IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/stipep/22.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Leading the Party:Coordination, Direction, and Communication

Author

Listed:
  • Torun Dewan
  • David P. Myatt

Abstract

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier tocoordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is tosucceed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of thealternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual'sability to assess the mood is his sense of direction. These factors combine toform an index of both the desirability and the feasibility of leadership: wecall this index Michels' Ratio. A sovereign party conference gives way toleadership by an individual or oligarchy if and only if Michels' Ratio issufficiently high. Leadership enhances the clarity of intra-partycommunication, but weakens the response of policy choices to the party'smood.

Suggested Citation

  • Torun Dewan & David P. Myatt, 2006. "Leading the Party:Coordination, Direction, and Communication," STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series 22, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:stipep:22
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/pepp/Pepp22.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy Feddersen & Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 1997. "Voting Behavior and Information Aggregation in Elections with Private Information," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(5), pages 1029-1058, September.
    2. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin, 2002. "Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1521-1534, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Panova, Elena, 2015. "A passion for voting," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 44-65.
    2. Liu, Shuo, 2019. "Voting with public information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 694-719.
    3. Elena Panova, 2011. "A Passion for Democracy," CIRANO Working Papers 2011s-47, CIRANO.
    4. Torun Dewan & David P Myatt, 2012. "On the rhetorical strategies of leaders: Speaking clearly, standing back, and stepping down," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 24(4), pages 431-460, October.
    5. Keiichi Morimoto, 2021. "Information Use and the Condorcet Jury Theorem," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(10), pages 1-22, May.
    6. Alan S. Blinder & Michael Ehrmann & Jakob de Haan & David-Jan Jansen, 2024. "Central Bank Communication with the General Public: Promise or False Hope?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 62(2), pages 425-457, June.
    7. Burkhard Schipper & Hee Yeul Woo, 2012. "Political Awareness and Microtargeting of Voters in Electoral Competition," Working Papers 124, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    8. repec:ecb:ecbrbu:2017:0037:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Micael Castanheira, 2003. "Why Vote For Losers?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(5), pages 1207-1238, September.
    10. Christian Hellwig, 2004. "Heterogeneous Information and the Benefits of Public Information Disclosures (October 2005)," UCLA Economics Online Papers 283, UCLA Department of Economics.
    11. Benjamin Born & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher, 2011. "How Should Central Banks Deal with a Financial Stability Objective? The Evolving Role of Communication as a Policy Instrument," Chapters, in: Sylvester Eijffinger & Donato Masciandaro (ed.), Handbook of Central Banking, Financial Regulation and Supervision, chapter 9, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Herrada, Rafael & Pérez, Fernando & Montoro, Carlos & Castillo, Paul, 2020. "La comunicación de la política monetaria en los bancos centrales de América del Sur," Revista Moneda, Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, issue 181, pages 4-9.
    13. George-Marios Angeletos & Alessandro Pavan, 2009. "Policy with Dispersed Information," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 7(1), pages 11-60, March.
    14. Mostafa Beshkar & Jee-Hyeong Park, 2017. "Dispute Settlement with Second-Order Uncertainty: The Case of International Trade Disputes," CAEPR Working Papers 2017-010, Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research, Department of Economics, Indiana University Bloomington.
    15. George-Marios Angeletos & Chen Lian, 2018. "Forward Guidance without Common Knowledge," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(9), pages 2477-2512, September.
    16. Robbett, Andrea & Matthews, Peter Hans, 2018. "Partisan bias and expressive voting," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 107-120.
    17. Meirowitz, Adam, 2005. "Deliberative Democracy or Market Democracy: Designing Institutions to Aggregate Preferences and Information," Papers 03-28-2005, Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy.
    18. Goldstein, Itay & Yang, Liyan, 2019. "Good disclosure, bad disclosure," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1), pages 118-138.
    19. Ichiro Fukunaga, 2007. "Imperfect Common Knowledge, Staggered Price Setting, and the Effects of Monetary Policy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(7), pages 1711-1739, October.
    20. Ernesto Dal Bo, 2000. "Bribing Voters," Economics Series Working Papers 39, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    21. Bhattacharya, Sourav & Duffy, John & Kim, Sun-Tak, 2014. "Compulsory versus voluntary voting: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 111-131.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government

    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:cep:stipep:22. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/ .

    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.