We study political dynasties in the United States Congress since its inception in 1789. We document historic and geographic patterns in the evolution and pro…le of political dynasties, and analyze the connection between political dynasties and political competition. We also study the self-perpetuation of political elites. We …nd that legislators who enjoy longer tenures are signi…cantly more li...

There has been a growing recognition among scholars that politics matters in the distribution of resources in society. However, attempts to use a political economy ‘lens’ with which to explore causes of poverty and strategies for poverty alleviation have largely ignored elites. By failing to embrace the crucial role elites play in the implementation of pro-poor policy, existing research has not...

This paper addresses the issue of the endogenous choice and persistence of legislative malapportionment and analyzes its economic consequences. Legislative malapportionment denotes a wide discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population held by electoral districts. We first document that countries with higher lower chamber malapportionment have lower GDP per capita...

More than providing simply nutritive value, food in human societies can be endowed with great social weight. Aspects of any given food system inform, and are informed by, a variety of social, economic, religious, historical, ecological, cultural, and political processes. Moreover, food systems are often intentionally designed and executed to communicate key aspects of a consumer’s identity incl...

perspective of either political economy or political culture, which leaves the study of East Asian political systems highly underdeveloped. This paper seeks a political explanation of the emergence, characteristics, changes and future prospects of East Asian political regimes. They reveal the common nature of unipolar power in each of three forms-the one-party regime, one-man rule, and the olig...

Indonesia seems perpetually condemned to “live in interesting times,” as the famous Chinese curse goes. The past decade has seen the country attract global notoriety as a land of recurrent economic shocks, ethnic confl icts, terrorist bombings, separatist rebellions, and natural catastrophes. Political authorities have appeared too corrupt and inept to respond effectively. Thus, when Susilo Bam...

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part paper surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parti...

BACKGROUND. Sex-specific differences in attitudes and behaviors, arising from a division of human nature into male and female types, have been core findings of evolutionary psychology and are now among its key investigational presumptions. These differences have largely been ignored by mainstream political and social theories. METHOD. I explored one potential path toward incorporation, using ''...