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Leading the Party:Coordination, Direction, and Communication

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • 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.

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File URL: http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/pepp/Pepp22.pdf
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Paper provided by Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE in its series STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series with number 22.

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Date of creation: Oct 2006
Handle: RePEc:cep:stipep:22
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/default.asp

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
  • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
  • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government

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  1. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin, 2002. "Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1521-1534, December.
  2. 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.
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Cited by:

  1. Junichiro Ishida & Takashi Shimizu, 2012. "Asking One Too Many? Why Leaders Need to Be Decisive," ISER Discussion Paper 0857, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
  2. Laurent Bouton & Micael Castanheira, 2012. "One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 80(1), pages 43-87, 01.
  3. Torun Dewan & David P. Myatt, 2007. "The Qualities of Leadership:Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation," STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series 24, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
  4. Dmitry Shapiro & Xianwen Shi & Artie Zillante, 2009. "Robustness of Level-k Reasoning in Generalized Beauty Contest Games," Working Papers tecipa-380, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
  5. Laurent Bouton, 2013. "A Theory of Strategic Voting in Runoff Elections," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(4), pages 1248-1288, June.

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