Benefits Of Majoritarian Politics

Costs and benefits of proposed policies can be organized into widely distributed and narrowly concentrated. Widely distributed means that the cost and benefits spread to all the citizens and narrowly concentrated means that the cost and benefits only go or affect a small group. One example of an widely distributed cost is the social security tax, which affects everyone in the United States and everyone has to pay the taxes. Other examples are income taxes, high rate of crime, and others. Some of the widely distributed benefits were retirement benefits, clean air, national security, and others. Theses widely distributed costs and benefits applies to everyone because the benefits and costs all affect them. Narrowly concentrated costs and benefits

The majoritarian politics are politics that affect everyone. Theses policies promise benefits to large numbers of people at a cost that large number of people will have to bear. One example is social security benefits, whoever wants to receive retirement benefits when they retire they have to pay social security taxes to receive the benefits. Another example of a majoritarian politics is the national defense that all the citizens benefit from. This is why the people every year have to contribute to the military. Majoritarian politics are not dominated by pulling and hauling among rival interest groups, but they appeal to large amount of voters and their representatives in hopes of finding a majority. The reason why interest groups are not important in majoritarian politics is that citizens rarely will have incentive to join an interest group if it doesn’t affect them. Also citizens will not have any motivation to join a interest group if the group benefits everyone whether they join or not, this is called the free-rider problem. People will not join an interest group if the their contribution to the group will barely impact the group and they can also gain benefits by not participating too. The free rider problem is that some individuals in some populations either take more resources and contributed less or when they get the fair share but they contribute less than others. This results in a problem

The benefits are awarded to a small amount of people so the group that received the benefits will have an incentive to work to get them. Client politics affect a lot of people because it has a widely distributed costs that everyone pays, however the cost it so small that most people barely recognize it. One example is farmers benefit from agricultural price supports, but the far more numerous food consumers have no idea that the prices supports cost them in taxes and also results in higher food prices. Another example is the way airlines benefit from higher prices that they can charge on certain routes. Pork barrel projects are several projects that are approved in a single piece of legislation, such as the rivers and harbors that Congress pass every year. Logrolling is when a congressman helps approve a project to gain the other congressman’s vote. Entrepreneurial politics is the opposite of the client politics, they give benefits to the whole society and the costs are directed at a small group of people. One example of it is when the anti pollution and safety requirements for automobiles were proposed as ways of improving the health and well-being of all people at the expense of automobile manufacturers. This is an example that shows that a widely distributed benefits and also a narrowly concentrated costs that are imposed on automobile