Two quite different, but equally plausible, theories of the “cause” of the foundation of the United States in 1787 have been put forward, first by Charles Beard (1913), and then by William Riker (1964). Beard’s thesis was that the preferences underlying the Ratification were generated by...

The key theoretical idea underlying this paper is that an institutional equilibrium can be destroyed or transformed by rapid belief changes in the population. The changes in electoral beliefs in the period prior to the election of Lincoln in 1860 and the commencement of the Civil War are...

It has been a standard result of the stochastic, or probabilistic, spatial model of voting that vote maximizing candidates, or parties, will converge to the electoral mean (the origin). This conclusion has appeared to be contradicted by empirical studies.Here, a more general stochastic model,...

We develop a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. We model a small open economy with two tradable goods, each of which is produced using a sector specific factor (e.g., land and capital) and another factor that is...

Olson has argued that rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common goal or to satisfy their collective interests. Hardin interpreted the argument in terms of the classical prisoner's dilemma and offered a solution whereby the majority choice of the group would...

We develop a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. We model a small open economy with two tradable goods, each of which is produced using a sector-specific factor (e.g., land and capital) and another factor that is...