(1-2), pages 135-145, April.
    6. Baron, David P., 1993. "Government Formation and Endogenous Parties," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(1), pages 34-47, March.
    7. McKelvey, Richard D & Schofield, Norman, 1987. "Generalized Symmetry Conditions at a Core Point," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(4), pages 923-933, July.
    8. Mackie,Gerry, 2003. "Democracy Defended," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521827089, September.
    9. Austen-Smith, David & Banks, Jeffrey, 1988. "Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(2), pages 405-422, June.
    10. Gordon Tullock, 1981. "Why so much stability," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 37(2), pages 189-204, January.
    11. -, 1986. "Agenda = Agenda," Series Históricas 8749, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, 2014. "Empirical social choice: an introduction," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 297-310, March.
    2. Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter, 2018. "Trump, Condorcet and Borda: Voting paradoxes in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 29-35.
    3. Moser, Peter, 1999. "The impact of legislative institutions on public policy: a survey," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 1-33, March.
    4. Norman Schofield, 1995. "Coalition Politics," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 7(3), pages 245-281, July.
    5. Richard Potthoff, 2013. "Simple manipulation-resistant voting systems designed to elect Condorcet candidates and suitable for large-scale public elections," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 40(1), pages 101-122, January.
    6. Adrian Deemen, 2014. "On the empirical relevance of Condorcet’s paradox," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 311-330, March.
    7. Antonio Merlo, 2005. "Whither Political Economy? Theories, Facts and Issues," PIER Working Paper Archive 05-033, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 01 Dec 2005.
    8. Jacob Bower-Bir & William Bianco & Nicholas D’Amico & Christopher Kam & Itai Sened & Regina Smyth, 2015. "Predicting majority rule: Evaluating the uncovered set and the strong point," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 27(4), pages 650-672, October.
    9. Iain McLean, 2015. "The strange history of social choice, and the contribution of the Public Choice Society to its fifth revival," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 153-165, April.
    10. Tovey, Craig A., 2010. "The instability of instability of centered distributions," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 53-73, January.
    11. Moshe Maor, 1995. "Intra-Party Determinants of Coalition Bargaining," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 7(1), pages 65-91, January.
    12. Diermeier, Daniel & Merlo, Antonio, 2004. "An empirical investigation of coalitional bargaining procedures," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(3-4), pages 783-797, March.
    13. Sven de Vries & Rakesh Vohra, 2000. "A Structural Model of Government Formation," Discussion Papers 1297, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    14. Merlo, Antonio, 1997. "Bargaining over Governments in a Stochastic Environment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(1), pages 101-131, February.
    15. Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay & Mandar Oak, 2022. "Party Formation and Coalitional Bargaining in a Model of Proportional Representation," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-17, June.
    16. Stéphane Rottier & Francis Bloch, 2002. "Agenda control in coalition formation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(4), pages 769-788.
    17. John Patty & Elizabeth Penn, 2011. "A social choice theory of legitimacy," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 36(3), pages 365-382, April.
    18. Itai Sened, 1995. "Equilibria in Weighted Voting Games with Sidepayments," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 7(3), pages 283-300, July.
    19. Silvia Fedeli & Francesco Forte, 2011. "A survival analysis of the circulation of the political elites governing Italy from 1861 to 1994," Working Papers in Public Economics 141, University of Rome La Sapienza, Department of Economics and Law.
    20. Jan Zápal, 2017. "Crafting consensus," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 173(1), pages 169-200, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social choice; Condorcet cycle; McKelvey chaos theorem; Municipal politics; Danish politics; D71;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:158:y:2014:i:3:p:383-397. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.