This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

Parties value unity, yet, members of parliament face competing demands, giving them incentives to deviate from the party line. For members of the European Parliament (MEPs), these competing demands are national party and European party group pressures. Here, we look at how MEPs respond to those...

We analyse a standard pivotal-voter model under majority rule, with two rival groups of players, each preferring one of two public policies and simultaneously deciding whether to cast a costly vote, as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983). We allow the benefit of the favorite public policy to...

We study parties' optimal ideological cohesion across electoral rules, when the following trade-off is present: A more heterogenous set of candidates is electorally appealing (catch-all party), yet, it serves policy-related goals less efficiently. When the rule becomes more disproportional, thus...

In this paper the author analyzes the nature of the legislative process which takes place within the European Parliament by studying the bilateral interactions among its relevant decisional groups, i.e. the parliamentary groups. In this sense, the author uses a methodological approach inspired...

Most election fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a machinery consisting of a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

This paper presents a model which focuses on differences between the competition policy of the EU and antitrust of the U.S. It introduces three versions - Neutral, American, and European. Two-stage game model takes the authority’s perspective and describes options and behavior of antitrust...