The Rule of Law in the Fight against Terrorism

What is the role of legal limits on executive power, if any, when citizens demand more security from terrorism, and allowing executive officials legal flexibility of action appears necessary to achieve it? We develop a game‐theoretic model to show that when the executive faces increased electoral incentives to provide security and has legal flexibility to choose any policy it finds optimal, security from terrorism can actually decrease. In contrast, when the executive faces increased electoral incentives to provide security and there is an explicit legal limit on executive counterterrorism activities, security from terrorism increases. We also show that the executive achieves the objective of terrorism prevention more effectively when there are some limitations on its counterterrorism powers. The article provides a security rationale for legal limits on executive power and has implications for understanding how to design the institutional structure of liberal governments when the social objective is terrorism prevention.     

Political Conflict over Time

We study a model of electoral competition in which politicians must decide whether to initiate the provision of some public good and, afterward, how much of the public good to supply. The model illuminates how a project's implementation affects elections and, conversely, how electoral considerations influence decisions about implementation. Under well-defined conditions, politicians will either implement projects that they do not like or delay projects that, absent electoral concerns, they would support. The model further reveals how the perceived benefits of holding office can impede the production of public goods about which there is broad consensus. And depending on facts about the program's structure and the electoral landscape, a policy's implementation can either mitigate or exacerbate political conflict.     

Candidate competition and voter learning in the 2000–2012 US presidential primaries

Public Choice - When candidates in primary elections are ideologically differentiated (e.g., conservatives and moderates in the Republican Party), then candidates with similar positions affect each...