This paper presents evidence on the consequences of the 1912 introduction of "quasiuniversal" 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...

Institutions can limit governments' policy options. Such restrictions are usually commended as solutions to time inconsistency problems or coordination failures. However, policy constraints can have important drawbacks and these disadvantages have generally been overlooked to date. When...

Institutions can limit governments' policy options. Such restrictions are usually commended as solutions to time inconsistency problems or coordination failures. However, policy constraints can have important drawbacks and these disadvantages have generally been overlooked to date. When...

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and...

We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation ofthe US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantialliterature originating from the influential paper by ?) finds that small andoverrepresented states get significantly larger shares of...

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during anelectoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefsabout parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about thecandidates attach little value to information because they perceive...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distributionof federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve onprevious work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that areDemocrats, Republicans, and...

This paper studies determinants of MPs expense claims in Parliament using the datareleased under the freedom of information act in 2004. Using a multiple regressionframework, we correlate expenses with three sets of variables: constituencycharacteristics, party affiliation and individual...

A number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of politicalknowledge on turnout. Both information acquisition and turnout, however,are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables, rendering hard theidentification of a causal link in empirical investigations....

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of Presidents during the period 1982-2000. Our findings suggest...