In this survey, we investigate the general mechanisms underlying the political economy of attention and review their empirical relevance, in particular for electoral accountability. The focus is on exogenous or stimulus-driven attention that political actors try to win or divert when pursuing...

Pivato and Soh [Pivato, M., Soh, A., 2020. Weighted representative democracy. Journal of Mathematical Economics 88 (2020) 52--63] proposed a new system of democratic representation whereby any individual can choose any legislator as her representative and different legislators can represent...

The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...

The median voter, or the ideological position of the electoral center, has fi gured widely across literatures. This paper introduces a median voter data set that allows for comparison across time and across countries. The data set employs the statistics provided by the Comparative Manifesto...

While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding increasing social polarization based on partisan identity, there has been little analysis of how social polarization impacts voting. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model of political...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the determinants of state capacity investments and public finance in societies with different intensities of democracy. Specifically, we consider the implications of political (dis)parity between the political parties as well as voter groups for state...