This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy for special interests' capture of US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002, and compare the reaction of voters to...

I develop a model of the relation between the media environment and political obstructionism. I show that when voters are less informed by media, obstructionism becomes a more effective political signal for the minority party. The model thus implies that media change can cause gridlock via...

We study which policy tool and at what level a majority chooses in order to reduce activities with negative externalities. We consider three instruments: a rule, that sets an upper limit to the activity which produces the negative externality, a quota that forces a proportional reduction of the...

We study the policy choice of an office-holding politician who is concerned with the public's perception of his capabilities. The politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform. The reform's success depends critically on the politician's capabilities, which...

There are three signature features of autocracies. First, there is a wide variety across autocracies in terms of economic performance: some do much better and some much worse than democracies. Second, economic performance of a given autocracy is more sensitive to leader quality, and exhibits...

We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters' payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

We consider a political agency model where voters learn information about some policy-relevant variable, which they can ignore when it impedes their desire to hold optimistic beliefs. Voters' excessive tendency to sustain optimism may result in inefficient political decision-making because...

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public...

Two significant challenges hamper the analyses of the collective choice of educational vouchers. One is the multi-dimensional choice set arising from the interdependence of the voucher, public education spending, and taxation. Second, even absent a voucher, preferences over public spending are...

We analyze how anticipated changes in the electoral vulnerability of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The electoral vulnerability changes due to a merger because it changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in the...