Does higher office always lead to more favoritism? We argue that firms may lose their benefit from a connected politicians ascent to higher office, if it entails stricter scrutiny that may reduce favoritism. Around close Congress elections, we find RDD-based evidence of this adverse effect that...

An economic argument in favor of direct democracy in a social choice setting with pure common values, private noisy information about an unobservable payoff-relevant state of the world, and costless voting is essentially one about information aggregation: if all citizens vote according to their...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualified majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a wellknown public gure with...

We study the problem of aggregating private information in elections with two or more alternatives. We characterize environments where information can be aggregated asymptotically by a sequence of equilibria of voting games as the electorate grows large and explore the implications for the...

In models of political economy, institutionalization of free and open elections is presented as infusing competition into a previously monopolized regime. Due to elections, representative democracies are thought to reflect the will of the majority as opposed to the will of the elites. I...

Analysis of the Constitutional Treaty of the European Union shows that there is a serious discrepancy between the voting power gradient of Member States computed by the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices. Given the lack of compelling arguments to choose between these indices on purely axiomatic...

We consider a two-stage public goods provision game: In the first stage, players simultaneously decide if they will join a contribution group or not. In the second stage, players in the contribution group simultaneously offer contribution schemes in order to influence the government's choice on...

In general, analyses of voting power are performed through the notion of a simple voting game (SVG) in which every voter can choose between two options: 'yes' or 'no'. Felsenthal and Machover (1997) introduced the concept of ternary voting games (TVGs) which recognizes abstention alongside. They...

In this study, we examine the voting behavior in Indonesian parliamentary elections from 1999 to 2014. After summarizing the changes in Indonesian parties' share of the vote from a historical standpoint, we investigate the voting behavior with simple regression models to analyze the effect of...