Acknowledgement of the importance of identity to politics and widespread concern about responding adequately to marginalized groups have made otherness a salient concept in contemporary political thought. Yet, there has not appeared in the literature any attempt to clarify the distinctive forms...

Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of the political and social climate over the issue of slavery in the textual culmination of his travels throughout the U.S. in 1830s, Democracy in America, casts a shadow over the sustainability of a single American nation-state. Although Tocqueville's...

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Recently, political scientists have marshaled an impressive methodological discussion of political ethnography. However, this discussion has yielded little debate about the potential for an activist turn in political ethnography. In order to promote such a turn, this paper takes on four tasks....

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....

While most economists agree that seigniorage is one way governments finance deficits, there is less agreement about the political, institutional, and economic reasons for relying on it. This paper investigates the main determinants of seigniorage using panel data on about 100 countries, for the...

The countries that were once British colonies in the Caribbean share a common language and a colonial history of slavery, dominance of a plantation-based sugar industry, and broadly similar government and administrative traditions. Following independence in the late-1960s economic strategies and...

Viewing fiscal policies as the outcome of democratically resolved conflicts of households over public goods and taxes, the “economic model of politics” proposes a public choice approach, which does not rely on social welfare functions. With it, a country’s overall budget can be derived...

We study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public expenditure in OECD and Latin American countries. We present a model emphasizing the distinction between purchases of goods and services, which are easier to target geographically, and transfers, which are...