All rulers face political competition, both from rivals within their state, and from other states to which their subjects may exit. In a simple model, both kinds of competition are substitutes. Internal competition (democracy) benefits citizens by allowing them to replace rent-seeking rulers....

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with risk averse households who are heterogeneous in income. We compare four different systems and analyse voters' choices among them: a traditional subsidy scheme, a pure loan scheme, income contingent loans and graduate taxes. Using...

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...

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...

Are national or multinational firms better lobbyists? This paper analyzes the extent of national environmental regulation when policy is determined in a lobbying game between a government and firm. We compare the resulting regulation levels for national and multinational firms. We identify three...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...

In this paper we investigate the role of judicial control of lobbying activities in an endogenous policy framework, focusing on two dimensions of quality of the judiciary, namely efficiency and integrity. We present a multi-layer lobbying model where a self-interested group is allowed to inuence...

We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of...