The adoption of gender quotas in electoral lists, like the recent “parity law” in France, can be fully rationalized on the basis of the self interest of male incumbent politicians. This paper explains why the parity law was approved in its form and, at the same time, why it has not been very...

I introduce a model of representative democracy that allows for strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters, and multiple districts. If the distribution of policy preferences is sufficiently similar across districts and sufficiently close to uniform within districts, then the...

Morelli (American Political Science Review, 1999) provides a majoritarian bargaining model in which the parties make payoff demands and the order of moves is chosen by the leading party. Morelli's main proposition states that the ex post distribution of payoffs inside the coalition that forms is...

Many important decisions are taken according to weighted majority rule. Power indices predict that enlargement of the voting body may affect the balance of power between the original members even if their number of votes and the decision rule remain constant. Some of the existing voters may...

This paper extends the Baron-Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining to general weighted majority games with two modifications: first, payoff division can only be agreed upon after the coalition has formed (two-stage bargaining); second, negotiations in the coalition can break down, in which...