In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and...

I explore a behavioral model of political participation, first introduced by Quattrone and Tversky [1988], based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by Kahneman and Tversky [1979]. The model offers an alternative explanation for why the President’s party tends to lose seats in...

In this paper, we examine the incentives facing candidates in the spatial voting model. We assume that voters' types are independent, but allow for nonidentical distributions across voters. Examining candidate positional equilibria as a function of voter behavior, we find that what we term...

This paper examines decision-making by political candidates under three different objective functions. In particular, we are interested in when the optimal strategies for expected vote share, expected plurality, and probability of victory maximizing candidates coincide in simple plurality...

In this paper I examine single member, simple plurality elections with n 2 probabilistic voters and show that the maximization of expected vote share and maximization of probability of victory are “generically different” in a specific sense. More specifically, I first describe finite...

This article presents a model of collective choice when group decisions must be justified by arguments from first principles. Individuals may have preferences over both the actions chosen and the arguments used to justify them. Defining a notion of stability in the arguments made and actions...

This article considers manipulation of collective choice — in such environments, a potential alternative is powerful only to the degree that its introduction can affect the collective decision. Using the Banks set (Banks, 1985), we present and characterize alternatives that can, and those...

Important conceptualizations of both interest groups and bureaucratic agencies suggest that these institutions provide legislatures with greater information for use in policy making. Yet little is known about how these information sources interact in the policy process as a whole. In this paper...