We study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions, with a special focus on institutional "flexibility." A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities (e.g., by...

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses "populist' policies - i.e., policies to the left...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization), and how this interacts with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power and changes in economic structure. We focus on the Markov voting equilibria,...

In dynamic collective decision making, current decisions determine the future distribution of political power and influence future decisions. We develop a general framework to study this class of problems. Under acyclicity, we characterize dynamically stable states as functions of the initial...

A central feature of collective decision-making in many social groups, such as political coalitions, international unions, or private clubs, is that the rules that govern regulations, procedures for future decision-making, and inclusion and exclusion of members are made by the current members...

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in non-democratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of...