Most models of pre-vote deliberation assume that voters send messages simultaneously. In practice, however, communication is almost always sequential. This review shows that sequential communication makes it even more difficult to induce truthful communication. Specifically, I show that for any...

This article builds on Matthews and Stimson's (1975) study of legislative cuetaking, analyzing the extent to which legislators sitting next to each other influence each others' voting behavior. Data come from three decades of roll call votes in the California Assembly, a chamber in which each...

This paper shows why states, acting in their own self-interest, may create informational asymmetries that lead to war. In our models, two actors with no private information invest in military capacity before engaging in crisis bargaining. If bargaining fails, the states go to war, and the...

Political Scientists routinely rely on self-reports when investigating the effects of political stimuli on behavior. An example of this is found in the American politics work addressing whether campaign advertising mobilizes voters. Findings appear to vary by methodology and are based on varying...

Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally suggested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations...

Statistical studies on the effects of capital controls on growth have generally yielded insignificant results. In this paper, we show that capital controls negatively affect growth in authoritarian countries, while growth in democratic countries is insignificantly affected. We also show that the...

The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996)—an intriguing development, given game theory's individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory...

We amass a new, large-scale dataset of newspaper editorials that allows us to calculate fine-grained measures of the political positions of newspaper editorial pages. Collecting and classifying over 1500 editorials adopted by 25 major US newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994 to 2004,...

We present a theoretical model of a parliamentary democracy where electoral competition inside coalition governments induces higher spending than under single party governments. Policy preferences of parties are endogenous and derived from opportunistic reelection motives. The electoral rule...

To understand the extent to which partisan majorities in Congress influence economic policy, we compare financial market responses in recent midterm elections to Presidential elections. We use prediction markets that track election outcomes as a means of precisely timing and calibrating the...