In "The Myth of the Rational Voter" Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address...

What determines citizens satisfaction with the constitution in operation ? We make two contributions towards an answer to this important policy question. First, we place stronger emphasis than existing studies on quantitative interpretations of the importance of different factors. We use...

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

What determines citizens' satisfaction with the "constitution in operation"? We make two contributions towards an answer to this important policy question. First, we place stronger emphasis than existing studies on quantitative interpretations of the importance of different factors. We use...

The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union's ban on...

In a game-theoretical approach of probabilistic voting, we introduce biased beliefs among voters and retrospective voting. In order to micro-found biased beliefs we introduce the psychological concept of mental models. We put into perspective the claim that biased beliefs lead to bad policy...

This paper argues that where institutions are strong, actors are more likely to participate in the political process through institutionalized arenas, while where they are weak, protests and other unconventional means of participation become more appealing. This relationship is explored...

This paper argues that where institutions are strong, actors are more likely to participate in the political process through institutionalized arenas, while where they are weak, protests and other unconventional means of participation become more appealing. This relationship is explored...

Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak, and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in which candidates running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal exposing these...

This paper starts with the observation that almost all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that military interests are able to coordinate on status-preserving institutional change prior to democratization and therefore prefer political...