Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. This creates prison overcrowding and can lead to recidivism. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them politically attractive for politicians. Yet the contextual...

Environmental policies are characterized by salient short-term costs and long-term benefits that are difficult to observe and to attribute to the government's efforts. These characteristics imply that citizens' support for environmental policies is highly dependent on their trust in the...

Overconfidence leads to risky behavior, including when people are around guns. Does overconfidence also shape attitudes about gun ownership and use? We evaluate this possibility by conducting nationally representative surveys in six countries in the Americas, including the United States. Results...

Welfarist justifications of democracy presume that citizens have policy preferences that are responsive to pertinent information. Is this accurate? This paper addresses that question by providing a model and empirical test of how citizens' policy preferences respond to information in the arena...

Using aggregate analysis, this paper examines the core contentions of the "varieties of capitalismʺ perspective on comparative capitalism. We construct a coordination index to assess whether the institutional features of liberal and coordinated market economies conform to the predictions of the...

This paper develops a game-theoretic model for assessing the relationship between ideological divisions in a society and prospects for good governance. Synthesizing the insights of the literature on political career concerns with those from the literature on issue framing, the model emphasizes...

An influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society-wide coordination game in which the individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how...

Screening requirements are common features of fraud and corruption mitigation efforts around the world. Yet imposing these requirements involves trade-offs between higher administrative costs, delayed benefits, and exclusion of genuine beneficiaries on one hand and lower fraud on the other. We...

Descriptions of elections in Brazil have long emphasized that much of the money used in campaigns is unreported to electoral authorities. As unreported expenditures are not typically observable by scholars, academic understanding of the uses and electoral impact of political finance in Brazil is...