Staff expenditures in the U.S. Congress increased exponentially from 1940 to 1980, but have remained roughly constant since. A theoretical model of Congressional expenditures, bureaucratic oversight, and congressional ethics is developed to understand historical data. Such a model allows one to...

This paper assesses the development of the modeling of group behavior in the interest group literature. Throughout the literature, interest groups have been modeled in multiple ways: from passive groups that do not interact with one another to groups that act just as rational strategic players....

This paper investigates the effects of the sources of candidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, with particular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrow base of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. An extensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions...

Of those eligible, about 40% do not vote in presidential elections. When asked, about a quarter of those nonvoters will lie to the survey takers and claim that they did. Increases in education are associated with higher voting rates and lower rates of lying overall, but with increased rates of...

Spending limits are an important rule in the electoral game. Critics of limits claim that incumbents write these rules to keep down promising challengers. Their arguments are seductive but do not stand on a firm empirical base. The data seem quite eager to support or reject the critics' view,...

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...

In this paper, we show that the shortcomings of the unanimity rule can be alleviated by complementing it with the following constitutional principles: broad packages with many public projects can only be proposed once in a legislative term, the agenda setter needs to pay the highest taxes he is...

The article proposes an enabling mechanism for the creation, adjustment and dissolution of governmental units, giving autonomy to each resident as in a direct democracy. Rather than focusing on a narrow model with restrictive and specialized assumptions, and subsequent solutions, as has been...

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and...

This paper offers an explanation for why policy makers stick to inefficient policy decisions. I argue that repealing a policy is a bad signal to voters about the policy maker's competence if voters do not have complete knowledge about the effects of implemented policies. I derive the optimal...