Many governments in the United States hold elections on days other than national Election Day. Recent studies have argued that the low voter turnout that accompanies such off-cycle elections could create an advantage for interest groups. However, the endogeneity of election timing makes it...

Conventional models of democratic accountability hinge on citizens' ability to evaluate government performance accurately. In recent years, public reporting of governmental performance has expanded in many policy domains, potentially enhancing citizen capacities to make accurate evaluations. Yet...

One key role of elections is to allow voters to remove politicians who perform poorly in office. We analyze the extent to which incumbents who are involved in relatively serious political scandals lose elections. More importantly, we assess the relative importance of primary and general...

The relationship between specific skills and the welfare state has been the subject of considerable debate. To help resolve the conflict, we present a general model of preferences over social insurance with endogenous wages and investment in specific skills and a variety of exogenous...

My 2008 article suggested that oil wealth, but not Islam, has impeded progress towards gender equality in the Middle East. Groh and Rothschild re-examine one part of my study, which reported a statistical correlation between oil rents and female labor force participation; they argue that the...

Private politics social pressure is led by social activists who use confrontational and cooperative strategies to induce firms to provide social benefits. A confrontational activist demands that a firm change its practices and threatens a harmful campaign if it does not change. A cooperative...

Arrangements by which politically connected firms receive economic favors are a common feature around the world, but little is known of the form or effects of influence in business–government relationships. We present a simple model in which influence requires firms to provide goods of...

We study a game-theoretic model where three political parties (left, median and right) can form coalitions both before and after the election. Before the election, coalitions can commit to a seat-sharing arrangement, but not to a policy platform or a division of rents from office; coalition...

This paper provides a model of indirect lobbying where special interest groups try to influence policy outcomes by targeting voters. Specifically, competing lobbies engage in influence activities to affect the information that a (possibly biased) media outlet collects on the public value of...

When legislators are uninformed about public opinion, does learning constituents' opinion affect how legislators vote? We conducted a fully randomized field experiment to answer this question. We surveyed 10,690 New Mexicans about the Governor's spending proposals for a special summer session...