The Anglo-American double-member districts employing plurality-at-large are frequently criticized for giving a large majority premium to a winning party, since the large premium may decrease proportionality of the elected assembly relative to single-member districts. We demonstrate that the...

This paper examines the importance of electoral rules for legislators' behavior. It uses a quasi-natural experiment that assigns whether legislators are elected under the "first-pass-the-post" (FPTP), or the proportional representation (PR) electoral rule. The experiment is generated by the...

Democratic direct voting on issues (in the form of referenda) suffers from the tyranny of the majority as well as potentially supporting extremist and populist positions. We state 4 fair voting principles for issue based voting, and show that current direct voting systems are not consistent with...

Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Median voter theorem has been used in many economic environments including law enforcement. Assumptions of the median voter theorem, however, are generally violated in lawenforcement models. Moreover, it is impossible to have agents with "opposite equilibrium preferences" over enforcement levels...

I establish conditions for existence of pure strategy equilibria in K-candidate Downsian electoral competition (K ≥ 2) with valence when the voting rule is monotonic, generalizing results by Ansolabehere and Snyder (2000) and Martin et al. (2021). The conditions are sufficient when K ≥ 2 and...

Does party polarization affect the electoral prospects of a new centrist candidate? The paper investigates this question in the context of a laboratory experiment where a centrist candidate is added to the race between a left candidate and a right candidate. The experimental design varies the...

This paper surveys some recent literature on fiscal policy and comparative politics. Economic policy is viewed as the outcome of a game with multiple-principals and multiple-agents. Opportunistic politicians bargain over policy. Rational voters hold them accountable through retrospective voting....