This article investigates the patronage phenomenon in the italian, so called, Second Republic. In particular, the analysis argues that (ex) members of parliament are appointed to managerial boards in italian (partially) state-owned enterprises responding to political selection rationales....

While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding increasing social polarization based on partisan identity, there has been little analysis of how social polarization impacts voting. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model of political...

Geographic representation is an important consideration in candidate nominations, even under closed-list proportional representation (PR), and may even matter for distributive policy outcomes. However, since nominations are determined strategically, the causal effects of local representation are...

Fiscal decentralization is high on the agenda in policy fora. This paper empirically investigates the underlying causes of fiscal decentralization, based on the predictions of a simple political economy model. We argue that the likeliness that a central government engages in devolution of powers...

This paper extends the small existing theoretical literature on negative campaigning, building on work by Harrington and Hess (1996). While their analysis explores the determinants of negative campaign spending using a classic spatial voting model, this paper relies instead on a probabilistic...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore, interest...

In this paper we first use two international data sets to investigate how governance, political and economic factors influence corporate tax rates. We show that institutional and political factors matter: good governance reduces the tax rate; a parliamentary system, especially a plurality...

Democracy usually is identified by the right to vote. However, in recent times voting procedures have been criticized, as they seemingly do not guarantee that all parts of the population have an adequate voice in the established political process. We suggest invigorating an old but nearly...

We distinguish between three sets of rights – property rights, political rights, and civil rights – and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two....

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...