Martin Paldam is one of the most prominent figures of Danish economics and European public choice. In this introduction to the special issue, we identify five of the areas, where he has made significant contributions: (1) vote and popularity functions and political business cycles; (2)...

Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation. A main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary, the...

We examine the US state-level pattern of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. We relate spending to (1) Keynesian determinants of countercyclical policy, (2) congressional power and dominance, and (3) presidential electoral vote importance. We find that the ARRA is, in...

This note amends the model of informational lobbying presented in Potters and van Winden (Public Choice 74:269–292, <CitationRef CitationID="CR1">1992</CitationRef>). In the original article, the authors find that only separating and pooling equilibria exist when the cost of lobbying is intermediate and the policymaker’s prior favors...</citationref>

Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose...

Can financial connections to the military provide economic value in democratic environments? We address this question by studying whether firms in which the Turkish military had a controlling financial interest earned abnormally high stock returns on the Istanbul stock exchange. Our findings...