Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians can use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve self-serving outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician provides...

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about human reasoning. One such assumption, that political actors think in complex and similar ways when assessing strategies, is nested within widely used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. Empirical research casts doubt...

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality,...

The purpose of this paper is to rank economic journals in the broader field of policy and political science. By using one composite input and one composite output the paper ranks 52 journals in a linear programming setting using data for the time period of 1996-2010. In addition for the first...

Each democratic nation with the Montesquieu Trias Politica separation of powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government is advised to create an Economic Supreme Court as a fourth branch. The new UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) falls short of that and will...

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality,...

No new issues are discussed but we try to improve on the didactics of some well-known elementary features of multiple seats elections that rely on a single vote such as common elections for Parliament or the U.S. Congress. The didactics concentrate on proportionality versus districts. Since some...

This paper presents models of criticism, communication and debate in public environment, focusing on the types of criticism and countercriticism manifested in political debates and public management. The paper proposes: (i) a normative model showing how rational criticism and countercriticism...

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others’ strategies, is nested within applications of widely-used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. When...

The local economical development is part of the general logic for the decentralization process, offering substance to the local autonomy, because we can’t assure at local level only the obligation for the assurance of administrative activities, keeping at the same time the economic levers in...