Many political economic theories use and emphasize the process of voting in their explanation of the growth of Social Security, government spending, and other public policies. But is there an empirical connection between democracy and Social Security program size or design? Using some new...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old-age Social Security as a public program? In the first part of the paper, we document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and...

We propose a positive theory that is consistent with two important features of social security programs around the world: (1) they redistribute income from young to old and (2) they induce retirement. We construct a voting model that includes a "political campaign" or "debate" prior to the...

Estimates of democracy's effect on the public sector are obtained from comparisons of 142 countries over the years 1960-90. Based on three tenets of voting theory -- that voting mutes policy preference intensity, political power is equally distributed in democracies, and the form of voting...