Continuous violent conflict is a central cause of economic stagnation in many of the world’s poorest countries. Peace agreements are one common tool used to attempt to break these ‘conflict traps.’ However, these agreements often fail due to the lack of a clear and credible commitment by...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of primary voting systems on the ability of agent-representatives to deviate within the median voter model. While conclusions are consistent with the results found in Gerber and Morton (1998), this paper extends their analysis by including the...

A significant set of the public-choice literature considers the relationship between primary types and the resulting ideology of the winning candidate in primary and general elections. Research by Buel and Jackson [1991], for instance, suggests that primary voters with ideologically extreme...

In the political science and public choice literature, it has been shown that candidates (i) deviate from their median voter based upon the primary election type, and (ii) are more likely to establish policy positions that deviate from the median voter when the voting system is characterized by...

The remarkable growth of the carriage trade movement in health care provision reflects the hyper-regulated health care environment that exists in health care today. This growth, which is only recently becoming noticed within the academic literature, is consistent with economic theory and is...

Recent events highlight primary type as an institutional variable that merits further examination in the economics literature on voter turnout. Using panel data for U.S. gubernatorial elections and treating primary type as a proxy for candidate deviation from the median voter, we test whether...