Equalizing Political Participation and, in turn, Political Influence with Civil Liability Rules
Equalizing Political Participation and, in turn, Political Influence with Civil Liability Rules

Summary/Abstract: Data reported by the authors in Section 1, below, suggest that elected public officials in the U.S. are disproportionately responsive to the public policy preferences of their affluent constituents (Bartels, 2016, 253-254; Gilens, 2012, 241). However, these data do not exclude the possibility that the public policy positions of these officials are driven by their own preferences which the affluent largely share because of shared backgrounds (Bartels, 2016, 347). This possibility implies, therefore, that if legislators vote their own preferences, then low income/less-well educated constituents could acquire a proportionally equal share of political influence by participating to elect representatives who share the voters’ political preferences. Moreover, this possibility inspires the authors’ analysis in Section 6 of the use of civil liability rules to equalize political participation rates which, in turn, could equalize political influence rates if the policy makers’ preferences align with those of the voters. In Section 2, the authors show that if the voters’ participation rates determine their influence rates then perfectly equal participation rates could imply perfectly equal influence rates. In Section 3, the authors derive analytically the ith voter’s privately-optimal political participation rate (Pi*), while, in Section 4, they derive analytically the socially-optimal participation rate (Ps*). In Section 5, the authors obtain a numerical solution for Ps* using hypothetical data and, in Section 6, in a case study, they analyze the use of civil liability rules to incentivize the ith eligible voter to substitute Ps* for Pi* to induce perfectly equal political participation rates and, in turn, by the argument of Section 2, perfectly equal political influence rates. Section 7 is a conclusion.

• Details
• Contents