The political parties in Cyprus are extremely powerful. They play a dominant role in the public as well as the private sphere, resulting in a civil society that is extremely weak. The article will address two issues. First, it will map the evolution of civil society organisations (CSOs),...

This paper examines how preference heterogeneity affects the ability of the poor to extract resources from the rich. We study the equilibrium of a game in which coalitions of individuals form parties, parties propose platforms, and all individuals vote, with the winning policy chosen by...

This paper presents a new model of political parties. I assume that the role of parties is to increase the commitment ability of politicians vis-à-vis the voters. Whereas a politician running alone can only offer his ideal policy, the set of policies that a party can commit to is the Pareto set...

Public provision of private goods such as education is usually viewed as a form of redistribution in kind. However, does it arise when income redistribution is feasible as well? In this paper I analyse a two-dimensional model of political decision making. Society has to choose both the tax rate...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of Presidents during the period 1982-2000. Our findings suggest...

This paper focuses on an econometric investigation of the macroeconomic and political factors that contributed to Greece’s excessive debt accumulation and its failure to adequately address its fiscal imbalances, from the restoration of democracy in 1974 till the crisis of 2009. The econometric...

This paper argues that the recent decline in the hegemony of the centre-left in Greece is related to the ideas of modernization that have dominated that tradition over the past few years. The tendency to conceptualize development in terms of a clash between the “new” and the “old”, to...

Average unemployment in Europe today is relatively high compared with OECD countries outside Europe. The majority of countries in Europe today have lower unemployment than any OECD country outside Europe, including the US. These two fa cts are consistent because the four largest countries in...

This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development...