We investigate theoretically and experimentally the <italic>crisis bargaining</italic> model, a dynamic game of two-sided incomplete information with player types drawn from a commonly known distribution. Little work has been done to analyze whether and how players update their beliefs in such games.Within the...

Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the...

We develop the empirical implications of Page's (2006) definition of path dependence as a process where the sequence of historical events affects the final outcome. A critical necessary condition for path dependence in common dynamic models is a time-varying autoregressive parameter whose value...

The quality of government is often measured by the degree of congruence between policy choices and public opinion, but there is not an accepted method for calculating congruence. This paper offers a new approach to measuring policy-opinion congruence, and uses it to study 10 high-profile issues...

How does the existence of an international institution change the strategic calculations of states engaged in an international dispute? This paper investigates the question by modeling an international institution as an alternative to bilateral bargaining for a dispute settlement. The...

We leverage the natural experiment afforded by tornado incidence to estimate the effect of exogenous economic loss on electoral outcomes. We find that voters punish the incumbent party in presidential elections for economic damage resulting from tornadoes. Although this behavior could suggest...

We analyze democratic accountability in open economies based on different hypotheses about political evaluations and government responsiveness. Specifically, we assess whether citizens primarily rely on government policies or if they focus on economic outcomes resulting from these policies to...

What would happen if the current U.S. campaign finance system, mostly based on private donations, were replaced by a public funding scheme of the same magnitude? Some argue that public funding would deprive voters of useful information, but this can only be true if private donations are somehow...

We introduce a path-based measure of convexity to be used in assessing the compactness of legislative districts. Our measure is the probability that a district contains the shortest path between a randomly selected pair of its points. The measure is defined relative to exogenous political...

Inequality is generally thought to affect the electoral fortunes of the left, yet the theory and evidence on the question are unclear. This is the case even in Latin America, a region marked by enormous inequalities and by the stunning return of the left over the last decade. We address this...