We present an electoral agency model that, in a stylized way, captures the public finance structure of Norwegian municipal governments. It drives the following main implication: increasing partisan bias in favor of the incumbent reduces efficiency in public production, and more so the higher the...

Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters...

The costly lobbying model of Potters and van Winden is confronted with data on lobbying interactions between local assemblies and the national assembly in Norway. A total of 239 interactions are studied. Survey responses by a large number of voters and politicians, as well as registry data on...