Objectives. Economic models of politics typically make two assumptions about voters: First, their motives are egocentric, not sociotropic; second, their beliefs are rational, not subject to systematic bias. Political scientists have presented strong evidence against the first assumption...

Must the state handle the adjudication of disputes? Researchers of different perspectives, from heterodox scholars of law who advocate legal pluralism to libertarian economists who advocate privatizing law, have increasingly questioned the idea that the state is, or should be, the only source of...

Much of the public finance literature argues that local governments behave competitively due to residents' ease of exit and entry. The model presented here challenges this widespread conclusion. Though it is costless to relocate to another locality, the presence of tax capitalization makes it...

Models of inefficient political failure have been criticized for implicitly assuming the irrationality of voters (Wittman, 1989, 1995, 1999; Coate and Morris, 1995). Building on Caplan's (1999) model of "rational irrationality", the current paper maintains that the assumption of voter irrationality...

Beliefs about normative economics appear to be primarily determined by sociotropic rather than egocentric variables. (Sears & Funk, 1990; Citrin & Green, 1990) Using the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy, the current paper finds that the same holds for positiveeconomic beliefs in...

Terrorism in general, and suicidal terrorism in particular, is popularly seen as “irrational,” but many economists and political scientists argue otherwise. This paper distinguishes three different senses of irrationality: unresponsiveness to incentives, deviation from narrow self-interest,...