We study the possibilities for agenda manipulation under strategic voting for two prominent sequential voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. We show that a well known result for tournaments, namely that the successive procedure is (weakly) more manipulable than...

Group identification refers to the problem of classifying individuals into groups (e.g., racial or ethnic classification). We consider a multinary group identification model where memberships to three or more groups are simultaneously determined based on individual opinions on who belong to what...

This paper develops a dynamic model of legislative policy making with evolving, privately observed policy preferences. Our goal is to find conditions under which decision rules, which assign feasible policies based on the legislators' preferences, are sustainable in the long run. We show that...

Numerous theoretical studies have shown that information aggregation through voting is fragile. We consider a model of information aggregation with vote-contingent payoffs and generically characterize voting behavior in large committees. We use this characterization to identify the set of...

Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, the rightwing populist AfD has recently entered all state parliaments as well as the federal parliament in Germany. Although professed AfD voters faced a likely risk of social stigmatization, electoral...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate-level information shocks regarding support for a populist right-wing party on the individual disposition to report a respective political preference in survey interviews. Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

Es wird die Grundidee einer direktdemokratischen Plattformpartei vorgestellt, dass die bei ihr registrierten Wähler über alle (wichtigen) Einzelfragen abstimmen dürfen und ihre Abgeordneten sie nicht nach Mehrheitsbeschluss, sondern proportional vertreten. Dazu werden wichtige Varianten, die...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...

Taking Macur Olson´s theory of the decline of nations as pathbreaking in this field we develop a formal model of the behavior of interest groups and their interaction to win some deeper insights into the interior mechanics of the interest-group-state. Followed by a brief survey of empirical...