Fundamental political change often occurs gradually, and it is therefore important to understand the strategic underpinnings of gradual institutional change. This paper presents a game in which players are entirely strategic and share proposal power, while showing how one player can gradually...

Sovereignty is necessary for peaceful cooperation, supporters argue, because a unified actor must enforce legal procedures. This argument rests upon an epistemic claim: Agreement over legal procedures is only possible if all individuals adhere to the interpretation of a single actor. But this is...

Models of electoral accountability typically assume a politician provides a public good. Yet in many contexts, elected officials distribute private goods among voters with conflicting interests. We present a formal model to analyze this situation. An elected official allocates a rivalrous good...

Political contests over institutional structure are fundamentally shaped by the range of institutional alternatives. Yet how is the menu of alternatives constructed? To understand the emergence of institutional alternatives, I turn to the concept of group consciousness. A specific form of group...

Nimbyism is widely thought to arise from an inherent tradeoff between localism and efficiency in government: because many development projects have spatially concentrated costs and diffuse benefits, local residents naturally oppose proposed projects. But why cannot project developers (with large...

A wide variety of policies have spatially concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. In many cases, such policies exhibit severe governance failures. We present a formal model to investigate how these policy failures relate to institutions for resident participation. In the model, residents of two...

To address economic inequality, proposals have emerged to expand democracy within firms. To evaluate these proposals, empirical researchers have examined European policies for worker representation. Yet without a baseline model against which to compare the results of these studies, we cannot...