Endogenous Tariff Formation under Representative Democracy: A Probabilistic Voting Model
扩展了Mayer的直接民主关税模型到代议制民主，在候选人信息不完全下引入概率投票，发现均衡关税是选民最优关税的加权平均，且收入分配比自由贸易更平等。
Wolfgang Mayer (1984) applied Duncan Black's (1948) median-voter theorem to investigate endogenous tariff formation under direct democracy. This paper extends Mayer's model from direct to representative democracy.' The extension from direct to representative democracy is straightforward if candidates possess perfect information. One can still apply the median-voter theorem, for a candidate in a two-party representative democracy also chooses the most preferred tariff of the median voter. Mayer (1984) himself fully recognized this direct extension.2 Nevertheless, if candidates possess imperfect information, which is believed typical in the real world, how the medianvoter outcome might alter or be modified remains unanswered. The purpose of the current paper is to answer the question. That candidates are something more than simply policy surrogates is the highlight of the article by James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich (1982). In contrast to direct democracy in which only policies matter in voter choices, in a representative democracy candidates are thought to be judged by voters on the basis of both nonpolicy candidate characteristics and proposed policies. In this paper I adopt the view of Enelow and Hinich (1982) and combine it with candidate uncertainty. More specifically, I consider a model incorporating candidates' lack of information regarding voters' nonpolicy preferences. The model gives rise to probabilistic rather than deterministic voting.3 I show that, in such a framework, the equilibrium tariff is no longer dictated by the most preferred tariff of the median voter, but is a weighted mean or even the mean of voters' most preferred tariffs; moreover, the income distribution resulting from the equilibrium tariff tends to be more equalized than that from free trade. The plan of the paper is as follows. Section I introduces the model of the paper. It consists of an economic and a political structure. Section II characterizes the equilibrium tariff and discusses its implications for income distribution. Concluding remarks are presented in Section III.