Working papers
Tolerance and Polarization
This paper studies how voter polarization reduces overall voter welfare through its effects on policymaking in electoral competition, when voters exhibit tolerance toward certain ideologies— perceiving ideologies as either goods or bads. I develop a model of Downsian electoral competition in a two-dimensional policy space, where each policy is defined by both its ideology and its scale of implementation. Voters tolerate some ideologies in the sense that they prefer higher scale for ideologies they perceive as goods, and lower scale for those seen as bads. In equilibrium, candidates adopt policies aligned with the ideology tolerated by the median voter, but the scale of implementation decreases either as polarization increases or as voters become more intolerant. Unlike prior work, my results shed light on how polarization leads to a welfare decline for all voters in the absence of additional mechanisms: Moderates are harmed by reduced policy scale, while extremists are harmed by the unchanging ideological content of the median voter’s preferred policy. The driving mechanism is that the median voter is no longer pivotal in determining policy scale—candidates also respond to the preferences of more extreme voters, breaking the classic Hotelling-Downs logic that centers policy solely around the median.
Signaling via Elite-induced Referendums [Paper]
Jointly with Barton E. Lee
Around the globe, politicians are increasingly choosing to make policy via referendum rather than within the legislature. We observe empirically that the frequency of these “elite-induced” referendums is negatively correlated with societal measures of trust. To provide insights into this relationship, we develop a simple model of politics where a politician faces a popular policy and must choose between calling a referendum or attempting to pass the policy via the legislature. In equilibrium, referendums may be used strategically to either increase or decrease the probability of the policy passing but always signal to voters that the politician is more aligned with their interests. Under certain conditions (and as we empirically observe), referendums are called more often as voters’ trust in politicians decreases: believing that politicians are more likely to be misaligned with their interests. In such cases, politician who call referendums induce an inefficient policy distortion: all else equal, voters and the politician who called the referendum would benefit from legislating instead.
Characterization of planar chains
I provide a characterization of the class of linear orderings that can be represented as a finite lexicographic product of the real line. This class corresponds to linear orderings that are locally representable, meaning they have at least one neighborhood that can be represented within the real line.
Other publications
On Carruth’s axioms for natural sums and products, European Journal of Mathematics. [Paper]
Jointly with Lorenz Halbeisen.
In this paper three main results are presented: a bijection between natural sums and natural products, the completion of the axioms of Carruth for natural sums, and a new characterization of the natural sums in terms of Klaua’s integral ordinals. After introducing some preliminary results, we present two lemmas and a proposition for the proof of the existence of a bijection between natural products and natural sums. Then we prove the incompleteness of Carruth’s axioms by providing two counterexamples, and complete Carruth’s axioms by adding a fifth axiom. Finally, we introduce a characterization of natural sums in terms of Klaua’s integral ordinals and present two families of natural sums, which differ from Hessenberg’s sum.