Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of organizations, political institutions and many instances of social and economic reform. In this paper we take a first step towards analyzing the role of leadership to ask: when and how does a leader engineer change? We show that while...

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last 20 years. While there is evidence that raising the share of women politicians has substantive impacts on the composition of government spending, there is scarcely any evidence of how it influences...

To ensure equal representation, the voting districts of a country must be more or less of the same size. Designing such voting districts, however, is not an easy task due to the fact that voting districts are encompassed in administrative regions. Since the respective share of an administrative...

We model which special interest groups lobby which policymakers directly, and which employ for-profit intermediaries. We show that special interests affected by policy issues that frequently receive high political salience lobby policymakers directly, while those that rarely receive high...

Members of the Norwegian Parliament were interviewed about the decision process concerning national road investments. Most of them found cost-benefit analysis useful, but apparently not as a device for ranking projects. Rather, the cost-benefit ratio was used to pick project proposals requiring...

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...

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters' preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behaviour of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institutions by examining the...

Generally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that does not assume politicians or voters to be...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...