Bundling is a concept used for studying the selection of candidates for public office. A voter typically chooses a candidate (or party) for the legislature, rather than directly voting for specific policies. When doing so, the voter is essentially selecting among bundles of policies that a candidate or a party will enact if in power.
Overview
Occurring principally in
republics, the electorate, rather than directly voting on each individual piece of proposed legislation, must choose a number of candidates (or parties) for the legislature. In so doing, they accept or reject each individual candidate or party and their "bundle" of positions on various issues. As there may be no candidate who perfectly reflects the views of an individual voter on all the issues of importance to him/her, each voter must prioritize what issues are most important and choose a candidate accordingly. Another form of bundling occurs in races where the candidate has a
running mate
A running mate is a person running together with another person on a joint ticket during an election. The term is most often used in reference to the person in the subordinate position (such as the vice presidential candidate running with a pr ...
who is elected on the same ticket, as in U.S. presidential elections.
Bundling, as studied in
public choice theory is essentially a variant of
product bundling
In marketing, product bundling is offering several products or services for sale as one combined product or service package. It is a common feature in many imperfectly competitive product and service markets. Industries engaged in the practice ...
: each candidate and party is marketed as a product comprising a bundle of positions and attributes. In
party-list proportional representation
Party-list proportional representation (list-PR) is a subset of proportional representation electoral systems in which multiple candidates are elected (e.g., elections to parliament) through their position on an electoral list. They can also be us ...
(particularly
closed list variants), bundling may be especially pronounced, as voters select an entire slate of party candidates rather than choosing individual candidates, thus lacking the option of selecting one candidate of a party and not another. Robert Cooter's ''The Strategic Constitution'' notes that when voters' demand for a party is
inelastic
In economics, elasticity measures the percentage change of one economic variable in response to a percentage change in another. If the price elasticity of the demand of something is -2, a 10% increase in price causes the demand quantity to fall ...
, the party will tend to nominate candidates based more on loyalty than on popularity: "Thus, monopoly power of a party decreases the demand of its leaders for loyalty."
Bundling in political economy is not to be confused with
bundling of donations
The financing of electoral campaigns in the United States happens at the federal, state, and local levels by contributions from individuals, corporations, political action committees, and sometimes the government. Campaign spending has risen ...
in campaign finance. It has been argued that bundling can often reduce the cost of political transactions. But it has also been argued that the bundling of policy packages necessitated by indivisibility weakens the signals provided even by well-informed voters.
See also
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Autonomism
Autonomism, also known as autonomist Marxism is an anti-capitalist left-wing political and social movement and theory. As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism (). Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tende ...
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Corporative federalism
Corporative federalism is a system of federalism not based on the common federalist idea of relative land area or nearest spheres of influence for governance, but on fiduciary jurisdiction to legal personality, corporate personhood in which grou ...
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Consociationalism
Consociationalism ( ) is a form of democratic power sharing. Political scientists define a consociational state as one which has major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, but which remains stable due to consultation ...
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Multicameralism
In contrast to unicameralism, and bicameralism, multicameralism is the condition in which a legislature is divided into more than two deliberative assemblies, which are commonly called "chambers" or "houses". This usually includes tricameral ...
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Pillarisation
Pillarisation (from the nl, verzuiling) is the politico-denominational segregation of a society into groups by religion and associated political beliefs. These societies were (and in some areas, still are) vertically divided into two or more gr ...
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Voluntary association
A voluntary group or union (also sometimes called a voluntary organization, common-interest association, association, or society) is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement, usually as volunteers, to form a body (or organization) to ac ...
References
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Public choice theory