Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public’s monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put pressure on policy-makers, it might also send a vague message in that diverging objectives are likely to e...

Little attention has been paid in most economic studies on political business cycles to separate the effects of fiscal and monetary policy. We attempt to assess the effect of monetary policy in a panel model for 14 OECD countries. To answer the question of whether central banks actively create political business cycles we focus on the short-term interest rate as a proxy for the use of monetary ...

For IS academics to provide political consulting and to offer expertise in political decision making would seem to open enormous opportunities for 'doing good' and for reinforcing the relevance of the IS field. However, the contributions of IS academics to political decision making are minor compared to our colleagues in other fields. This panel will offer the personal views of panel members on...

This paper discusses political leadership and national security in the Nigerian fourth republic. The paper accentuates that the democratic process itself constitute a functional mechanism for interest articulation and aggregation thereby checking agent threat to national security that may arise from lack of input or participation in the political process. The paper through the use of leadership...

Frontier Issues of the Political Economy of Migration Migration has a strong economic impact on the sending and host countries. Since individuals and groups do not benefit equally from migration, interest groups emerge to protect and take care of their narrow self-interests and compete for rents generated by migration. Narrow selfinterests may be present not only for interest groups but also fo...

Conventional wisdom in political economy warns that once an economic policy is introduced, it is likely to persist. Even when its original rationale is no longer applicable or has been proven invalid, a policy will prove hard to remove. Empirical support for this position abounds. In both developed and developing countries, many policies appear remarkably resilient. In the United States, farm p...

Medicaid was established in 1965 as a joint state and federal program to provide medical insurance to Americans who are poor and have disabilities, and it has grown from 1 percent to 3 percent of GDP. The source of Medicaid’s growth over the past 50 years must inform efforts to reform the program and slow spending. The literature on the political economy of Medicaid provides strong evidence of ...

Political Institutions and Regimes since 1600: A New Historical Data Set Do national political institutions matter for social developments and changes? If so, how, where, and when do the critical conditions occur, and how long is the causal time lag? What are the patterns of interaction between political regime types and institutional changes from one country to another? These are some of the q...

This paper develops a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies to analyze the conditions that lead to a powerful political position of business. Proceeding from the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, our model predicts the conditions under which elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges ...