This paper surveys some recent literature on fiscal policy and comparative politics. Economic policy is viewed as the outcome of a game with multiple-principals and multiple-agents. Opportunistic politicians bargain over policy. Rational voters hold them accountable through retrospective voting....

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...

Politicians may pander to public opinion and may renounce undertaking beneficial long-term projects. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a triple mechanism involving political information markets, reelection threshold contracts, and democratic elections. An information market is used to...

This paper examines policy centralization outcomes in a two-jurisdiction, political economy model of public good provision choices with heterogeneous policy preferences and interjurisdictional policy spillovers, under alternative democratic choice procedures, namely, direct democracy and...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

We analyze a psychologically-based model of voter turnout in an election with common value and uncertainty. Our model yields distinctive comparative statics results. First, an increase in the proportion of informed citizens may cause the winning margin for the right candidate to either rise or...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...

According to a standard argument, higher income inequality fosters redistributive activities of the government in favor of the median income earner. This paper shows that if redistribution is achieved by a public provision of goods and services rather than by transfers, higher income inequality...

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...

This paper presents a general equilibrium model of conflict based on a world populated by representative democracies. At the individual state level, when information regarding a leader's ability to defend the state against unavoidable conflict is va luable to voters, an incumbent leader seeking...