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CHAPTER 5 Political Positions and Imitative Behavior What determines people's political positions?! Two hypotheses have dominated the literature. On the whole, economists have emphasized self-interest (Stigler 1971; Peltzman 1980). But some (for example, Kau and Rubin 1979, 1982; Kalt and Zupan 1984) maintain that political positions are influenced by ideology. These economists base their ideology hypothesis in part on altruism (Kalt and Zupan 1984). Both of these hypotheses have the same fundamental flaw. They both focus on the consequences ofthe policies that people advocate. In the Stigler and Peltzman models a person votes and advocates those policies that maximize his real income. We call this narrow self-interest . In the standard altruism models one is interested in voting to maximize some weighted average of the real income of oneself and others. The problem with these hypotheses is the well-known free-rider problem. An individual's vote or advocacy usually has a miniscule impact on the outcome of any election. Therefore, for most people there are extremely small expected returns to advocating any policy through the impact of that policy on the advocate. While this observation has frequently been made by those exploring the determinants of whether one votes, only a few have seen its possible importance in determining how one votes or what one advocates (Kalt and Zupan 1984; Brennan and Buchanan 1984; Schuessler 2000). If the expected returns of the policy consequences of advocacy are so small, other returns from advocacy-the private returns-will dominate in determining behavior if such returns exist. So what? Brennan and Buchanan (1984) argue that these private returns make it difficult to formulate predictions about the political process, since there are myriad sources for these returns. Not surprisingly , empirically oriented political economists have not accepted this invitation to close shop, especially since the standard self-interest model sometimes successfully predicts political behavior. But focusing on private returns need not lead to the abyss, nor to a rejection of the empirical successes of the narrow self-interest theory. Concentrating 72 Political Positions and Imitative Behavior 73 on the dominant private returns allows one to construct a testable model with some implications similar to, and some quite different from, the narrow self-interest model. The key point of this chapter is that political behavior can generate private benefits by helping people fit in with desired friends and associates . Political positions are then chosen not because these positions are the desired outcome for voters, but rather because one wants to associate with certain people and they have certain positions. People imitate others in choosing political positions. To put it in terms used by Brennan and Buchanan, people cheer for causes that others important to them are cheering for. The interaction between positions chosen for this reason and positions chosen for income-maximizing reasons, then, leads to many interesting testable implications. The narrow self-interest model also fails empirically in some major ways. Across the globe some of the biggest political clashes are between ethnic or religious groups rather than economic groups. For example, poor Protestants in Northern Ireland tended to support the Unionist cause in spite of the higher average income of Protestants. The imitation hypothesis easily explains this phenomenon. The classic work of Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee (1954) provides a prima facie case for imitation in political positions. They find that a person's political position was closely related to the political position of family, coworkers, and friends. Of course, this could be attributable to the fact that a person shares common characteristics with these groups, and Berelson et al. did not use appropriate statistical tools to control for this effect. However, in their results the effect of associates is very much larger than the effect of common characteristics . In consequence, if such tools had been used, one would not expect the common-characteristic effect to eliminate the imitation effect. Conceivably, their results could be explained by people choosing associates for their political views rather than vice versa. However, it is hard to see how the former could exist without the latter. If people choose associates for their political views, it pays people to develop political views that will get them chosen by those whom they prefer. Berelson et al. provide direct evidence ofthis revision ofpolitical views in response to the views of friends. They find that where a voter's friends had the same party preferences as he did initially, he was much less likely to change his preference than when...

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