Papers by Alessandro Del Ponte
Journal of Politics, 2017
Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by... more Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by inequitable distributions of the benefits of carbon emissions and the costs of climate change; that is, the people who benefit the most are not the same set of people who pay the most costs. Here we use an experimental economic approach to political science to study these inequities. In two experiments, we show that people willingly create climate problems when those problems are passed along to others. Surprisingly, this is not further exacerbated if those others are from another country. We also show that, with increasing relative losses from climate change, people are more likely to contribute to its mitigation. Thus, we identify a factor that makes preventing climate change difficult and a factor that may lead citizens to contribute to mitigation.
Cognition, 2019
People's decisions to consume and save resources are critical to their wellbeing. Previous experi... more People's decisions to consume and save resources are critical to their wellbeing. Previous experiments find that people typically spend too much because of how they discount the future. We propose that people's motive to preserve their savings can instead cause them to spend too little in hard times. We design an economic game in which participants can store resources for the future to survive in a harsh environment. A player's income is uncertain and consumption yields diminishing returns within each day, creating tradeoffs between spending and saving. We compare participants' decisions to a heuristic that performed best in simulations. We find that participants spent too much after windfalls in income, consistent with previous research, but they also spent too little after downturns, supporting the resource preservation hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we find that by varying the income stream, the downturn effect can be isolated from the windfall effect. In Experiments 3-4, we find the same downturn effect in games with financial and political themes.
International Advances in Economic Research, 2018
This paper identifies systemic risk levels in the Eurozone and China.We first analyze the politic... more This paper identifies systemic risk levels in the Eurozone and China.We first analyze the political and macro-financial factors underlying potential financial instability in both currency areas. Then, we examine the impact of a possible breakup of the Eurozone on the Chinese financial system and the risk of redenomination of Chinese assets expressed in Euros. Finally, considering the increasing credit gap in the Chinese economy and the enduring political instability in several Eurozone countries, we warn against a possible opening of contagion channels between China and Europe.
Drafts by Alessandro Del Ponte
G. Gustavsson & D. Miller (Eds.), Liberal Nationalism and Its Critics: Normative and Empirical Questions. Oxford University Press., 2019
Theorists of liberal nationalism argue that national identities serve as essential glue holding a... more Theorists of liberal nationalism argue that national identities serve as essential glue holding a nation together. This picture is incomplete, however. National identities also have chauvinistic aspects that undercut or dissolve national glue by creating tensions among subgroups of co-nationals and breeding suspicion of outsiders. We analyze the psychology of national attachments through the lens of social identity theory to better understand the effects of national identity. We identify three types of national attachments: national chauvinism, national pride, and national identity, discuss their theoretical origins and links to social identity theory, and evaluate their political consequences. Using European data from the three ISSP national Identity modules conducted in 1995, 2003, and 2013, we then investigate the differing origins and consequences of national identity, pride, and chauvinism. We focus specifically on their contrasting effects on support for protectionism and attitudes toward immigration, key facets of globalization. We find that national chauvinism undercuts and national pride enhances support for globalization, underscoring the diverse political effects of national attachments. We consider the important role of social context in conditioning the political effects of national attachments and conclude with a call for a unified approach to the study of national attachments.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Decision Making, 2020
Prospect theory introduces several anomalies in the behavior of rational agents, including loss a... more Prospect theory introduces several anomalies in the behavior of rational agents, including loss aversion, the reflection effect, probability weighting, and the certainty effect. Loss aversion occurs relative to a state of the world, called a reference point. Being loss averse causes people to prefer the current state of affairs above and beyond the expected utility that comes from a risky political change, engendering a status quo bias. Yet, bias is asymmetric due to the reflection effect: People are too tepid toward advantageous platforms or candidates, whereas they are not critical enough against detrimental policies or bad politicians. Both rich and poor citizens take similar stances on nonpartisan issues (such as national defense): this happens because they evaluate uncertain policy changes relative to a reference point. Citizens welcome radical political platforms with greater enthusiasm than incremental proposals.
Generally, under prospect theory societal conflict is smoother than under expected utility theory. Older societies are more prone to preserving the status quo than younger ones. These properties affect also the choice of voting rules. Loss aversion induces people to prefer more prudent voting rules and preserve the status quo. Hence, agents favor higher majority thresholds or even unanimity over simple majority in constitutional choice. The status quo bias supports the persistence of policy cycles, with prolonged drifts in one direction before a trend reversal. In sum, loss aversion and other anomalies pinpointed by behavioral sciences offer insightful predictions to study political phenomena.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Decision Making, 2020
Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psy... more Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psychology to enrich standard economic models which assume perfectly rational individuals. Empirical research in behavioral economics typically employs incentivized experiments that use economic games with real money on the line. In these experiments, subjects are awarded financial payoffs based on the decisions they make (either individually or as part of a group) in an institutional context designed by the researcher. Behavioral economics is well suited for political science because behavioral economics is interdisciplinary by nature and political science is not bound by any particular research paradigm. At the same time, the method is still novel to many political scientists despite many years of its use to study political topics. This essay describes ways in which political scientists have used this research method in a variety of research areas. What unites the application of the method to these areas is the explicit consideration of conflict. Scholars have uncovered social conflict between groups including increasing polarization in the American context using behavioral games as measures. They have used designed experiments around elections to test theories of the candidate and voter behavior. Because of the clear financial incentives in the experiments, they are especially useful for studying people’s actual preferences for redistribution as opposed to the preferences they claim to hold or hold because of their position in the current economic system. Finally, the method can be used to design institutions that will help overcome conflict over scarce resources. The strength of behavioral economics include: (1) the ability to vary institutional contexts; (2) clear incentives that ensure valid measures of preferences; (3) direct measures of behaviors instead of stated intensions which could be confounded by outside pressures such as social desirability. At the same time, the method is better suited for particular aspects of broader questions. In this way, behavioral economics is the same as every other research method used to study politics. It shines a spotlight on particular aspects of a phenomenon leaving the rest obscured in darkness. But no research method is a flood light and it is only the combined spotlights of experimentation, observation, and historical analysis that allow us to see a phenomenon in full.
Should a government repay its international debts even if this imposes severe hardships on its ci... more Should a government repay its international debts even if this imposes severe hardships on its citizens? Drawing on moral psychology, we investigate when people think a government is morally obligated to pay its debts. Participants read about a government that has to decide whether to default on its debt payments or cut vital programs. Across experimental conditions, we varied the number of jobs at stake and whether a full or partial default is required to save them. Overall, most participants judged that a government should pay its debt, even when the damage to the debtor is substantially greater than the benefit to the lender. As the damage to the debtor became extreme, participants increasingly said the government should default, but they still judged that defaulting is morally wrong. In Experiment 2, we find in a national sample of Americans that political conservatives were more opposed to default than liberals.
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Papers by Alessandro Del Ponte
Drafts by Alessandro Del Ponte
Generally, under prospect theory societal conflict is smoother than under expected utility theory. Older societies are more prone to preserving the status quo than younger ones. These properties affect also the choice of voting rules. Loss aversion induces people to prefer more prudent voting rules and preserve the status quo. Hence, agents favor higher majority thresholds or even unanimity over simple majority in constitutional choice. The status quo bias supports the persistence of policy cycles, with prolonged drifts in one direction before a trend reversal. In sum, loss aversion and other anomalies pinpointed by behavioral sciences offer insightful predictions to study political phenomena.
Generally, under prospect theory societal conflict is smoother than under expected utility theory. Older societies are more prone to preserving the status quo than younger ones. These properties affect also the choice of voting rules. Loss aversion induces people to prefer more prudent voting rules and preserve the status quo. Hence, agents favor higher majority thresholds or even unanimity over simple majority in constitutional choice. The status quo bias supports the persistence of policy cycles, with prolonged drifts in one direction before a trend reversal. In sum, loss aversion and other anomalies pinpointed by behavioral sciences offer insightful predictions to study political phenomena.