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James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005710665
Using data on elections to the United States House of Representatives (1946-1998), this paper exploits a quasi-experiment generated by the electoral system in order to determine if political incumbency provides an electoral advantage - an implicit first-order prediction of principal-agent...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774786
We study the competitive equilibrium of a market for votes where voters can trade votes for a numeraire before making a decision via majority rule. The choice is binary and the number of supporters of either alternative is known. We identify a sufficient condition guaranteeing the existence of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011252333
This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005718155
absenteeism or shirking from legislative sessions; in contrast, non-pecuniary motives, proxied by home-country corruption …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009401239
We examine the politics of the %u201CSalary Grab%u201D of 1873, legislation that increased congressional salaries retroactively by 50 percent. A group of New England and Midwestern elites opposed the Salary Grab, along with congressional franking and patronage-based civil service appointments,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005089236
The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of … implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed … transfers increase political corruption and reduce the quality of candidates for mayor. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008622357
The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 gave relatively strong powers to the President. We model and test Executive-Legislative relations in Brazil and demonstrate that Presidents have used pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms. In particular Presidents Cardoso and Lula...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005575854
We examine the practice of military conscription around the world from the perspective of two standard theories, and a new one, which emphasizes the fixed cost of introducing and administering the draft as a deterrent to its use. We find that, holding the relative size of the military constant,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005050276
In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010950707