Abstract
The minimax regret model of decision making under uncertainty, which was proposed by Ferejohn and Fiorina (1974) as a model of the voting decision, is here generalized to encompass forms of political participation (such as contributing money or time to a campaign) in which the range of alternatives is continuous. A principal implication of the model is that aggregate campaign contributions may be substantially increased by limiting the amount that any one individual can contribute. The conditions under which the behavior of a minimax regret decision maker can be unambiguously distinguished from that of an expected utility maximizer are also specified.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aldrich, John H. (1976). “Some Problems in Testing Two Rational Models of Participation.”American Journal of Political Science 20: 713–733.
Chernoff, Herman (1954). “Rational Selection of Decision Functions.”Econometrica 22: 422–443.
Downs, Anthony (1957).An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
Ferejohn, John A., and Morris P. Fiorina (1974). “The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis.”American Political Science Review 68: 525–536.
—— (1975). “Closeness Counts Only in Horseshoes and Dancing.”American Political Science Review 69: 920–925.
Frohlich, Norman, and Joe A. Oppenheimer (1970). “I Get by with a Little Help from my Friends.”World Politics 23: 104–120.
Luce, R. Duncan, and Howard Raiffa (1957).Games and Decisions. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Sen, Amartya (1969). “Quasi-transitivity, Rational Choice and Collective Decisions.”Review of Economic Studies 36: 381–393.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Panning, W.H. Uncertainty and political participation. Polit Behav 4, 69–81 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987119
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987119