Some committees are made up of experts, persons interested in both the (subject) matter at hand and in coming across as able decision-makers. Such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. We present a theory that describes the reaction of experts to the requirement to...

In a multiperiod setting, decision-makers can learn about the consequences of their decisions throughexperimentation. In this paper we examine how in a two-party system polarization and political instability affectlearning through experimentation. We distinguish two cases:the decision to be made...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...

This discussion paper led to a publication in the 'European Journal of Political Economics', 2004, 20, 255-262.<P> In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure...</p>

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

This paper examines the incentives for a party leader in office and for a parties' rank-and-file to replace a sitting member of parliament. As to the leader's decision, we show that the leader prefers to replace a critical member of parliament who votes against the leader's policy. A competent...

We experimentally study the relationship between other-regarding preferences, group identity and political participation. In doing so, we propose a novel group identity induction procedure that succeeds in creating environments where in-group bias is either high or low. At the individual level,...

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Social Choice and Welfare', 2006, 26, 527-545.<P> We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that...</p>

A review is given of the use of laboratory experiments in the Public Choice literature. A distinction is made in experiments on public goods, participation games, rent-seeking and lobbying, and spatial voting.