In practice one rarely observes pure forms of dictatorship that lack a council, or pure forms of parliament that lack an executive. Generally government policies emerge from organizations that combine an executive branch of government, the king, with a cabinet or parliamentary branch, the...

This paper develops a model of self-interested norm-driven behavior and uses it to analyze public policy formation within a democracy. If voters are concerned with broad normative issues, politicians will take policy positions in part to advance voter interests in "virtue" or "the public...

In the late sixteenth century, the Dutch fought a successful war to secede from a major empire. They wrote a declaration of independence and adopted a federal model of Republican governance almost exactly two hundred years before the Americans. The Dutch republic and its political institutions...