This paper adapts the entrepreneurial theory developed by Richard Cantillon, Frank Knight, and Ludwig von Mises to the theory of “political entrepreneurship.” Political entrepreneurship is an outgrowth of the theory of the market entrepreneur, and derives from extending entrepreneurial theory from the market into the political sphere of action. By applying the theory of the entrepreneur to poli...

Evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cognitive perspectives in psychology have converged on the idea that some attitudes are moralized—a distinctive characteristic. Moralized attitudes reorient behavior from maximizing gains to adhering to rules. Here, I examine a political consequence of this tendency. In four studies drawing data from a variety of sources, I measure attitude moralization and ex...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

Trust matters profoundly for many dimensions of political life. In this article we focus on political trust: how the trust or mistrust citizens have toward the political process, politicians and government affects politics. Prior research has shown that political trust influences such crucial dimensions of politics as the basic legitimacy of government, political participation, voting behavior,...

Social Complexity, Learning and International Political Economy, With Illustrations from the Political Economy of Trade Policy Complexity is an essential element of the political economic environment. This fact implies that ignorance and learning will affect the dynamics of that environment. This paper surveys recent work from decision theory, game theory, and economics that seeks to formalize ...

Research on the relationship between contextual factors and individual-level participation has offered a new frontier in the study of political activity. These studies push beyond the core characteristics highlighted in the Civic Voluntarism Model to understand how individuals respond to political, economic, and social environments. This paper builds on the contributions of both of these litera...

Previously we and others have shown evidence for genetic influences on political attitudes and sociodemographic indicators (Martin 1987; Posner et al. 1996; Truett et al. 1992; Eaves et al. 1999). However, the nature of the relationship between political attitudes, social indictors and voting behavior has not been investigated. While heritability estimates for social and political attitudes hav...

Brain structure exhibits systematic relationships with a variety of an individual’s cognitive abilities and such relationships can be captured by voxel-based morphometry (VBM) that computes regional gray matter volume based on anatomical MRIs. This method has been successfully used to reveal brain regions that are associated with individual differences in a broad range of contexts such as perce...