Research, and Political Power

Facing Political Power in Islamic Ethics

The present article looks at the control of political power through the lens of Islamic ethics, which distinguishes between the two approaches of direct and indirect criticism by examining some ethical texts. In these texts, the direct critique of power, on the one hand, is necessary to correct the state of society; but on the other hand, given its enormous dangers, it is advisable to avoid it....

Power fluctuations and political economy

We study the constrained Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy in which the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources. We show that Pareto efficient allocations take a quasi-Markovian structure and can be represented recursively as a function of the identity of the group in power and updated Pareto weights. For high discount factors, the economy...

Proposal Rights and Political Power

In a canonical model of sequential collective bargaining over a divisible good we show that equilibrium expected payoffs are not restricted by players’ voting rights or their impatience. For all monotonic voting rules and discount factors, and for all divisions of the good among players, there exists a stationary proposal-making rule such that this division represents players’ expected payoffs ...

Political Selection and the Concentration of Political Power

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters’ capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness. As voters can only base their ballots on the candidates’ binding policy proposals, low-quality candida...

Political Culture and Judicial Research