A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to bring home the pork to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and...

This literature survey distinguishes between public administration and economics, identifies some issues common to both fields and some reasons why public administration is not economics. Finally, it briefly surveys the contributions and limits of three bodies of economic literature that have in...

In many developing and transition countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption. This is surprising from a political economy perspective, as the majority of people in a corrupt country suffer from high corruption levels. Our model is based on the fact that corrupt officials have to pay...

We analyze a model in which voters learn over time their preferences regarding an irreversible social decision. Voters can either implement the project in the first period, or they can postpone the decision to the second period. We analyze the effects of different majority rules. We show that...

This paper uses state-level election returns and individual-level survey data to show that American voters have systematically punished the incumbent party for extreme weather in presidential election years. A moderate drought has cost the incumbent party an average of 2.6 percent of the...

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that voters have about candidates' preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas. In such a setup, we study the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information, and how...

We consider strategic voting with incomplete information and partially common values in sequential committees. A proposal is considered against the status quo in one committee, and only upon its approval advances for consideration in a second committee. Committee members (i) are privately and...

We use the citizen-candidate model to study the differential incentives that alternative voting rules provide for candidate entry, and their effect on policy polarization. In particular, we show that allowing voters to cast multiple votes leads to equilibria which support multiple candidate...

This paper extends a basic 'common agency' model of policy determination to a case of a policy vector where lobbies have oppposed interests in one of the instruments. Liberalisation takes the form of an entrant that has to access the incumbent's network, while the incumbent remains vertically...

Centralisation of political decision making often fails to produce the desired results. For instance, it is frequently argued that decision making within the European Union results in overspending and overregulation in some policy areas, while too low spending and too little regulation prevails...