How can office-seeking politicians or managers be aligned with social welfare or firm welfare, given that such agents have a suboptimal incentive to cater to majority preferences in situations with low participation costs and to elite preferences in situations with high participation costs? In...

This paper adopts a "revealed preference" approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system. We model an infinite horizon, dynamic economy and its political system from the point of view of an "outside observer." The observer sees a finite sequence of policy data,...

Es wird die Grundidee einer direktdemokratischen Plattformpartei vorgestellt, dass die bei ihr registrierten Wähler über alle (wichtigen) Einzelfragen abstimmen dürfen und ihre Abgeordneten sie nicht nach Mehrheitsbeschluss, sondern proportional vertreten. Dazu werden wichtige Varianten, die...

A country`s judiciary, police, and security forces are essential to protect the State from external aggression. By virtue of the State`s monopoly of coercion, they maintain a stable legal framework and the safety of persons and property. All these activities enhance a society`s productivity, but...

Few social scientists have equaled the impact on political science of Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993. His extraordinary influence emanated from his ideas but was also a result of his vast social network of collaborators, students, and friendly...

We study collective action under adverse incentives: each member of the group has a given budget ('use-it-or-lose-it') that is his private information and that can be used for contributions to make the group win a prize and for internal fights about this very prize. Even in the face of such...