This paper surveys recent approaches towards lobbying if interest groups influence the decision of an incumbent government. It describes the two main channels of influence which mainly exist in parallel, namely contribution payments and the transmission of information through lobbying. Recent...

We analyze the determinants of environmental policy when two firms engage in two types of lobbying against a restriction on allowed pollution: General lobbying increases the total amount of allowed pollution, which is beneficial for both firms. Private lobbying increases the individual pollution...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing different policymaking styles, their causes and their consequences in Latin America, finding that lower institutionalization and greater use of alternative political technologies (APTs) are more likely the lower the cost of using these technologies,...

This paper argues that where institutions are strong, actors are more likely to participate in the political process through institutionalized arenas, while where they are weak, protests and other unconventional means of participation become more appealing. This relationship is explored...

This work analyzes the impact of asymmetric financial constraints on the platforms of parties, using a formal model of elections. The main results show that when a party faces a tight financial constraint, the platform chosen in equilibrium is further away from its ideal point compared with the...

We apply the difference-in-discontinuities design to disentangle the fiscal effects of the governance system conditional on electoral systems. We take advantage of a natural experiment, which involves two institutional reforms at the local level in Poland. The first reform introduced two...