The Instruments of Political Participation

This chapter examines the various activities in which utility-maximizing citizens can engage in an effort to reduce, or even to eliminate, the coercion (or the expected coercion) that is placed on them by the government’s supply of policies with public and non-private goods characteristics.1 The object of the chapter could also be defined as that of analyzing how individual citizens, motivated by their own interest, can seek to achieve partial or complete elimination of the coercion (or of the expected coercion) imposed on them by the governing party and in the process signal or reveal their (positive or negative) preferences for public policies. Throughout I assume that citizens deal with politicians and political parties that maximize a utility function defined, among other things, for probability of reelection variable so that it makes sense to assume that citizens can influence the pattern of government policies.