We develop a model of legislative decision making in which lobbying and public policy are jointly determined. We examine how policy outcomes depend on the sizes of the interest groups. While a larger size typically involves favorable effects on policy, we also identify threshold levels of...

We examine the consequences of lobbying and vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two <italic>lobbyists</italic> compete for the votes of legislators by offering up-front payments to the legislators in exchange for their votes. We analyze how the lobbyists' budget constraints and...

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on public policy outcomes using a new dataset on agriculture and food policies from 74 countries over the 1960–2005 period. Using both cross-sectional and panel data analyses we find robust evidence that the specific nature...

An adversarial game is used to model a firm's intrinsic and exerted influence over a regulator. Data from the World Business Environment Survey provide strong evidence in support of model hypotheses across a wide range of government agents, countries, and regulatory areas. Of particular...

Using rainfall, public relief, and election data from India, we examine how governments respond to adverse shocks and how voters react to these responses. The data show that voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control. However, fewer voters punish the ruling party...

This paper studies the interaction between different actors in the policy-making process of fiscal transfer reform in Colombia. To analyse this reform, we use the “life cycle of reform” framework. In that context, we follow critical phases in the reform process: planning, dialogue and...

Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a...

This article aims at supplying an interpretative frame of the long-term Malagasy trajectory by redrawing the structuring knots of its political economy. The concomitance of periods of economic expansion and political crises leash indeed to suppose that one of the essential sources of the...

A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China's market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. According to prospect theory, how...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites enforce and operate...