Abstract: What explains the variation in trade policy among democracies in developing countries? Why have some liberalized trade more than others? We analyze the impact of political particularism – defined as the degree of party discipline and the incentives for politicians to cultivate a personal vote – on trade protection. We present theoretical results from a model of particularism and its e...

We reexamine the theory of rational voter participation where voting is by two collusive parties that can enforce social norms through costly peer punishment. This model nests both the ethical voter model and the pivotal voter model. We initially abstract from aggregate shocks to the population of voters in favor of the original Palfrey and Rosenthal [24] model and analyze the subsequent all-pa...

Forming an idea of the number of parties competing at elections or winning seats in legislatures is fundamental to disaggregated approaches to mapping party systems. We set out a method for systematically relating the behaviour of any ‘number of parties’ index to the size of the largest party’s vote and the numbers of parties in competition. This approach shows that the ‘effective number of par...

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, typically make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties. This article challenges the presumption that voting for ethnic parties is primarily an expressive act. It devel...

Electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars. Arguably, “it does not provide enough choice” between candidates (Committee on Political Parties, 1950). This paper provides a formal account of the perceived negative effects of platform convergence. We show that when parties do not know voters’ preferences precisely, all voters ex-ant...

EMBO reports (2009) 10, 689–693. doi:10.1038/embor.2009.136 Introduction At the recent Keystone Symposium on Chromatin Dynamics and Higher Order Organization, an emerging and expanded view of the chromatin landscape was apparent. Many reports connected the organization of individual nucleosomes and histone-modification domains with the spatial co-localization of genes and regulatory elements in...

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Although social institutions permeate the world in which we live, they are all but absent from our analyses of economic growth and development. This paper argues the need to mitigate this omission by demonstrating the importance of social institutions for growth and development while focusing on institutions providing social safety nets. Social institutions and policies render individual behavi...

This paper evaluates the use of commuting zones as a local labor market definition. We revisit Tolbert and Sizer (1996) and demonstrate the sensitivity of definitions to two features of the methodology. We show how these features impact empirical estimates using a well-known application of commuting zones. We conclude with advice to researchers using commuting zones on how to demonstrate the ro...

This is the first draft of the introductory chapter to a new book manuscript entitled Capitalism and Welfare: The Political Economy of Social Protection in Democratic Capitalism. It outlines a political economy approach to the study of the welfare state that emphasizes the interaction between production, skill formation, and social protection. One of the key ideas is that workers who have made ...