Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

We provide an explanation why centralisation of political decision makingresults in overspending in some policy domains, whereas too low spending persists in others.We study a model in which delegates from jurisdictions bargain over local public goods provision.If all of the costs of public...

We examine the two-candidate equilibria of the citizen-candidate model when the implemented policy arises from a compromise between the government and an unelected external power. We show that the equilibria of this model differ significantly from the original: the distance between the...

The United States Code (Code) is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in various aspects of the Code. However, few have mathematically...

This study aims to investigate the demographic, social, and economic drivers of rising abstention and populist electoral success in Italy in 2018. The Italian case is unique in the euro area because, in the political elections of 4 March 2018, two parties usually identified as left-wing and...

Some scholars have argued that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution did not have a common set of views on economics, or that the Constitution, except perhaps in isolated clauses, does not reflect any specific economic views. The principal Framers did, in fact, share a basic set of economic...

The ability of voters to use the available electoral instruments is crucial for the functioning of democracies. The paper shows that voters consider the institutional environment when making electoral decisions. Voters recognize that executives who face binding term limits (i.e., lame ducks)...

This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in US congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per US House representative in less populous markets (where the number of...