We study the dynamic selection of governments. A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in o ce determines collective utilities (e.g., by determining the amount and quality of public goods), and each individual derives additional utility from being part of the government (e.g., corruption or rents from holding o ce). We characte...

This paper argues that e-Government holds much potential for transforming government activity, and, in respect to representative government specifically, it focuses upon the development of e-Participation and e-Democracy to enhance the responsiveness of the relationship between government and the governed. Recent upheavals across the Middle East the 'Arab Spring' have highlighted the importance...

We study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions, with a special focus on institutional "flexibility" . A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities (e.g., by determining the amount and quality of public goods), and each individual derives additional utility f...

Introduction Throughout the past three decades governments, international development agencies and various non-governmental organisations have increasingly reflected an interest in adopting, either in policy or rhetoric, the idea of community participation. One of the greatest polemics encountered both in discourse and practise involves the interpretation and subsequent meaning that different i...

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...

Demand for renewable energy is booming. Scholars often attribute this success to feed-in tariffs (FITs), which mandate that energy utilities pay a premium to renewable electricity producers and guarantee grid access for them. Why have so many countries, including least developed ones, adopted these policies? We hypothesize that democratic governments have political incentives to adopt the FIT b...

he improvements in development in Latin America and the Caribbean observed from the 1950s through the early 1970s have started to decline. Principal factors include growing external debt, the world trade imbalance due to the increase in the price of oil and manufactured products and the decrease of primary products. This deterioration of socioeconomic conditions has increasingly and primarily a...

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare-improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding i...

This paper surveys the state of fiscal federalism in India, in the broader context of decentralization. We begin with an overview of the basic features and recent developments in intergovernmental fiscal relations, including the role of political institutions, the specifics of legislative and budgetary autonomy, assignments of expenditure responsibility and revenue authority, revenue collection...