Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

It is often argued that additional constraints on redistribution such as granting veto power to more players in society better protects property from expropriation. We use a model of multilateral bargaining to demonstrate that this intuition may be flawed. Increasing the number of veto players...

A puzzling feature of self-governing organizations is persistent majority support for restrictive, seemingly non-majoritarian, procedures, e.g., chairs and committees. This paper provides a theory of self-enforcing majoritarian commitment to restrictive procedures. We ask (i) why majorities...