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,...

The prospects of global warming and potential shortages of oil have brought energy back to the forefront of the list of national, indeed, global, problems that governments, corporations and society must address. In 2002, as part the MIT study on The Future of Nuclear Power, the first MIT Energy...

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...

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...

Spatial models of two-party or two-candidate competition almost never have pure-strategy Nash equilibria when the issue space has more than one dimension. This paper shows that the introduction of valence issues can create conditions where equilibria exist, even in a multidimensional setting. We...

This paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997. We find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support....

In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not...

America, we are told, is a nation divided. The cartographers who draw up the maps of U.S. election results have branded a new division in American politics: Republican red versus Democratic blue. What is the source of this division? Most observers point not to the bread-and-butter economic...