There are two well-established empirical regularities about voters. First, they entertain systematically biased beliefs about how public policies affect economic outcomes. Second, voters vote retrospectively: they punish the incumbent for poor and reward him for good macroeconomic performance....

This paper provides a theoretical model of party competition in a heterogeneous electorate. The latter consists of numerous groups of dominant-issue-voters who base their voting decision primarily on one issue of the political agenda. Parties follow a lexicographic objective function, aiming to...

Mancur Olson's theory of institutional sclerosis is based on the notion that the number of interest groups within a country increases with the duration of its political stability. The following paper argues that the increase in the number of interest groups over time could also be a concomitant...