This paper analyzes the behavior of U. S. governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation-building model of political behavior. We argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model. We find evidence that taxes, spending, a...

This paper is an empirical analysis of the likelihood of failure of inflation stabilization programs. Logit models are estimated on a dataset of 39 programs implemented in 10 countries since the late 1950s, in order to determine which economic and political variables affect the probability of failure of stabilizations. Besides the well-known effects of real exchange rate appreciation, decreasin...

Strengthening executive constraints is one of the key means of improving political governance. This paper examines how such reforms are related to threats to the tenure of ruling political incumbents. We formalize this idea theoretically and test it empirically, using data on leaders since 1875. Specifically, we distinguish leaders with different degrees of resilience as leaders who die from na...

This study investigates whether housing movements can produce significant outcomes. In particular, I examine the case of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), the main organization in the Spanish housing movement between 2009 and 2017. First, I discuss how their demands were framed according to specific contexts of legitimation. Second, I distinguish the nature and scope of the o...

This paper describes a Japanese political corpus created for interdisciplinary political research. The corpus contains the local assembly minutes of 47 prefectures from April 2011 to March 2015. This four-year period coincides with the term of office for assembly members in most autonomies. We analyze statistical data, such as the number of speakers, characters, and words, to clarify the charac...

down in the trenches and barter for access to taxpayer dollars. Figuring out which agency programs deserve these scarce resources is in many ways the government's chief responsibility. It's a tough job made even more so by all the political maneuvering that goes on in the nation's capital. To help make fair decisions, the government needs an unbiased watchdog, free of political affiliations, to...

The increased usage of information and communication technology and especially the Internet as a vehicle for democratic participation may be regarded in very different ways. First of all, the development of ‘eDemocracy’ may be seen as a matter of increased instrumental opportunity: these applications are purposively developed because the Internet provides new and better ways of reaching the cit...

We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model where voters have incomplete information. We identify a novel “party competition e¤ect.”Compared with “at large” selection of candidates, party selection makes o¢ ce-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands. Politicians follow party discipline, even in absence of a party-controlled reward mechanism. Vot...

This article considers the relationship between patenting and plant variety rights protection, through a detailed analysis of the recent determination by the Extended Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office that methods for breeding broccoli and tomatoes were not patentable. It concludes that the right to patent agricultural innovations is increasingly located within a political context.

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...