Clark and Lauderdale develop a novel approach for orienting Supreme Court opinions in unidimensional policy space. They argue that the most important portion of a Court’s opinion is not its judgment in favor of one party or another, but its reasoning, for it is this reasoning that becomes binding law and shapes the path of American legal development. The authors thus measure the policy orientat...

In U.S. elections, voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and Congress. Voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of Congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative. We develop a model of split-ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes but the benefits from this spending are concentrated. While the mo...

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a...

This paper studies the stability of a finite local public goods economy in horizontal differentiation, where a jurisdiction’s choice of the public good is given by an exogenous decision scheme. In this paper, we characterize the class of decision schemes that ensure the existence of an equilibrium with free mobility (that we call Tiebout equilibrium) for monotone distribution of players. This c...

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of...

I estimate the influence of political parties on state Tax Burdens over a 40-year period (1960– 2000). Holding constant a large number of state and voter characteristic variables, I find that: (i) Tax Burdens are higher when Democrats control the state legislature compared to when Republicans are in control. (ii) The political party of the governor has little effect after controlling for partis...

We examine a political agency problem in repeated elections where an incumbent runs against a challenger from the opposing party, whose policy preferences are unknown by voters. We first ask: do voters benefit from attracting a pool of challengers with more moderate ideologies? When voters and politicians are patient, moderating the ideology distribution of centrist and moderate politicians (th...

Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we investigate two specific genes that may contribute to variation in voting behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to have vote...

Conflicts of interest over the generosity and structure of redistribution and social insurance (call these jointly: social policy) include that between the relatively poor and wealthy—which theoretically produces the famous median-voter result that democratic demand for broad redistribution increases in the income skew—and that between the safely employed and the unemployed and precariously emp...

Using insights from social choice theory, particularly Black’s concept of single-peaked preferences and Downs’s median-voter model, the authors previously investigated the theoretical impact of the alternative vote system (AV) on the success of moderate parties in an ethnically bipolar society. Focusing on the simplest case, that with one moderate and one extremist ethnic party associated with ...