The higher legislative success of parliamentary governments relative to presidential governments has been used to argue that legislative success is driven by parliamentary governments' superior agenda power or their control of legislative majorities. We show that this approach is at odds with...

Across four experiments, participants saw companies as capable of having ‘agentic’ mental states, such as having intentions, but incapable of having ‘experiential’ mental states, such as feeling pain. This difference in mental state ascription caused companies to elicit anger as...

The so-called "paradox of voting" is major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational then large electorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act...

This paper presents a dynamic model of election, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period. The electorate votes strategically by taking into account the...

Activist NGOs have increasingly foregone public politics and turned to private politics to change the practices of firms and industries. This paper focuses on private politics, activist strategies, and nonmarket strategies of targets. A formal theory of an encounter between an activist...

In this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies. We use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government...

Theories of organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the U.S. Congress, explaining why committee systems emerge there, but not explaining variance in organization across legislatures of different countries. To analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the internal...

Recent empirical studies by Persson and Tabellini show that, in parliamentary countries with proportional representation, government spending as a fraction of GDP goes up during cyclical downturns but does not come down during cyclical upturns, whereas this ratchet effect is not apparent in...

We experimentally test competing theories of three-player majoritarian bargaining models with fixed, known disagreement values. Subjects are randomly assigned to three roles: a proposer and two types of voters. Each role is randomly assigned a disagreement value, i.e. a given amount of money...