The classical literature on spatial majority voting postulates that all citizens vote. The Median Voter Theorem (MVT) then obtains when parties have perfect information on voter behavior and are either office-seekers ("Downsian") or ideological. This paper introduces abstention, a simple yet...

How should international aid be distributed? The most common view is according to some utilitarian formula: in order to maximize the average growth rate of aid recipients or the growth rate of income of the class of recipient countries. Recently, the World Bank [7] has published a study...

The central result of this paper establishes an isomorphism between two types of mathematical structures: ""ternary preorders"" and ""convex topologies."" The former are characterized by reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity conditions, and can be interpreted geometrically as ordered...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework, which we call extended EOp, for analysing second-best optimal income taxation. Unlike the pure EOp criterion of Roemer (1998) the extended EOp criterion allows...

This project employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer’s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly...

The Downsian model, in which candidates care only about winning elections and parties play no role, has been hegemonic in formal political theory for forty years. In the past fifteen years, various authors have worked with a model of electoral competition in which competing parties represent...

Consider electoral competition between two candidates, in which there is a single-dimensional issue space. The simplest way to get the result that, in Nash equilibrium, candidates propose different policies, is to assume that (1) candidates are uncertain about the distribution of voter...

Under dictatorship, trade unions and strikes are illegal, and so wages are low and employment is full. Under democracy, there are two institutional innovations: trade unions, which can keep the wage about the Walrasian level, and the citizen franchise, by which citizens may vote transfer...

This paper surveys the evidence, theoretical and empirical, relating to the possibility of achieving more egalitarian distributions of income than are typical in modern societies. The first four parts of the paper (Introduction, Improving efficiency an equality, The ownership of firms, and...