IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00445596.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Extremism and monomania

Author

Listed:
  • Pierre Salmon

    (LEG - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Gestion - UB - Université de Bourgogne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Le papier définit un extrémiste comme un individu dont le point idéal dans l'espace des questions politiques est extrême le long d'une des dimensions et un "monomaniaque" (sans connotation péjorative) comme un individu aux yeux duquel une dimension a plus de poids, est plus "saillante", que les autres. Cette différence de saillance s'exprime dans la théorie spatiale du vote par des courbes d'indifférence en forme d'ellipse. En raisonnant dans le cadre de cette théorie, il est montré que les monomaniaques, alors même qu'ils ne sont pas nécessairement aussi des extrémistes, peuvent facilement être incités par des politiciens extrémistes à former ou à soutenir des coalitions extrémistes. Ce phénomène permet de rendre compte de certaines des caractéristiques observables des mouvements extrémistes. Il a aussi des implications quant à l'interprétation à donner aux résultats d'enquêtes, quant au mécanisme permettant aux partisans de coalitions extrémistes de sincèrement ne pas se sentir responsables de tout ce que font ces coalitions, enfin quant à l'évolution des jugements sur la culpabilité et l'innocence quand la saillance attribuée rétrospectivement aux différentes dimensions change au cours du temps, comme cela a été le cas en France depuis la guerre pour certains aspects du régime de Vichy. The paper defines an extremist as an individual whose ideal point in the issue space is extreme in some dimension, and a "monomaniac" (no derogatory connotation) as an individual for whom one issue is given more weight, has greater "salience", than the others. This difference in salience is reflected in the spatial theory of voting by indifference curves taking the form of ellipses. Using this theoretical framework, it is showed that monomaniacs, even though they are not necessarily also extremists, can easily be induced by extremist politicians to form or support extremist coalitions. This phenomenon can account for a number of the observed
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Pierre Salmon, 2002. "Extremism and monomania," Post-Print hal-00445596, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00445596
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pierre Salmon, 2017. "Is democracy exportable?," Working Papers halshs-01516493, HAL.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    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:hal:journl:hal-00445596. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.