This paper examines several hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the existence and growth of legislators' campaign "warchests". We examine the sources and political consequences of warchests in US House elections over the period of 1978-1998. Briefly, our findings are as follows. First,...

This paper uses newly available data from the 1995 Lobby Disclosure Act to assess the argument that PAC contributions are used to gain access to legislators. First, we find a much stronger connection between lobbying and campaign contributions than previous statistical research has...

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12040-abs-0001" <p>We develop an incomplete information theory of economic voting, where voters' information about macro-economic performance is determined by the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. We test our theory using both cross-sectional and...</p>

Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voter's expected payoff is proportional to her voting...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Energy Challenge -- 2 Energy Choices -- 3 What People Want -- 4 Price and Consequence -- 5 Why Do People Hate Coal and Love Solar? -- 6 The Chicken and the Egg -- 7 Two Minds about Climate Change -- 8 What to Do? -- 9 A Way Forward -- Appendix --...