We use a policy experiment in Indonesia to show how local political boundaries affect ethnic tension. Redrawing district borders along group lines reduces conflict. However, the gains stability are undone or even reversed when new increase polarization. Greater polarization leads more violence around majoritarian elections but has little effect lower-stakes, proportional representation election...

Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates? While the American primary system lets choose, most democracies rely instead on officials appoint nominate candidates. The consequences of these distinct design choices are unclear: while often informed about candidate qualifications, they may value traits, like loyalty willingness pay for nomination, at od...

Abstract The article asks whether the exercising of NATO membership option is justified for Finland and Sweden in light their geopolitical state after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It was Gallup democracy, which launched political moves toward membership. In both countries, majority people turned to favor within 2–3 months. activated first. fast catching up with Finnish process. theory pricing em...

We synthesize the literature on recent rise of populism. First, we discuss definitions and present descriptive evidence increase in support for populists. Second, cover historical evolution populist regimes since late nineteenth century. Third, role secular economic factors related to cross-border trade automation. Fourth, review studies 2008–09 global financial crisis subsequent austerity, con...

In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external costs, foreign state non-state actors have interest in influencing actions other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities takes three principal forms: (i) voluntary agreemen...

In a common-values election where voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior, suppose there is a small amount of uncertainty about the conditional likelihood of the signal’s outcome, given the correct candidate. Once this uncertainty is resolved, the signal is i.i.d. across agents. Information can then fail to aggregate. The candidate less likely to be correct given agents’ signa...

This paper discusses a numerical scheme for computing the Banzhaf swing probability when votes are neither equiprobable nor independent. Examples indicate a substantial bias in the Banzhaf measure of voting power if neither assumption is met. The analytical part derives the exact magnitude of the bias due to the common probability of an affirmative vote deviating from one half and due to common...

We model political competition as a contest between parties that represent constituents, and which announce policies in a two-dimensional policy space; the first dimension concerns the degree of redistribution, and the second, the race or immigration issue. Given the distribution of voter preferences on this space, a political equilibrium is determined. We study the effect that racist or anti-i...