Separated powers cannot permanently constrain individual ambitions. Concerns about a government's ability to respond to contemporary and future crises, we show, invariably compromise the principled commitments one branch of government has in limiting the authority of another. We study a dynamic...

In this paper we elaborate on a strategic view of institutional features. Our focus is on seniority, though we note that this general approach may also be deployed to understand other aspects of institutional arrangements. We have taken the initial game-theoretic model of seniority of McKelvey...

In overlapping-generations models of public gods provision, in which the contribution decision is binary and lifetimes are finite, the set of symmetric subgame-perfect equilibria can be categorized into three types: seniority equilibria in which players contribute (effort) until a predetermined...

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- I History -- 1 The Impact of Administrative Power on Political and Economic Developments: Toward a Political Economy of Implementation -- 2 The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution -- 3 Institutions and the Resource Curse in...

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of...