Over the last two decades, industrialized nations and multilateral financial institutions have encouraged less developed countries to undertake institutional reforms to hasten socioeconomic development. Implicit in this advice is the idea that reform-minded countries will receive a foreign...

Compulsory voting is known to produce a relatively weak match between voters' ballot choices and their preferences. We theorize that this link, in part, exists because compelled voters are relatively unlikely to seek out political information during an election campaign, even after differences...

We posit that sound, growth-promoting economic policy is more likely to be formulated when major political players have incentives to cooperate. Using Portugal as an arena to test this theory, we provide an in depth analysis of its policymaking environment, finding that Portuguese institutional...

Compulsory voting is known to increase electoral participation, but its second-order effects are not well established. In this paper, I argue that vote choices are a relatively poor reflection of individuals’ preferences under compulsory voting, as it boosts participation among those who are...

Numerous studies examine voting behavior based on the formal theoretical predictions of the spatial utility model. These studies model individual utility from the election of a preferred party or candidate as decreasing as the alternative deviates from one’s ideal point, but differ as to...