The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union's ban on...

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making in society. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine the important positive features of decisions by random...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical Tullock Challenges. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

The interdependence of the State and business is widely recognised across many disciplines and frameworks. This paper examines the State-capital nexus in India during the neoliberal era, focusing on how the State has facilitated accelerated primitive accumulation for large capital by selectively...

While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries' formal institutions (e.g., political...

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

In recent decades right-wing populist parties have experienced increased electoral success in many western democracies. This rise of the far-right, which is strongly built on the support of the working class, coincides with a sharp decline of the manufacturing sector. This paper analyzes the...