Ideology and interest groups

This paper analyzes the interaction between ideological shirking by legislators and interest group activities in a two stage game between a legislator, a challenger, and an interest group. Some comparative statics results are derived. In some circumstances, campaign contributions decrease as the legislator shirks more; they increase with committee power and seniority, other things equal. An empirical test provides some support for this model. The interpretation of those results is made difficult by the methodological problems of ideological shirking measures. It is problematic to interpret the standard residual as ideological shirking because it ignores the effect of campaign contributions on legislative voting.     

Jurisdiction Size,Political Participation,and the Allocation of Resources

This paper analyzes the effect of population size on politicalparticipation and allocative efficiency. Increasing populationis generally found to reduce political participation. However,since participation is not evenly spread throughout thepopulation, this will have consequences for allocation.Namely, we argue that increasing population size shifts powerto the rich. We discuss the consequences for the optimal sizeof jurisdictions, the size of government, and the measurementof publicness.     

Pareto Efficiency and Majority Voting: Why High Taxes on the Middle Class may be Desirable

In this paper we use a simple median voter model to analyze the effects of tax systems with differing degrees of progressivity. We find that relatively high taxes on middle incomes have two important advantages: On the one hand, they help to ensure that all citizens are better off than they would be in a world without government, and on the other hand, they reduce the tax level chosen in the election. Therefore, the progression in the middle income range not only ensures that Wicksell's requirement of ex post efficiency of the tax system is achieved, it may also increase social welfare.