Journal articleJournal of Politics · October 1, 2025
A prominent contemporary phenomenon is “backsliding” of democratic countries into (semi-)authoritarian practices. Such episodes often unfold gradually over time in contexts where the ultimate intentions of governments are not clear. We present a model that ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · March 1, 2025
Scholars have generally taken a negative view of the inclusion of secession rights in federal constitutions. Adopting a constitutional political economy perspective, we challenge this consensus by highlighting the critical role that the right to secession ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · October 1, 2024
Following transitions from authoritarianism, newly democratic governments confront the challenge of dealing with individuals who served the former regime. A prominent argument in the transitional justice literature holds that it is best not to exclude such ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · June 1, 2023
The constitutional political economy (CPE) approach as developed by James Buchanan places emphasis on supermajority rules—in particular, a unanimity requirement for constitutional change. Critics argue that this approach “privileges the status quo” in two ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · June 1, 2022
Anthropologists, historians, and political economists suggest that private violence—feuding—provides order and enforces agreements in the absence of a state. We ground these accounts in a series of formal models that shows the relationship between feuding, ...
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Journal articleJournal of Law and Courts · March 1, 2021
High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Political Science · April 1, 2020
Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in governm ...
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Journal articleAmerican Political Science Review · January 1, 2020
Party elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the ba ...
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Journal articleBritish Journal of Political Science · April 1, 2019
Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees - committee chairs - is poorl ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · December 1, 2018
Democracy and constitutionalism are both central to the Western political tradition. And yet, constitutional restrictions are often perceived to be in tension with democratic commitments. I argue that the constitutional political economy approach developed ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · April 1, 2016
We consider Gordon Tullock’s impact in political science, focusing on his influence as a scholar and as an academic entrepreneur. It is common to think of Tullock as a “natural economist,” but his formal training at Chicago encompassed considerable coursew ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Political Science · October 1, 2014
In parliamentary democracies, governments are typically composed of multiple political parties working together in a coalition. Such governments must confront a fundamental challenge in policymaking-the preferences of coalition parties often diverge signif ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · July 21, 2014
In a recent article in the Journal of Politics, Golder, Golder, and Siegel (2012) argue that models of government formation should be rebuilt "from the ground up." They propose to do so with a "zero-intelligence" model of government formation. They claim t ...
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Journal articleJournal of Theoretical Politics · July 1, 2014
A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judi ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · October 1, 2013
A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a common pool resource (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal p ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Political Science · April 1, 2012
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to refl ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · October 1, 2011
The constitutional political economy research program established by Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan provides a rigorous analytical framework for the analysis of constitutional choice. I focus on two issues that have received only limited attention in the ...
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Journal articleAmerican Politics Research · October 6, 2010
Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we emp ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · October 1, 2009
Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court's ideological output. We develop a theory of the int ...
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Journal articleJournal of Law Economics and Organization · June 1, 2007
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), stands as one of the Supreme Court's most reviled decisions. We challenge the critical consensus against Lochner and provide a defense, albeit a contingent defense, of "unprincipled" judicial activism. To do so, we ...
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Journal articleBritish Journal of Political Science · January 1, 2000
Comparative studies of election rules and legislative representation have focused intensively on vote-seat disproportionality as an indication of poor representation. Beginning with citizens' preferences, rather than votes, has important advantages and is ...
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Journal articleJournal of Theoretical Politics · January 1, 1998
The constitutions of many parliamentary democracies provide for abstract judicial review, a proceeding that allows a specified parliamentary minority to initiate judicial review against legislation in the absence of a concrete case. The paper analyzes the ...
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