When moving from a plurality rule to a proportional system, members of national parliament have more incentives to diverge from the median voter's preferences. We match voting behavior concerning legislative proposals of Swiss members of parliament with real referenda outcomes on the same issues...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority's preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals...

We build a multiple hierarchical model of a representative democracy in which, for instance, voters elect county representatives, county representatives elect district representatives, district representatives elect state representatives, and state representatives elect a prime minister. We use...

We present a dynamic theory of electoral competition to study the determinants of fiscal policy. In each period, two parties choose electoral platforms to maximize the expected number of elected representatives. The platforms include public expenditure, redistributive transfers, the tax rate and...

We present a dynamic theory of electoral competition to study the determinants of fiscal policy. In each period, two parties choose electoral platforms to maximize the expected number of elected representatives. The platforms include public expenditure, redistributive transfers, the tax rate and...

We present a dynamic theory of electoral competition to study the determinants of fiscal policy. In each period, two parties choose electoral platforms to maximize the expected number of elected representatives. The platforms include public expenditure, redistributive transfers, the tax rate and...

We study the effect of electoral systems on openness to immigration. According to the literature, in our model plurality systems induce a rent-seeking policymaker to get re-election through locally provided public goods rather than through transfers, whereas the opposite occurs under...

This article--designed to give readers unfamiliar with public choice a historical overview and flavor for the kinds of problems considered--is divided into three main sections, "historical origins," the "modern founders of MPE," and a brief description of some "current issues" studied by public...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

I establish conditions for existence of pure strategy equilibria in K-candidate Downsian electoral competition (K ≥ 2) with valence when the voting rule is monotonic, generalizing results by Ansolabehere and Snyder (2000) and Martin et al. (2021). The conditions are sufficient when K ≥ 2 and...