This paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies. It extends the citizen-candidate model of democratic policy-making to a dynamic environment. Equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that, in each period, conditional on future policies...

An important question in political economy concerns the form of transfers to special interests. The Chicago view is that political competition leads politicians to make such transfers efficiently. The Virginia position is that lack of information on the part of voters leads politicians to favor...

Policy persistence refers to the tendency of the political process to maintain policies once they have been introduced. This paper develops a theory of policy persistence based on the idea that policies create incentives for beneficiaries to take actions which increase their willingness to pay...

This paper explores a group rule–utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of John C. Harsanyi (1980) and Timothy J. Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni (2002). It develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in...

This paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending, taxation and debt. Policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically-defined districts. The legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing....

This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods. The point of departure is to model a centralized system as one in which public spending is financed by general taxation, but districts can receive different levels of local...