Standard models of voting on redistribution generate a clear-cut prediction: redistribution increases in income skewness. (the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis) Empirical evidence on this issue is mixed. Changes in income skewness are often accompanied by developments in redistribution into the...

We study the effects of preselection on an expert's incentive to give truthful advice. In a decision environment in which certain decisions yield more precise estimates about the expert's expertise, a mediocre expert's advice is biased. We show that this bias can be undone by the introduction of...

This paper models the instability of peace agreements, motivated by the empirical regularity with which peace agreements tend to break down following civil war. When war provides opportunities for profit to one side, or when other difficulties such as historical grievances exist, peace may...

Welfare-state measures often tend to persist even when they seem to have become suboptimal due to changes in the economic environment. This paper proposes an information-based explanation for the persistence of the welfare state. I present a structural model where rationally inattentive voters...

Despite a strong theoretical prediction that income skewness and redistribution should be positively linked, empirical evidence on this issue is mixed. This paper argues that it is important to distinguish between sources of changes in income skewness. Two sources of such changes are discussed:...

Several empirical studies derive that personal positions with respect to policy measures are dominated by ideology instead of narrow self-interest. In the present field study we carried out a telephone survey with 1.003 respondents all over Austria. Instead of only measuring self-interest...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

This paper studies how political competition can lead candidates to strategically increase the salience of specific issues, in order to influence voting decisions of marginal groups, with non trivial consequences for turnout rates. In my setup issues differ in their divisiveness, to be defined...

In The Myth of the Rational Voter Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address voter'...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...