This paper provides a dynamic theory of the effects of organizational capacity on public policy. Consistent with prevailing accounts, a bureaucratic organization with higher capacity, i.e., a better ability to get things done, is more likely to deliver projects in a timely, predictable, or...

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of...

In this brief analysis, we use a new dataset of two million voter registration records to demonstrate that gender, race, and age do not correlate with political participation in the ways that previous research has shown. Among Blacks and Latinos, women participate at vastly higher rates than...

Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12040-abs-0001" <p>We develop an incomplete information theory of economic voting, where voters' information about macro-economic performance is determined by the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. We test our theory using both cross-sectional and...</p>

This paper examines several hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the existence and growth of legislators' campaign "warchests". We examine the sources and political consequences of warchests in US House elections over the period of 1978-1998. Briefly, our findings are as follows. First,...