Non–traditional parties have had newfound success across European democracies contributing to increasing electoral volatility. Drawing from the literature on social movements, voting for an unconventional party can be a form of contentious politics. Support for non– mainstream parties is the institutional manifestation of the factors that contribute to social movements. Perceptions of political...

Public Choice relies heavily on equilibrium analysis in its models of government failure. Austrians are suspicious of equilibrium analysis owing to its reliance on some variant of the perfect-knowledge assumption. To what extent then can Austrians consistently embrace public-choice descriptions of government failure? This paper argues that to maintain methodological consistency Public Choice sh...

In this paper, we discuss the concept of"choice" in filial care work. A dichotomy between choice and obligation is constructed in theoretical and empirical literature on filial care work. However, this dichotomy does not adequately reflect family caregiving experiences; for instance, choice and obligation are not mutually exclusive motivations. Rather, choice and obligation are "relational" and...

In some new political economic models, delays of stabilizations result from coordination problems caused by collective choice-making mechanisms. Although several previous studies have tested the effects of political instability and fragmentation on seigniorage, deficits, or inflation, no direct tests of the influence of these factors on the delays of stabilizations have previously been undertak...

Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to wh...

Capital flight often amounts to a substantial proportion of GDP in developing countries. This paper presents a portfolio choice model that relates capital flight to return differentials, risk aversion, and three types of risk: economic risk, political instability, and policy variability. Estimating the equilibrium capital flight equation for a panel of 45 developing countries over 16 years, all...

Timothy Besley’s Principled Agents? carefully surveys the modern social science literature on political agency problems and tries to chart a sensible middle course between the naive assumption that politicians maximize the public welfare and the pessimism of Virginia-style public choice. However, the literature that Besley showcases is seriously flawed. By building on the empirically discredite...

Voters’ political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the ...

This paper analyzes the political economy of transport-system choice, with the goal of gaining an understanding of the forces involved in this important urban public policy decision. Transport systems pose a continuous trade-off between time and money cost, so that a city can choose a fast system with a high money cost per mile or a slower, cheaper system. The paper compares the socially optima...