Why do citizens get politically informed in a democracy? On one hand, being informed allows a citizen to participate in political discussions within her social network. On the other hand, having an informed opinion can help her to extend her social network. This paper builds a simple model on...

We examine the consequences of lobbying and vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two <italic>lobbyists</italic> compete for the votes of legislators by offering up-front payments to the legislators in exchange for their votes. We analyze how the lobbyists' budget constraints and...

We study countries choosing armament levels and then whether or not to go to war. We show that if the costs of war are not overly high or low, then all equilibria must involve dove, hawk, and deterrent strategies and the probability of war is positive (but less than one) in any given period....

In this paper we examine the dynamics of suicide attacks and targeted killings in the Second Intifada. We find evidence that the targeted killings of Palestinian leaders by Israel reduce <italic>realized</italic> Palestinian violence. We find, however, that <italic>intended</italic> Palestinian violence is increasing at low...

In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates' and voters' strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates...

Since 1932, when Justice Louis Brandeis remarked that in a federal system states can serve as "laboratories" of democracy, political decentralization has been thought to stimulate policy experimentation. We reexamine the political economy behind this belief, using a simple model of voting in...

I show that in a multidimensional spatial model, if an agent is risk neutral on each side of the policy space away from his/her ideal point, then his/her utility function is linearly decreasing not in the Euclidean, but rather in the city block distance to the ideal policy of the agent.

This article revisits the relationship between income per capita and civil conflict. We begin by documenting that the empirical literature identifies two different patterns. First, poor countries have a higher propensity to suffer from civil war. Second, civil war occurs when countries suffer...

This paper estimates the effects of initial committee seniority on the career histories of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established by lottery....

Choi (2009) offers a useful demonstration that Li and Resnick's (2003) analysis of the effect of regime type on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows is vulnerable to the impact of outliers. However, his first remedial method of controlling for outliers with a dummy variable leads to...