In many instances, both voters and politicians are imperfectly informed about which policies are optimal. We analyze politicians’ policy choice in such situations. A distinctive element of our analysis is that we investigate how the strategic sophistication of voters’ beliefs about politicians’ behavior affects policy choice. This provides a novel approach in political economy that leads to a n...

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable ...

Doctors and politicians have rarely seen eye to eye on what a health service should provide and how it should be managed. The introduction of general management in 1984, while initially successful, created new fault-lines between doctors, managers and politicians that were compounded by a succession of NHS reorganisations. These changes brought politics too close to front-line management, highl...

We study lobbying with information in a setting where politicians are connected through a network describing information flows. There are two opposing lobby groups, who choose which politician to address. The decision depends on the ideological bias of politicians as well as the overall network structure. We show that there is an interplay between the strength of the network, as given by the in...

Rigorous Deductive Argumentation for Socially Relevant Issues Dustin Wehr Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2015 The most important problems for society are describable only in vague terms, dependent on subjective positions, and missing highly relevant data. This thesis is intended to revive and further develop the view that giving non-trivial, r...

Although freedom of speech is a Constitutionally protected and widely endorsed value, political tolerance research finds that people are less willing to protect speech they dislike than speech they like (Gibson, 2006). Research also suggests liberal-conservative differences in political tolerance (Davis & Silver, 2004). We measured U.S. citizens’ political tolerance for speech acts, while manip...

Building upon psychological conflict theory, on the one hand, and item-response models, on the other, the present paper develops an integrated methodology that aims at differentiating the various ways of criticizing Israel. An application of this methodology to the Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel (ASCI) survey found two ways of criticizing Israel resulting from two different and antipodal...