The distributive politics literature following Weingast (1979) predicts majoritarian redistribution within countries governed by strong party systems. This prediction is tested using evidence from Canadian job creation grant programs active during the mid-1990s. Results provide strong evidence...

This paper assesses the development of the modeling of group behavior in the interest group literature. Throughout the literature, interest groups have been modeled in multiple ways: from passive groups that do not interact with one another to groups that act just as rational strategic players....

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...

This paper offers an explanation for why policy makers stick to inefficient policy decisions. I argue that repealing a policy is a bad signal to voters about the policy maker's competence if voters do not have complete knowledge about the effects of implemented policies. I derive the optimal...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

We study the politico-economic interaction in a country in transition from a communist regime to a democratic, free market system, to wit, Albania. It is argued that the politico-economic system there is characterized by the existence of clans. Both the communists and the first democratically...

While several cross-sectional studies (La Porta et. al. 2002, Norton 2002) examine institutional and cultural determinants of economic freedom, changes in economic freedom remain unexamined. I construct a measure of median voter preferences and find changes in voter preferences for economic...

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members produce political support can, however, retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

Judicial Independence (JI) as factually implemented varies considerably between countries. Since de iure JI is an imperfect predictor of de facto JI, a number of variables that might determine the factual level of judicial independence is theoretically discussed and empirically tested. A...