We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. We show that both lobbying instruments are interdependent. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the politician’s beliefs about the desirability of the lobby’s objective. The constraints governing informat...

This paper uses a game-theoretic framework to explain how collectivist values hamper societies’ efforts to elicit cooperation in inter-group games of prisoners’ dilemma (PD) and draws on the results of the analysis to interpret the meanings of three historical institutional reform episodes. Group-oriented values, widespread throughout non-western civilizations, can contribute to social cohesion...

We extend the New Keynesian Monetary Policy literature relaxing the assumption that the decisions are taken by a single policymaker, considering instead that monetary policy decisions are taken collectively in a committee. We introduce a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), whose members have different preferences between output and inflation variability and have to vote on the level of the interes...

The political influence of specific interest groups can be revealed using a "Political Preference Function" approach. Previous empirical studies have clearly shown that the strong promotion of agriculture in industrialized countries is due to the fact that farmers are able to exert greater political pressure than consumers and taxpayers. Extending the scope of investigation, this paper analyzes...

A growing body of studies analyzes interest groups’ media visibility. Yet little is known about how the drivers access may vary across different group systems. This article focuses on two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain visibility: management efforts and newsworthiness elite actors. We hypothesize that effort explains more strongly in competitive, pluralist systems insider...

Health promotion is inherently political. Not only is it largely funded by government, but the very nature of the enterprise requires shifts in power. Political theory has much to contribute to an understanding of the politics of health promotion. In this paper three key political theories are explained and their insights for health promotion explored. They are then applied to the development o...

Human behavior in banking and financial systems is in part made up of a complex mix of political, social and cultural factors. These factors are reflected in expert opinion based political risk scores. Market inefficiency is largely a result of anomalies in human behavior causing information asymmetries. A basic systemic market model is re-specified into a model for international banking system...

Medicare spends more than $200 billion a year; the politics surrounding the Medicare program cannot be fully understood without an adequate appreciation of that fact. An understanding of the political economy of Medicare is perhaps best achieved by thinking along three dimensions: (1) Medicare as redistributive politics; (2) Medicare as special-interest politics; and (3) Medicare as distributiv...