Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...

In this paper we propose minority voting as a scheme that can partially protect individuals from the risk of repeated exploitation. We consider a committee that meets twice to decide about projects where the first-period project may have a long-lasting impact. In the first period a simple open...

We exploit a discontinuity in Brazilian municipal election rules to investigate whether political competition has a causal impact on policy choices. In municipalities with less than 200,000 voters mayors are elected with a plurality of the vote. In municipalities with more than 200,000 voters a...

A high court has to decide whether a lawis constitutional, unconstitutional, or interpretable. The voting system is runoff. Runoff voting systems can be interpreted both, as social choice functions or as mechanisms. It is known that, for universal domains of preferences, runoff voting systems...