Support for a larger government has remained stable despite the growing inequality over the last 40 years in the US, which standard economic models of government size fail to predict. In this paper, we highlight the governmental role of public goods provision as a key political determinant of...

Overconfident people who do not earn what they think they can may attribute this negative gap to the unfairness of the economy and thereby favor reducing income inequality when they realize their income-ability gap. We conducted an online survey experiment in the US in which we assigned the...

This study uncovers a novel effect of public goods on inequality through public opinions. We hypothesize that people are more likely to support a tax increase after realizing the benefit from public goods, helping to reduce inequality by expanding government size. We conducted an online survey...

The rapid aging of the population has become increasingly challenging for public healthcare systems. To ensure sustainability, governments must persuade their citizens to accept a larger burden, which is a difficult task. This study explored whether informing individuals of self-benefits from...

To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...

To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...

To explore the propagation of populist extremism across countries, we construct a multi-country model wherein each country's politician sequentially implements a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by observing foreign policies on top of the domestic...

This study investigates how supermajority rules in a legislature affect electoral competition. To this end, we construct a probabilistic voting model and show that supermajority rules magnify the divergence of policy platforms generated by aggregate uncertainty about the electoral outcome. Thus,...