This is a survey of the literature linking economics and politics. In the introduction, I explain why it is necessary to study these issues as a separate course in economics. I then proceed to analyze voting models, the political business cycle, international and foreign policy issues. The...

This paper investigates the implications of how states with initiative systems of legislation can use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource allocation by their goverments. We construct a simple growth model whereby we can identify this channel through which...

The prupose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct blocs as suggested by the US political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Reime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three...