This paper looks at how the interaction between democracy and education affects the quality of government. It models an economy in which politicians of heterogeneous quality can run for office and shows that education has a positive effect on the quality of selected officials only if democratic...

We develop a theory of endogenous political entrenchment in a simple two-party dynamic model of income redistribution with probabilistic voting. A partially self-interested left-wing party may implement (entrenchment) policies reducing the income of its own constituency, the lower class, in...

This paper presents a model of party coalition formation between policy- motivated activists and office-seeking opportunists. In this framework, I con- sider how changes in party valence and public financing of political parties shape the equilibrium inside coalitions. Results show that, in...

The paper illustrates a simple empirical rule to choose the best electoral system for a Parliament.

Political organizations engaged in long-term operations are viewed as firms that sell promises: their output is the expectation of a reorganization of society. Because benefits will accrue to the organization's customers and rewards will be paid out to its workers only if and when the goal is...

The purpose of this paper is to show how two competitive governments can simultaneously choose their income taxes. There are two different levels of government in competition: a central government and a local one. The problem is analysed starting from the Leviathan hypothesis and from the theory...

The aim of this paper is to analyse competition between two levels of government that want to maximise their tax revenues facing the problem of re-election. We assume that citizens have incomplete information about central and local public goods. Then, they are not able to choose a single...

L'articolo esamina la corruzione amministrativa in una burocrazia strutturata con funzionari a giurisdizioni sovrapposte. L'analisi viene condotta ricorrendo a modelli della domanda e dell'offerta delle prestazioni fornite dai funzionari dietro versamento di tangenti. La diffusione della...

The paper describes a simulation program for comparing electoral systems. The user fixes some basic features, like the distribution of first preferences, their peakedness, the dimension of the districts, and so on. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of electoral system,...

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties,namely...