Academic freedom empowers scholars to influence public discourse and debate, cultivate critical reasoning, discuss ideas that challenge traditional values, and impose a soft check and balance on governments. For those reasons, governments have specific preferences regarding the extent of academic freedom, especially when led by populists, whose ideology, values, and strategic features are frequently at odds with the implications of this freedom. Using a quasi-experimental design, we confirm that academic freedom declines significantly under populist governments, a pattern largely independent of their host ideology. Those negative consequences increase after multiple populist terms, and extend more broadly to the substance of speech and the flow of information. Altogether, these results highlight the incompatibility of populism with democratic guarantees.
Since the pioneering work of Lizzeri and Persico (2001), it has been well known that, in winner-take-all systems, office-motivated politicians may favor targeted redistribution over the provision of public goods. Motivated by the possibility that similar incentives may arise even in small organizations, we examine a policy proposal to revise a journal-ranking system in a medium-sized Economics Department. At the same time, a majority of faculty members signed a petition on an unrelated issue publicly supporting the department’s governance. Using individual publication records, we analyze whether the distributional consequences of the proposed reform were systematically related to such support. We find that faculty members who signed the petition were significantly more likely to benefit from the initial proposal, while this association became considerably weaker after an open departmental discussion and a subsequent revision of the proposal. The observed pattern is consistent with theories emphasizing distributive incentives and the disciplining role of transparency in collective decision-making though alternative readings of the revision cannot be excluded.
Do campaign contributions polarize legislators or induce moderation? Theory allows for both possibilities, with effects likely varying by donor type. Using data on all contributions received by members of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2022, this paper examines how Political Action Committee (PAC) and individual donations affect subsequent roll-call voting behavior. The analysis focuses on within-legislator changes in ideological positioning across congressional terms. The results consistently show that increased contributions are associated with greater moderation on the economic dimension of roll-call voting. Republican legislators shift toward the political center following increases in both PAC and individual donations in the previous congress. Democratic legislators are more ideologically stable, exhibiting relatively modest centrist movement in response to higher levels of individual contributions. Dynamic specifications suggest that these associations accumulate over successive electoral cycles, most robustly for Republican PAC receipts. Additional analysis reveals a dimensional asymmetry: the centripetal pattern is specific to economic voting, while on the social dimension higher fundraising is if anything associated with more extreme positioning among Republicans. Overall, the findings suggest that campaign contributions in the contemporary U.S. House are associated with economic moderation rather than polarization.
Does a country’s experience with centralized statehood raise income, or does that experience proxy for the non-state institutions that precede statehood? We argue that the answer is non-state institutions, such as customary law, property arrangements, and decentralized enforcement. This private governance predates the state and promotes coordination and exchange. It also supplies the foundation on which durable states form. Thus, private governance is positively correlated with state experience and with income. As a result, omitting it from state antiquity estimations biases the estimated return upward. To test this claim, we build a private governance index from the coding of early institutions and regress log GDP per capita on both private governance and state antiquity. Adding private governance reduces the ancestry-adjusted state antiquity coefficient by up to 62
This paper analyzes the welfare implications of reverse contingency fees (compared to hourly fees) in terms of both litigation effort and adjudicative accuracy in a framework in which litigation is modeled as a rent-seeking contest. Under reverse contingency fees, the defendant’s lawyer gets a share of the amount her client saved, which is the difference between the plaintiff’s claim and the judgment. We show that the conditions under which reverse contingency fees outperform hourly fees are relatively restrictive, especially since they may also tighten liquidity constraints for the defendant. This may explain why reverse contingency fees are rarely used, and highlights why they are not the mirror image of plaintiff-side contingent fees.
Sociological rational choice theory (SRT) is a theoretical approach that values scientifically driven, theoretically grounded research, combining the methodological individualism and instrumental microfoundations used in economics with models of institutions, networks, and norms from sociology. Inspired by the public choice movement, SRT sought to apply rational choice theory to non-market behavior and the collective results of that behavior. At the time of its inception, SRT distanced itself from social exchange theory and the main lines of social network analysis. Whereas exchange theory readily incorporated network concepts and rooted itself in social psychology, advocates for rational choice pursued a strategy based on strong assumptions about individual rationality combined with a more flexible conception of bounded rationality. Despite being promoted by leading sociologists, SRT never attained a position at the center of the discipline, and debate on rational choice gradually died out. Mounting criticism of the rational action model in philosophy, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics also took a toll on the appeal of rational choice and the confidence of its practitioners. Nevertheless, we conclude on an encouraging note. While American sociology has shown declining interest and involvement in SRT, new directions drawing on social network analysis, experimental methods, and efforts to adapt the dual-process framework of behavior show great promise. To some extent, rational choice sociology informs a vital part of the discipline in the United States and particularly in Europe.
Evaluation systems often seek to reduce bias, prevent manipulation, preserve relevant information, maintain comparability, and treat candidates equally, but these fairness goals can conflict. This paper develops a framework for understanding such trade-offs in expert evaluation---including peer review, grant panels, academic hiring, and artistic competitions---where quality is multidimensional and legitimate disagreement among evaluators is possible. We treat the choice among evaluation procedures as a problem of constitutional design: rules must be selected before the specific candidates, evaluators, and circumstances that will test them are known. Classical music competitions are our primary analytical setting because their rules, scores, and controversies make these trade-offs unusually visible, but the framework applies to other settings in which expert judgments are aggregated under incomplete information. The framework highlights two core tensions: information control and outlier rules. First, when information is both quality-relevant and identity-revealing, procedures that suppress bias-relevant cues may also remove information with genuine evaluative content. Second, because sincere minority judgment and strategic manipulation can generate similar observed score patterns, score-based exclusion rules may reduce manipulation while limiting legitimate dissent. Two further trade-offs concerning transparency and standardization are developed as illustrations. The analysis shows that no procedure can eliminate all vulnerabilities at once. Beyond this design implication, the framework also helps explain why evaluation rules differ across stages and settings, and why well-intentioned reforms may create new vulnerabilities.
This study examines how the interregional rotation of provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission (PLAC) secretaries affects interregional market integration in China. Using province-pair panel data from 2003 to 2015, we find that a PLAC secretary’s prior work experience in another province significantly enhances market integration between the current and previous jurisdictions. The effect strengthens with longer prior tenure, consistent with regional favoritism in judicial enforcement. This mechanism is corroborated by analysis of civil court verdicts, which show that firms from connected provinces are more likely to receive favorable rulings. No similar effects are observed for other provincial officials at the same level. Moreover, the regional-favoritism effect is significantly weaker when the PLAC secretary has formal legal education or prior central-government experience, and it diminishes markedly after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, when a sweeping anti-corruption campaign was launched.
This paper unifies public choice and public finance accounts of the flypaper effect under fiscal capacity as a common moderator, thereby organizing previously separate explanations into a single comparative-static framework. Using panel data on Chilean municipalities (2001–2021), we find that the flypaper response declines monotonically with fiscal capacity, from a transfer elasticity of 0.92 in the lowest-capacity quintile to statistical indistinguishability from zero in the highest; own-revenue elasticities show the opposite pattern. The gradient is robust to controls for municipality size and across alternative specifications. We read it as a regime statistic of a permanent institutional configuration with centrally fixed tax rates and formula-based intergovernmental grants, not as a treatment effect. The framework integrates the marginal cost of public funds from public finance with electoral accountability and soft budget constraints from public choice, each yielding the same prediction of monotonic decline. Uniform allocation rules amplify rather than neutralize the asymmetries they were designed to address, with implications for the design of intergovernmental transfer systems in developing countries.
We examine the effect of media freedom on public expenditure efficiency using a panel of 134 advanced and developing countries from 1994 to 2016. Our findings provide robust evidence that greater media freedom significantly enhances government spending efficiency. This effect is more pronounced in countries with higher levels of democracy, per capita income, human capital, internet access, and strong fiscal rules. Furthermore, we show that media freedom primarily influences efficiency through reduced corruption, increased transparency and accountability in the public sector, and stronger electoral competition. These results underscore the vital role of media freedom in fostering good governance and efficient public resource allocation, particularly in a context where press freedom is declining and fiscal constraints are tightening.
This paper examines the relationship between voter turnout and elec0737toral polarization. While much of the existing literature focuses on how polarization affects turnout, we analyze the next step in the causal chain: how turnout shapes electoral outcomes. We propose a simple theoretical model in which turnout depends on voters’ aversion to the expected governing coalition, which increases with the distance between the voter’s ideal point and the anticipated policy platform. This generates heterogeneous participation across the ideological spectrum, leading to a compositional reweighting of the electorate. When the governing coalition is expected to be centrist, centrist voters are underrepresented while voters at the ideological extremes are overrepresented, resulting in higher levels of observed electoral polarization. We test the theoretical predictions empirically, using municipality-level data from Dutch general elections. The results show that turnout has systematically heterogeneous effects across parties depending on their ideological position, with more extreme parties benefiting disproportionately from lower turnout. Consistent with the theory, lower turnout is associated with higher levels of electoral polarization. These findings highlight a compositional mechanism through which turnout influences electoral outcomes, resulting in a distorted picture in which electoral polarization exceeds what would be implied by the underlying distribution of ideological preferences in the population.
Majoritarian democracy is widely regarded as the canonical procedure for converting heterogeneous individual preferences into collective decisions, yet its welfare properties are far more fragile than legal and political theorists suggest. This paper contributes to the literature on the limits of majoritarianism by applying a spatial voting model to demonstrate that the conditions under which majoritarian democracies produce efficient outcomes are narrowly constrained by the structural features of majority rule itself. We formalize a multidimensional policy environment in which voters bargain over both the policy vector and lump‑sum transfers. We show that—even with transferable utility among members of the majority coalitions—the equilibrium chosen by the pivotal majority is generally off the Pareto frontier. Taken together, these results establish an impossibility theorem for majority rule in multidimensional policy spaces: whether coalitions are stable or cyclical, simple majority voting fails to maximize aggregate welfare. Political externalities imposed on minorities systematically exceed the surplus gains accruing to decisive majorities, and vote trading cannot redress the loss. Institutional remedies—supermajority thresholds, agenda control, or issue-bundling constraints—are therefore necessary conditions for approaching efficiency under democratic decision-making.
Political agency models predict that officials with higher continuation values of office exert greater effort when observable performance is tied to career rewards. We test this prediction in China’s top-down cadre system, where the 2012 leadership reshuffle following the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress coincided with the elevation of PM2.5 reduction to an explicit cadre-evaluation criterion. Using data from Chinese prefecture-level cities between 2008 and 2015, we implement a difference-in-differences design comparing cities led by first-term and reappointed leaders. We find that post-2012, first-term leaders achieved larger PM2.5 reductions than reappointed leaders. This gap reflects first-term leaders’ longer career horizons and weaker pre-existing capture relationships with incumbent polluters. Consistent with multitask incentive theory, first-term leaders exert greater effort on measurable, fast-acting administrative instruments such as production restrictions, while green subsidies and technological innovation show no significant term-stage difference. The paper provides new evidence on political agency, regulatory capture, and multitask incentives in top-down bureaucratic systems.
Few mafia traditions have endured as long or been shared as widely as the pizzo. The pizzo was and is a customary payment collected from clients by Italian mafias in exchange for private protection. The value of the pizzo was vulnerable to two sources of dissipation. First, excess competition for clients from other mafiosi. Second, evasive behavior from clients themselves. I argue that Italian mafias created de facto property rights to limit those losses. To limit competition, mafias in Italy defined client ownership via territorial delineation. To limit opportunism by clients, mafias tailored pizzo terms in proportion to clients’ latitude for opportunism. Historical evidence from New York mafias and Italy’s retailing and construction industries supports my thesis.
The Borda count offers a promising alternative to counteract the growing polarization of party systems by incentivizing moderate party strategies. However, empirical evidence on the Borda count is still lacking. This paper presents results from an online survey conducted in the aftermath of the 2025 German federal election, in which respondents were asked for their vote choice under a Borda count system. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: in the first, they could rank up to three out of seven parties; in the second, they could rank all seven parties. The findings show that more ranks considered, the more fragmented the election result. It also shows that the Borda count has mixed effects on policy congruence between voters and parliament. Respondents’ overall acceptance of the Borda rule was moderate to negative, with many of the objections cited were based on misconceptions about the system’s consequences.
This paper applies the economic approach to the history of Christianity in the religious environment of the Roman Empire, a ground already covered by Stark, Ekelund and Tollison. We show that Greco-Roman religion was not in decline and was not threatened by Christianity either in terms of numbers or influence, but it was a fragile system because it lacked a professional priestly class with an interest in its continuance; hence, when the emperors raised Christianity to state religion, it was doomed. Christianity rose slowly and inconspicuously, struggling to extricate itself from its Jewish apocalyptic beginnings; it was not a superior doctrine, and specifically not a superior afterlife promise, that drove its growth in its sectarian centuries. Rather, Christians were able to achieve a distinctive doctrinal identity and organizational unity only when Toleration offered them both opportunity and incentive to become a universal religion, and the emperors bet on that. On this reading, for all it was hell-bent on destroying paganism, Christianity emerged as its killer only by accident.
Governments increasingly use pilot experimentation before national policy rollouts, but this strategy introduces policy uncertainty until reforms are permanently institutionalized. We study how resolving this uncertainty affects asset prices, exploiting China’s 2020 revision of the Land Management Law, which elevated previously experimental rural land reform pilots into a binding national legal framework. Using difference-in-differences estimates on land transactions in Deqing County from 2015 to 2022, we find that legal institutionalization increased rural construction land prices by 12.3
This article examines the ontological foundations of two major strands within the field of public choice: the Virginia school, led by James M. Buchanan, and the Bloomington school, represented by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. Although their early collaboration was guided by a shared ambition, we argue that any attempt to subsume these two strands under a single theoretical framework is problematic. It risks overlooking a fundamental ontological divide regarding the nature of collective action and the so-called ‘constitutional moment.’ Buchanan’s framework, centered on exchange among rational individuals and the principle of unanimity, sharply contrasts with the Ostroms’ institutionalist approach, which emphasizes reciprocity and the formation of “communities of shared understanding” as the basis of collective action. These ontological differences underpin distinct methodological commitments to individualism, and ultimately entail important nuances in their approaches to public governance. Whereas Buchanan focuses on protecting individual liberty from government intrusion, the Ostroms highlight individuals’ capacity to engage directly in the governance of the public sector. In sum, since differences emerge at a fundamental level of their theoretical frameworks, any attempt to integrate them inevitably risks a reductive interpretation. Bloomington, after all, is not in Virginia.
