When politicians are provided with insufficient incentives by the democratic election mechanism, we show that social welfare can be improved by threshold contracts. A threshold incentive contract stipulates a performance level which a politican must reach in order to have the right to stand for reelection. Read my lips would turn into read my contracts. Reelection thresholds can be offered by p...

The study considers mass media communication as intertwined with social norms, as assumed by the perspective of social representations. It explores the Italian press communication by focusing on three pairs of men and women politicians with different political orientations and all serving as presidents of the Houses of Parliament in three legislatures. The article concentrates on five newspaper...

During debates and interviews, political leaders often have to defend themselves from adversaries and journalists questioning their performance. To fight against these threats, politicians resort to various defensive strategies, either direct or indirect, to draw attention away from their responsibilities or shed a more positive light upon their work. Counterfactual defences (i.e., comparing pa...

Taiwan is at the top of the list among Asian countries when it comes to the number of female legislators in national parliament. However, whether the increasing level of female politicians has an effect on policy outcomes is unclear. This is because female politicians’ work on women’s issues is often restricted by party discipline with the flourishing development of political parties and the po...

Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician can provide information about a threat. His statement need not be true. How citizens respond differs from most gametheoretic models – ...