The literature on intergenerational conflict and public budgets has shown that the demands of the elderly may crowd out educational spending. We extend this literature to take into account altruism within the family where individuals care about the welfare of family members. The conflicting...

Reform offers economic gains for society at large, but can represent a threat to the interests of public employees. Public sector reform faces opposition from voters employed in public sector. Norwegian data allow for an analysis this interpretation. Survey data show that public employees prefer...

This paper presents evidence on the consequences of the 1912 introduction of “quasi-universal” male suffrage in Italy. The reform increased the electorate from slightly less than three million to 8,650,000 and left the electoral rules and the district boundaries unchanged. This allows us to...

Most studies of distribution in developing countries are concerned with the distribution of material resources, most usually income or consumption and, sometimes, wealth. On the other hand, most studies of social capital are grounded in countries of the developed world. In this paper we depart...

This paper addresses the puzzle of why redistributive legislation, which benefits a small minority, may pass with overwhelming majorities. It models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods, showing how he can exploit a legislature (completely) in the first period by...

Our object is to explicate Buchanan's conception of individual liberty and to trace its connection to the 'working themes' in his corpus-anarchy, contract, constitution, Pareto optimality, 'public choice' and so on. In doing so, we investigate a number of tensions in Buchanan's...

The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual reconstruction of Sen’s conception of individual judgments, through a back-and-forth analysis between his democratic theory of justice and social choice theory. Firstly, while this is never explicitly presented in Sen’s work, we highlight the...

This paper provides a theory explaining the observed cyclical pattern of the approbation of laws and decrees through a legislature. We study an environment with three (sets of) agents, an incumbent government, unorganized voters and special interest groups. Special interest groups differ from...