Richard McKelvey Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Richard McKelvey (1944–2002) was an American political scientist whose ideas influenced statistical methodology, game theory, coalitions, political information, behavioral economics, and the study of voting. Generally, he is best known for work that clarifies essential properties of democratic institutions. He received his degrees from Oberlin College, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Rochester. He taught at the University of Rochester and Carnegie-Mellon University before spending the majority of his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
McKelvey’s work on majority decision making was of particular note. It was part of a broader attempt to understand the relationship between which policy outcomes individual voters want and which policy outcomes voting majorities choose. An early result, Scottish economist Duncan Black’s 1948 median voter theorem, identified a stable relationship between individual preferences and majority-preferred outcomes. Such stability matters, because without it, the concept of “majority will” has little or no meaning. Subsequent studies showed that majority decision-making produces stability only under very restrictive conditions. McKelvey’s work clarified how individual preferences can relate to majority-preferred outcomes when these conditions are not satisfied. He proved that voting agendas (rules that specify the order in which alternatives are voted on) exist such that majority decision making can produce almost any imaginable policy outcome from almost any imaginable set of preferences. This insight helped political scientists appreciate the importance of institutions—particularly those concerning control of voting agendas.
In the mid-1980s, McKelvey and Peter Ordeshook examined how limits in voter information affect popular elections. They developed a model in which voters knew little about candidates for office, and candidates knew little about what voters wanted. In one version of the model, interest groups knew what the voters wanted and where the candidates stood. McKelvey and Ordeshook identified conditions under which candidate endorsements by these groups provided enough information to allow candidates to choose policies preferred by the median voter (i.e., a voting majority) and allow voters to vote as if they knew the candidates’ positions. Experiments showed that interest group endorsements had the effects that their model predicted.
During the 1990s, McKelvey and Thomas Palfrey studied the “centipede game,” in which two people divide a growing sum of money. The game has exactly one Nash equilibrium (defined as a set of strategies such that, once played, give no one any incentive to change his or her strategy). In actual play, however, few people choose these strategies. McKelvey and Palfrey discovered an alternate logic that explains how many people play the game. It entails a seemingly small, but well-defined, deviation from pure rationality. Typically, game theory supposes that each player assumes that all other players are purely rational. McKelvey and Palfrey asked what would happen if players believed that there was at least a small probability that other players would not play purely rationally—a seemingly reasonable assumption given that virtually everyone actually does not do so. With this slight exception to pure rationality, they were able to develop a new equilibrium concept (quantal response equilibrium) that flowed from these newly modified assumptions and that fit the data they got from observing people actually playing the centipede game. This concept became foundational in behavioral economics.
Bibliography:
1. Aldrich, John H., James E. Alt, and Arthur Lupia, eds. Positive Changes in Political Science:The Legacy of Richard D. McKelvey’s Most Influential Writings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
2. Black, Duncan. “On the Rationale of Group Decision-making.” Journal of Political Economy, 56 (1948): 23–34.
3. The Theory of Committees and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
4. McKelvey, Richard D. “Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control.” Journal of Economic Theory 12 (1976): 472–482.
5. McKelvey, Richard D., and Peter C. Ordeshook. “Elections with Limited Information: A Fulfilled Expectations Model Using Contemporaneous Poll and Endorsement Data as Information Sources.” Journal of Economic Theory 36 (1985): 55–85.
6. “Rational Expectations in Elections: Some Experimental Results Based on a Multidimensional Model.” Public Choice 44 (1984): 61–102.
7. McKelvey, Richard D., and Thomas R. Palfrey. “An Experimental Study of the Centipede Game.” Econometrica 60 (1992): 803–836.

This example Richard McKelvey Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.