This paper focuses on agenda change affecting the politics of “fracking operations” in the US, a process of extracting natural gas from underground shale formations. We examine how the movement of this policy issue between the state and federal levels of government has become increasingly...

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...

This paper studies selection rules i.e. the procedures committees use to choose whether to place an issue on their agenda. The main ingredient of the model is that committee members are uncertain about their final preferences at the selection stage: they only know the probability that they will...

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed...

Comment expliquer que l’utilisation des organismes génétiquement modifiés (OGM) dans l’agriculture et l’alimentation pose problème en France où ils ne sont pratiquement pas utilisés et semble aller de soi aux États-Unis, où ils le sont à grande échelle ? Selon certains, les...

At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

This paper discusses a two-dimensional jury model. It combines the idea of winning a maximum of votes in a voting game with utility maximization that derives from the winning proposition. The model assumes a first mover, the plaintiff, and a second-mover, the counsel of the defendant. Typically,...

We study the implications of reciprocity on agenda setting in a sequential policy decision. We designed a laboratory experiment in which a committee decides sequentially on three independent bills. Selfish committee members would turn down all bills but reciprocity allows for implicit vote...

This paper challenges the prevailing view in the literature that informational lobbying is socially beneficial. Key to our analysis is the fact that policymakers are constrained on the number of issues they can address, which forces them to prioritize issues. Under reasonable conditions,...

This article deals with the media construction of the Europeanization theme in the Romanian context, starting from the theories related to agenda setting and from the studies which were conducted in this respect in older EU member states. We set out to find out, from content analysis, which are...