Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections, and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and...

When parties endorse policy positions and priorities, they are thought to send a signal about which policy best serves the interests, or is most consistent with the values, of their followers. Survey research has long confirmed a strong link between partisanship and policy attitudes, but left...

The paper analyzes the work of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) from its founding in 1992 to the present day. The WFD is a government sponsored NGO that administers democratic political aid in Eastern and Southern Europe, former Soviet Republics, and Africa (among other regions)...

This paper uses an unusual administrative dataset covering the universe of French hospitals to consider hospital employment: this is consistently higher in public hospitals than in Not-For-Profit (NFP) or private hospitals, even controlling for a number of measures of hospital output. NFP...

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: we use data derived from content analysis of party manifestos as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, we detect a positive impact of party support for various...

Despite a growing interest in African political parties, no comparative analyses of political ideology in Africa have been undertaken to date. This study addresses this shortcoming by applying the Manifesto Research Group's (MRG) coding scheme to a complete set of African party manifestos in...

This paper uses an unusual administrative dataset covering the universe of French hospitals to consider hospital employment: this is consistently higher in public hospitals than in Not-For-Profit (NFP) or private hospitals, even controlling for a number of measures of hospital output. NFP...

Polities differ in the extent to which political parties can pre-commit to carry out promised policy actions if they take power. Commitment problems may arise due to a divergence between the ex ante incentives facing national parties that seek to capture control of the legislature and the ex...