A full understanding of public affairs requires the ability to distinguish between the policies that voters would like the government to adopt, and the influence that different voters or group of voters actually exert in the democratic process. We consider the properties of a computable...

Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided a theoretical foundation for estimating equations that attempt to explain the dependence of civil liberties and political rights in non-democratic regimes on the history of economic growth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds of...