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 formal model of political competition almost ubiquitously employed by students of political economy is one in which political parties play no role. That model, introduced by Anthony Downs (1957) over forty years ago, portrays a competition between candidates, whose sole motivation for...

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...

It is commonly held that power has been transferred from political parties to candidates in the last fifty years, and that television is the cause. This paper constructs a game-theoretical model of political competition in which a technological innovation, like television, can have this effect....

We analyze the reallocations of educational expenditures required to equalize opportunities, according to the theory of Roemer (1998). Using the NLSYM data set, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across men of different races, by using educational finance as the instrument,...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the â??flypaper...

Why did socialists win elections in some countries in Europe, and fascists in others, during the interwar period? Many political historians have viewed ''distributive class politics'' as the appropriate characterization of this period and place, but heretofore, formal politico-economic analysis...

Much has happened in the theory of distributive justice during the last 30 years, in the period, roughly, since Rawls published his magisterial work1. As occurs in most fields following a great contribution, that work has been subjected to critique, amended and ramified, so that what Rawls...

Why do both left and right political parties typically propose progressive income taxation schemes in political competition? Analysis of this problem has been hindered by the two-dimensionality of the issue space. To give parties a choice over a domain which contains both progressive and...