In many instances, both voters and politicians are imperfectly informed about which policies are optimal. We analyze politicians’ policy choice in such situations. A distinctive element of our analysis is that we investigate how the strategic sophistication of voters’ beliefs about politicians’ behavior affects policy choice. This provides a novel approach in political economy that leads to a n...

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable ...

Doctors and politicians have rarely seen eye to eye on what a health service should provide and how it should be managed. The introduction of general management in 1984, while initially successful, created new fault-lines between doctors, managers and politicians that were compounded by a succession of NHS reorganisations. These changes brought politics too close to front-line management, highl...

We study lobbying with information in a setting where politicians are connected through a network describing information flows. There are two opposing lobby groups, who choose which politician to address. The decision depends on the ideological bias of politicians as well as the overall network structure. We show that there is an interplay between the strength of the network, as given by the in...

A metapragmatic expression denotes an event of speaking. An embedded metapragmatic construction embeds one metapragmatic expression within another, as in "Bush said Clinton lied." This article reports that embedded metapragmatic constructions, when used in television news coverage of U.S. political campaigns, most often predicate on the topic of lying. Simple metapragmatic constructions in this...

Scholars universally acknowledge government corruption to be widespread in Africa, yet there is no such agreement on whether office-holding tends to corrupt politicians or corrupt politicians tend to obtain office. Building on the corruption and behavioral economics literatures, we identify behavioral choices that we argue are linked to corruption. We conduct controlled experiments with over 14...

In practice, the most relevant question for direct democracy is not whether it could advantageously replace representative democracy, but whether it can be combined with it to improve political outcomes. We find that, by reallocating some political power to the population, direct democracy significantly affects the incentives, selection, and reelection prospects of politicians. When citizens ca...