We present a model of parties-in-legislatures that can support partisan policy outcomes despite the absence of any party-imposed voting discipline. Legislators choose all procedures and policies through majority-rule bargaining and cannot commit to vote against their preferences on either. Yet,...

Previous research on coalition formation has argued that people exclude others to maximize their own payoff. However, the majority of this research has been conducted in settings where participants do not interact person-to-person or where they communicate through highly restricted means. We...

This article presents a novel automatic method of text analysis aimed at discovering patterns of lexical cohesion in political speech. The unit of analysis are groups of words with related meanings; the software is based on the results of multi-person annotation experiment that captures reliably...

Models with adaptive agents have become increasingly popular in computational sociology (e.g. Macy 1991, Macy and Flache 2002). In this paper we show that at least two important kinds of such models lack empirical content. In the first type players adjust via reinforcement learning: they adjust...

This article presents a novel automatic method of text analysis aimed at discovering patterns of lexical cohesion in political speech. The unit of analysis are groups of words with related meanings; the software is based on the results of a multiperson annotation experiment that captures...

This paper presents a model of consumer boycotts where the discrete choices of concerned consumers are represented as stochastic processes. Boycotts are interpreted as a form of voting where consumers are trying to shape the behavior of firms. We solve for the limiting distribution of the...

We model the interaction between a profi t-maximizing firm and an activist using an in nite-horizon dynamic stochastic game. The fi rm enhances its reputation through self-regulation : voluntary provision of an activity that reduces a negative externality. We show that in equilibrium the...

This paper contains additional details about the model in our paper "A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers" (Diermeier, Keane and Merlo (2004)), as well as the computational methods we use to solve and estimate the model, and the construction of the data set

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 checks and balances provide economic agents with better protection from expropriation of their wealth or productive capital. We demonstrate that in a dynamic political economy model this intuition may be flawed. Surprisingly, increasing the number of veto...