In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

The scope of the public sector (i.e. what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities) is a decision made by politicians. While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: By privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to o...

I analyze equilibria in an infinite-horizon model of elections with a twoperiod term limit in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. The focus is on responsiveness of policy choices of first-term politicians. In equilibrium, office holders’ policy choices are ordered by type; politicians exert positive effort in the first term of office; and as politicians become highly office moti...

Getting it Straight: Avoiding Blunders While Criticizing a Peer’s Work Steven G Achinger, Alan S Go and Juan Carlos Ayus* Department of Nephrology, Watson Clinic, LLP – Lakeland, FL, USA, Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, Oakland, CA, USA, Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Medicine, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA, Re...

Politicians often use Twitter to express their beliefs, stances on current political issues, and reactions concerning national and international events. Since politicians are scrutinized for what they choose or neglect to say, they craft their statements carefully. Thus despite the limited length of tweets, their content is highly indicative of a politician’s stances. We present a weakly superv...

Purpose – To contribute to the mapping of the social media discourse involving politicians and their followers during election campaigns, we examined Israeli politicians’ Aristotelian rhetoric on Facebook and its reception during the 2013 election campaign. D ow nl oa de d by U N IV E R SI T Y O F H A IF A A t 0 0: 49 3 0 M ar ch 2 01 5 (P T ) Design/methodology/approach – We examined the Arist...

Redistricting is among the least transparent processes in democratic governance. Often, politicians shape districts behind closed doors with little or no input from the public.1 The resulting lines embody the political goals of politicians and not the public interest, as much as the goals of the two groups do not overlap.2 Politicians use redistricting to realign their constituencies to further...

OBJECTIVE Due to the nature of their work, politicians are at greater risk of stalking, harassment and attack than the general population. The small, but significantly elevated risk of violence to politicians is predominantly due not to organised terrorism or politically motivated extremists but to fixated individuals with untreated serious mental disorders, usually psychosis. Our objective was...