Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system - the first step in the voting process. In this model, older people are more apt to participate than younger...

In this brief analysis, we use a new dataset of two million voter registration records to demonstrate that gender, race, and age do not correlate with political participation in the ways that previous research has shown. Among Blacks and Latinos, women participate at vastly higher rates than...

How different are voters in competitive elections from voters in uncompetitive elections? If voters in competitive elections are treated differently by politicians, if they respond to different stimuli, and if their voting calculus is different, then how much can we learn from studies that...

In the mid-twentieth century, political researchers took active interest in the question of who, in a community, is influential. In those studies, most ordinary Americans could identify a person who they thought had influence. Respondents generally identified local business leaders as having...

We take a garden-variety instance of distributive politics-- a divide-the-cake stage game -- and explore dynamic extensions in different institutional settings: (i) repeated play of the stage game in a simultaneous-term unicameral legislature; (ii) repeated play in a staggered-term unicameral...

Models of nomination politics in the US often find "gridlock" in equilibrium because of the super-majority requirement in the Senate for the confirmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present...

Separated powers cannot permanently constrain individual ambitions. Concerns about a government's ability to respond to contemporary and future crises, we show, invariably compromise the principled commitments one branch of government has in limiting the authority of another. We study a dynamic...