The Swing Voter's Curse is extended to incorporate a class of supermajority rules.

This paper proves the existence of non-empty cores for directed network problems with quotas and for those combinatorial allocation problems which permit only exclusive allocations.

In this note, we propose a simple infinite horizon of elections with two candidates. We suppose that the government policy presents some degree of inertia, i.e. a new government cannot completely change the policy implemented by the incumbent. When the policy inertia is strong enough, no party...

Between 1994 and 2004, New York State voters returned a Republican governor but always cast a majority of the popular vote in favor of the Democratic candidate in the presidential election. This paper exploits those elections in an effort to understand voters' motivations to switch party...

This paper compares binary versions of two well-known preference aggregation methods designed to overcome problems occurring from voting cycles, Copeland's (1951) and Dodgson''s (1876) method. In particular it will first be shown that the Copeland winner can occur at any position in the Dodgson...

This paper explores the relationship between special-interest groups and volatility of GDP growth. In an unbalanced panel of 108 countries, we find a significant negative relationship between the number of interest groups in a country and the volatility of GDP growth.

This note shows that results similar to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem can be proved by replacing the weak Pareto principle by a weaker condition called Pareto Neutrality and used by Xu (1990) to state another version of Sen''s liberal paradox. Our result strengthens Xu''s arguments for taking...

The spatial voting approach is extended to account for the existence of a loyalty effect driving the choice of parties' platforms during elections. There emerges a non-linear relationship between these variable, whereby a party sticking to its historical heritage may lose to a rival more keen to...

This paper examines how the incumbency advantage is related to ideological voting or legislative shirking that causes the incumbents to diverge from the preference of the median voter using aggregate data for the U.S. House of Representatives between 1948 and 2000. I find that a rise in the...

I discuss a scenario in which second expert opinions may not benefit decision making. The introduction of a second expert s the possibility of partisan bickering, which impairs information transmission.