Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget --- the political budget cycle (PBC) --- has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the...

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. A natural question is what voting system such a committee should use. Concepts based on voting power provide guidelines for this choice. The two most...

Why do the poor vote against redistribution? We experimentally examine one explanation, namely that individuals gain direct expressive utility from voting in accordance with their ideology and understand they are unlikely to be pivotal; hence, their expressive utility, even if arbitrarily small,...