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...

We study a model that characterizes the conditions under which past misbehavior becomes the subject of present scandal, with consequences for both the implicated politician and the parties that work with him. In the model, both authentic and fake scandals arise endogenously within a political...

For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates....

Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are immortal, we show that program death is commonplace and seek to explain why. We develop a simple model of distributive politics, which we call "probabilistic universalism." Our theory suggests that differences in the ideological...

Much of the controversy surrounding school vouchers, and privatization schemes generally, stems from concerns about social stratification. This paper identifies the form and magnitude of selection effects in a means-tested New York City voucher program. It compares students who applied for...

Empirical research on distributive politics emphasizes party and committee leaders in Congress. This paper highlights the president, who most credibly fills the role of the proposer in Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) seminal model, and who has further opportunities to influence the distribution of...