David A Siegel

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Duke University

Can a political party spend enough across electoral campaigns to garner a majority within the U.S. Congress? Prior research on campaign spending minimizes the importance of campaign heterogeneity and fails to aggregate effects across campaigns, rendering it unable to address this question. Instead, we tackle the question with a system-level analysi...

Ethnic identifiability, state repression, and civil conflict are inextricably linked, yet few theories consider them as jointly endogenous. We model the incentives of persecuted ethnic minority groups to assimilate into or differentiate from a repressive, dominant majority group in order to understand both this important decision and the role of id...

Faced with repression from a strong state, one might expect minority ethnic groups to attempt to assimilate into the dominant group to make themselves seem less threatening. However, this conceptualization of threat elides its tactical components. Oppressed minority groups, even under strong states, may engage in anti-state operations in order to r...

Recent work has shown that the introduction of mobile communications can substantially alter the course of conflict. In Afghanistan and India targeting mobile communications is a central part of the insurgent campaigns. The opposite was true in Iraq. There insurgents instead threatened providers who did not do enough to maintain mobile phone networ...

In a 2012 JOP article, we presented a zero-intelligence model of government formation. Our intent was to provide a “null” model of government formation, a baseline on which other models could build. We made two claims regarding aggregate government formation outcomes. First, that our model produces aggregate results on the distributions of governme...

Participating in social network websites entails voluntarily sharing private information, and the explosive growth of social network websites over the last decade suggests shifting views on privacy. Concurrently, new anti-terrorism laws, such as the USA Patriot Act, ask citizens to surrender substantial claim to privacy in the name of greater secur...

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show t...

What is the relationship between human development, religion, and social conservatism? We present a model in which individuals derive utility from both the secular and religious worlds. Our model is unusual in that it explains both an individual’s religious participation and her preferences over social policy at different levels of development. Usi...

Why do some individuals engage in more religious activity than others? And how does this religious activity influence their economic attitudes? We present a formal model in which individuals derive utility from both secular and religious sources. Our model, which incorporates both demand-side and supply-side explanations of religion, is unusual in...

That neither the assumptions nor the predictions of standard government formation models entirely correspond to empirical findings has led some to conclude that theoretical accounts of government formation should be reconsidered from the bottom up. We take up this challenge by presenting a zero-intelligence model of government formation. In our mod...

Terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. This is puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for record keeping. The authors use t...

This paper elucidates a theory of identity formation and applies it to the study of international negotiation. The theory acknowledges that actors/agents can adopt a multiplicity of identities, and it treats changes in the salience of identities as endogenous to the contextually dependent processes of interpersonal and intergroup interactions. Typi...

Empirical studies reach conflicting conclusions about the effect of repression on collective action. Extant theories cannot explain this variation in the efficacy of repression, in part because they do not account for the way in which social networks condition how individual behavior is aggregated into population levels of participation. Using a mo...

Suppressing damaging aggregate behaviors such as insurgency, terrorism, and financial panics are important tasks of the state. Each outcome of these aggregate behaviors is an emergent property of a system in which each individual's action depends on a subset of others' actions, given by each individual's network of interactions. Yet there are few e...

This chapter focuses on Downsian party competition, a behavioral model of elections based on satisficing coupled to the Schattschneider-Schumpeter-Downs macrohypothesis that major parties in vigorous democracies are structured to win elections. The discussion is based on central premises about decision making that closely follow Simon’s analysis: w...

This chapter considers the voter’s choice between candidates. In the context of voter choice, aspirations are internal evaluation thresholds which code an incumbent’s performance as good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Good performance is rewarded with increased support, and bad with less support. This chapter introduces a behavioral model...

This chapter discusses some general properties of aspiration-based adaptive rules (ABARs). It begins with an overview of propensity and aspiration-based adjustment, using axioms to represent three premises: agents have aspirations, they compare payoffs to aspirations, and these comparisons determine the key qualitative properties of how agents adju...

This chapter summarizes the book’s major findings regarding party location, turnout, voter choice, and voter participation. First, the simple party competition model suggests that in unidimensional policy spaces, satisficing by winners plus search by losers produces a string of governmental policies that converges to the median voter’s ideal point...

This chapter introduces a model of two-party elections that integrates the focused models of party competition, turnout, and voter choice. To address the complexity of this synthetic model, computation is used as the main way to generate results (predictions). The model yields a “general equilibrium” of the election game. It also allows for greater...

This book discusses a behavioral theory of elections based on bounded rationality. As a research program, bounded rationality contains a set of alternative formulations, rather than a single theory or model. The issues raised by the bounded rationality program—the impact of cognitive constraints on behavior—are as pertinent to politics as they are...

This chapter focuses on voter participation, perhaps the most well-known anomaly for rational choice theory. The problem goes like this: in large electorates, the chance that any single voter will be pivotal is very small. Consequently, the cost of voting will outweigh the expected gains from turning out and few citizens will vote. This prediction...

This chapter extends the model used for two-party elections to multiparty democracies. It first considers the module models for party competition and voter turnout to see what modifications are required in order to extend the framework to multiple candidates and to identify what analytical results carry over to this context. It then discusses game-...

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections...

Scholars have hypothesized that policy choices by national, state and local governments often have implications for “location choices” made by residents (e.g., tax policies affect where firms set up business, welfare benefits influence where the poor live, government restaurant smoking restrictions influence where people eat). We develop a spatiall...

In a sense, the study of comparative politics is the study of the role that context plays in structuring behavior. Institutional contexts, such as the nature of the electoral system or the existence of an independent judiciary, drive differences in electoral outcomes or human rights across nations. Individual-level contextual factors such as norms,...

We analyze a seemingly simple question: when should government share private information that may be useful to terrorists? Policy makers’ answer to this question has typically been ‘it is dangerous to share information which can potentially help terrorists.’ Unfortunately, this incomplete response has motivated a detrimental increase in the amount...

Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000; Franzese 2002; Hibbs 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We suspect that Key had a less heroic view of voter cogniti...

We present two simulations designed to convey the strategic nature of terrorism and counterterrorism. The first is a simulated hostage crisis, designed primarily to illustrate the concepts of credible commitment and costly signaling. The second explores high-level decision-making of both a terrorist group and the state, and is designed to highlight...

One of the best known ideas in the study of bounded rationality is Simon's satisficing; yet we still lack a standard formalization of the heuristic and its implications. We propose a mathematical model of satisficing which explicitly represents agents' aspirations and which explores both single-person and multi-player contexts. The model shows that...

A review of international terrorist activity reveals a pattern of financially strapped operatives working for organizations that seem to have plenty of money. To explain this observation, and to examine when restricting terrorists' funds will reduce their lethality, we model a hierarchical terror organization in which leaders delegate financial and...

Despite growing attention to the role of social context in determining political participation, the effect of the structure of social networks remains little examined. This article introduces a model of interdependent decision making within social networks, in which individuals have heterogeneous motivations to participate, and networks are defined...

The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century. By RasmussenMikkel Vedby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 232p. $91.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 6 Issue 2 - David A. Siegel

Many elections specialists take seriously V.O.Key's hypothesis (1966) that much voting is retrospective: citizens reward good performance by becoming more likely to vote for the incumbent and punish bad performance by becoming less likely. Earlier (Bendor, Siegel, and Kumar 2005) we formalized Key's verbal theory. Our model shows that people endoge...

Since V. O. Key's seminal work, retrospective voting been regarded as a major component of voting theory, spawning a rich variety of models of voter choice utilizing Key's basic idea that the incumbent's performance influences citizens' votes. However, these models often assume that voters are fully rational and, for example, update their beliefs i...

Weinstein for tremendously helpful comments and criticisms.