This paper studies how voters' selective ignorance interacts with policy design by political candidates. It shows that the selectivity empowers voters with extreme preferences and small groups, divisive issues attract most attention and public goods are underfunded. Finer granularity of...

We study the properties of the group-based model of voting in elections with more than two candidates. We consider two of the most widely used electoral rules around the world: plurality and majority runoff. We fully characterize the set of equilibria under both rules and identify the features...

For voters with quot;socialquot; preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections. Less important elections are predicted to have lower turnout, but a...

Prior to elections, governments (at all levels) frequently undertake a consumption binge. Taxes are cut, transfers are raised, and government spending is distorted towards highly visible items. The quot;political business cyclequot; (better be thought of as quot;the political budget cyclequot;)...

The sociologist R. Dahrendorf has recently suggested that there is no and there ought to be no convergence of economic policies towards some common ideal model. On the contrary, he states that `diversity is [...] at the very heart of a world that has abandoned the need for closed, encompassing...

In this paper, a micro-founded model dealing with the effects of regional sizing on economic growth is developed. Departing from bigger sizes, reduction involves more efficient public choices because of proximity to individual preferences and needs, but also creates the risk of underestimation...

We are concerned with the design of a constitution for a firm - an ex ante contract which assigns residual rights of control (and possibly residual income rights) without reference to the issue to be decided. We focus attention on two polar constitutions: non-profit cooperatives and outside...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and...

This paper explores the logic of amp;scal restraints in a political agency model with both moral hazard and adverse selection. The role of the political process is both to discipline incumbents who may act against the public interest and to sort in those politicians who are most likely act in...