Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the...

Although many complain that the clientele served by government programs routinely expands, there exists no analytic model with suggests how policy implementation may result in such growth. This paper shows that peer effects, where each bureaucrat compares his behavior or that of all others, can...