Democrats run the Economic association

Political diversity at the AEA

The main point of a recent paper on political diversity in the AEA.

So what is the relationship between political affiliation and economic research?  I am not sure there is a meaningful partition that makes any difference in economic theory. It makes no difference in Physics.

The political groups are ultimately shaped by government structure. I would suggest that economists do not understand out government structure, or have no dynamic model for it other than vague philosophies. That is the bigger problem,  thinking that government can be treated like a perfectly proportional system. Failure to correctly understand American government will make all the political distinctions at the AEA seem meaningless. And failure to model government also yields horridly useless policy conclusions.

The probabilistic voting model assumes that voters are imperfectly informed about candidates and their platforms. Candidates are also imperfectly informed about the utility preferences of the electorate and the distribution of voters' preferences.

Voters and candidates are imperfectly informed.   But we can say that in some detail.  Small state senators are generally equally share information with the electorate. Large state senators cannot. The house is proportional.  These qualities make a lot of difference.

Government is best considered as an unstable value added network. The the voter mis-information problem is handled as a congestion problem in the delivery of government goods. Once we see it as a distribution of goods problem, then we can treat it like any economic value chain in terms of analysis.  We will find that has sever congestion problems, is usually unstatainable in one configuration, so we get regional rotation into and out of the swamp by regional political factions.

Look at the regime history since 1980, we have been rotating between regions of the country. This is the classic sign of an unstable distribution network.