Exam 31: Public Choice and Special Interest Group Politics

According to public choice theorists, the behavior of people employed in the public sector is likely to differ from the behavior of people employed in the private sector because

One implication of the median voter model is that a candidate is likely to label himself __________ and his or her opponent as __________.

A college professor berates his political science students for being uninformed on current political and government issues. For example, most of them do not know who represents them in the U.S. House of Representatives. He tells his students that they will never get very far in life by staying so uninformed and uninterested. The professor is probably overlooking the fact that

Society as a whole is made worse off by rent seeking behavior by producers.

A political candidate running in a two-person race is likely to occupy

Special interest groups often engage in rent seeking, which is a socially wasteful activity.

Which of the following statements about a political campaign is false?

Rational (political) ignorance refers to

A candidate who understands that in a two-person race the person closer to the center of the voter distribution will win is likely to

According to public choice theory, low voter turnouts may be the result of cost-benefit calculations on the part of voters.

Special interest groups are subsets of __________ that hold (usually) intense preferences for or against a particular government service, activity, or policy.

What is the median voter model? Describe four different ways in which this theory is predicted to impact the behavior of political candidates.

In the median voter model, we assume that

Exhibit 31-2 ​ -Refer to Exhibit 31-2-(b). Two candidates are competing for an electorate consisting of 3 voters labeled A, B, and C shown positioned with respect to their ideological stands on issues. The median voter theory would predict that candidates will assume the ideological position(s)

A different result may occur from simple-majority voting together with equal tax shares compared to the result with simple-majority voting with unequal tax shares.

Grown children fawning over an elderly parent in order to try to secure a larger inheritance is an example of

Rational ignorance refers to voter-citizens choosing to be uninformed about politics and government on an individual basis because

Exhibit 33-4 ​ -Refer to Exhibit 33-4. The opportunity cost of one unit of good B is __________ for country 1 and __________ for country 2.

Public choice deals with

The state of choosing not to acquire information because the costs of acquiring the information are greater than the benefits is referred to as