remain obstinately blind to them, embracing a statist ideology and voting for an excessively large government. Conversely, an …-faire ideology and blind faith in the invisible hand. With public-sector capital, this interplay of beliefs and institutions leads to …

this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology, levels of redistribution, labour supply, aggregate … welfare state. More generally, the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions, including those …

voting, where agents vote over income redistribution. The key feature of the theory is that the future constituency of … without a welfare state. The theory can explain why welfare state institutions, originally introduced in response to specific …

candidates and available policy alternatives. We show that both sides may be caught in an ideology trap: because voters expect … the perceived ideology of office holders to determine their political actions, politicians are tempted to act according to … their perceived ideology, resulting in political failure. …