Do voters see democracy entirely as a game of self-interest in which one person’s gain is another’s loss, or do they also view it as a search for the common good, as some democracy theorists have long conjectured? Existing empirical research that assumes entirely private interests cannot...

We develop and study a two-period model of political competition with office- and policy-motivated candidates, in which (i) changes of policies impose costs on all individuals and (ii) such costs increase with the magnitude of the policy change. We show that there is an optimal positive level of...

Exploiting a district level data set on the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, this paper investigates why polarization between ethnic groups results in violent conflict in some cases, but not in others. After the announcement of highly controversial election results in December 2007,...

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning...

We merge several historical data sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 is correlated with societal changes, as measured by municipal spending and city-level extremist voting, in the subsequent decade. First, influenza deaths are associated with lower per capita...

It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a...

This paper investigates how upward mobility affects legislator voting behavior towards education policies. We develop an electoral competition model where voters are altruistic parents and politicians are office seeking. In this setting the future economic status of the children is affected both...

In U.S. elections, voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and Congress. Voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of Congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative. We develop a model of split-ticket voting in which government...

This paper analyzes the effects of immigration by skill on the outcome of a majority vote among natives on both the size and the composition of public spending. Public spending can be of two types, spending on rival goods (transfers) and on nonrival goods (public goods). I find that the effect...

This paper empirically examines the effects of community racial context on voters' preferences for public education in California. In the 2000 General Elections, voters in California were faced with a ballot proposition, Proposition 39, also known as the Smaller Classes, Safer Schools and...