We show that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals (e.g. economic history, geography, social capital) can lead to extreme voting in federations. When the outcome of federal policies – such as transfer schemes, market regulation or migration laws – depends on these fundamentals,...

We compare two contest. Decentralized in which there are several independent contests with non overlapping contestants and Centralized in which all contestants fight for a unique prize which is the sum of all prizes in the small contests. We study the relationship between payoffs and efforts...

In this chapter, we assess recent contributions of computational models to the study of politics. We focus primarily on agent-based models developed by economists and political scientists. These models address collective action problems, questions related to institutional design and performance,...

NOTE: The following is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract. Equilibrium tax and expenditure policies are studied in a federation consisting of a federal government and several state governments. Each state begins with an initial distribution of residents of different ability...