This paper shows why a majority of legislators may vote for a policy that benefits a firm but harms all legislators. The firm may induce legislators to support the policy by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district where voters or their representative support the policy. In...

Though few voters appear to hold consistent ideological views, the roll call votes of congressmen and senators can be well predicted by ideological terms. An explanation for this puzzle is that ideology allows candidates to succinctly explain their views. Because it is difficult to explain...

One approach to avoiding the implications of Arrow's paradox is to impose restrictions on the preferences of voters. A restriction often assumed in the literature is that voters' preferences can be represented by a choice among points in a space, where voters' preferences are convex. We claim...

By committing policy, an incumbent in effect disowns an issue; when she maintains policy flexibility, the issue remains electorally salient. Electoral competition shapes political commitment decisions and collapses the multidimensional issue space into a low-dimensional space of electorally...

Analyses of campaign contributions usually follow the Downsian model to suppose that candidates seek contributions to win elections. This paper takes the opposite approach, by assuming that each candidate aims to maximize the contributions he collects. A citizen contributes to a candidate with...

If each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods, then a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties: (1) no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority; (2) instead,...

We consider n firms which choose rent-seeking expenditures sequentially, each player anticipating the rent-seeking expenditures that will be made by later movers. We find that the earlier movers need not make larger profits than later movers, and that aggregate profits are lower than in a game...

Consider a government that adopts a program, sees a noisy signal about its success, and decides whether to continue the program. Suppose further that the success of a program is greater if people think it will be continued. This paper considers outcomes when government cannot commit. We find...