When making collektive desicions, principals (voters or districts) typically benefit by strategically delegating their bargaining and voting power to representatives different from themselves. There are conflicting views in the literature, however, of whether such a delegate should be...

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...

We investigate how changes in the administrative-territorial structure affect ethnic voting. We present an event study design that exploits the 2010 constitutional reform in Kenya, which substantially increased the number of primary administrative regions. We find (i) strong evidence for a...

Despite the wide variety of agendas used in legislative settings, the literature on sophisticated voting has focused on two formats, the so-called Euro-Latin and Anglo-American agendas. In the current paper, I introduce a broad class of agendas whose defining structural features,...

Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device most commonly added to majority rule in national is a quorum requirement. The two most common are the participation and the approval quora. Such...

We study the possibilities for agenda manipulation under strategic voting for two prominent sequential voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the suc- cessive procedure. We show that a well known result for tournaments, namely that the successive procedure is (weakly) more manipulable...

In this work we set out to examine how the effective separation of powers in a political system, secures increased accountability and reduces the incentives of agents to try to corrupt officials. We summarize the main results of the existing literature that examines both these relationships and...

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organizations. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare positions of the actors. While such an analysis informs us about...

We experimentally investigate information aggregation through majority voting when some voters are biased. In such situations, majority voting can have a "dark side", that is, result in groups making choices inferior to those made by individuals acting alone. In line with theoretical...