Veto institutions are often dominated by government opponents with rival electoral and policy interests (e.g. \divided government"). I investigate the tradeoff between policy control and policy blockade when both the government and the veto party may cater to opposing special interests. The...

This paper explores the conditions under which compliance with a social contract establishes an equilibrium in a society. It is assumed that society consists of two groups, one of which has a comparative advantage in using violence, whereas the other one has a comparative advantage in producing...

The selection of political representatives depends on the political system. Principals, such as voters or districts, may benefit by strategically electing representatives different from themselves. While a status-quo biased delegate may be a better negotiator, an enthusiastic representative has...

This paper explores conditions under which dictators comply with a social contract. We assume society to consist of two groups, one with a comparative advantage in using violence, the other one with a comparative advantage in producing private goods. Violence can be used to produce security or...

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy tournament models to analyse elections. The main...

This paper explores the conditions under which compliance with a social contract establishes an equilibrium in a society. It is assumed that society consists of two groups, one of which has a comparative advantage in using violence, whereas the other one has a comparative advantage in producing...

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...

Does electoral fraud affect development? In a weak institutional environment the answer is not obvious. This paper demonstrates that electoral fraud can lower development and this effect is mediated through the partisan control of electoral institutions and the resultant ability of the incumbent...

Given the background of changing institutional competencies in the European Union, we analyze the choice of asylum law standards of national and European parliaments, the Council of the European Union and codecision between the Council and the European Parliament. In a two country model we find...

Recent empirical work shows that judicial dependence can explain high levels of corruption. This paper examines how the dependence of judiciaries influences corruption at different levels of the government in a model where the central government, low-level officials, and the judiciary are...