This paper argues that the study of policy incidence in industrial organization needs to take the endogeneity of government into account. The point is made by investigating whether political considerations are important in terms of understanding the causes and effects of deregulation using data provided by the OECD. In particular, we address two interrelated questions: (i) do political and inst...

The influence of Eric Griffiths looms large in this book. In his 1989 study The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, Griffiths examines the negotiation between spoken and written language that is central to the reading of Victorian poetry. In The Art of Eloquence, Matthew Bevis uses a similarly comparative approach to the languages of speech and writing as the basis for his analysis of the relati...

How should political scientists study the Internet’s influence on politics? Political science can surely help improve current public arguments about the Internet. Major public debates on the relationship between the Internet and politics now center around a few very general questions. Does the Internet exacerbate political polarization? Does the Internet empower ordinary citizens vis-a-vis poli...

This article offers a critical synthesis of the positive political economy literature on political institutions from the perspective of sustainability. We consider a socio-economic system sustainable if it allows humans to live lives they deem meaningful and is capable of renewing itself over extended periods of time. Institutions that maintain order, reduce conflict, and allow collective decis...

It is sometimes argued that political competition yields benefits to the citizens just as competition in economic markets yields benefits to consumers. We consider the economic costs and benefits of political competition and find that the story is somewhat more complicated. We first review the limited existing literature on this topic, and in the process, identify a number of distinct interpret...

In many countries, a radical political divide brings several socially relevant decisions to a standstill. Could cognitive, affective and social (CAS) neuroscience help better understand these questions? The present article reviews the moral-psychological and neuroevolutionary basis of the political partisanship divide. A non-systematic literature review and a conceptual analysis were conducted....

Studies of political economy in recent years have placed emphasis on the operating characteristics of political and economic institutions. The premise of this work is that constitutional features of the political economy provide a structure of institutional incentives inducing equilibrium behavior and practices by optimizing agents. At both the theoretical and empirical levels there are compari...

the formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. this is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. this may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. but it’s important t...

Interest in politics is important for a host of political behaviors and beliefs. Yet little is known about where political interest comes from. Most studies exploring the source of political interest focus on parental influences, economic status, and opportunity. Here, we investigate an alternative source: genetic transmission. Using two twin samples, one drawn from Denmark and the other from U...

The assumption in the personality and politics literature is that a person's personality motivates them to develop certain political attitudes later in life. This assumption is founded on the simple correlation between the two constructs and the observation that personality traits are genetically influenced and develop in infancy, whereas political preferences develop later in life. Work in psy...