Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this
variation? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We …

Gerontocracy, in its narrowest sense, refers to political systems ruled by elderly people,
whether de jure or de facto. Although formal gerontocratic rules are progressively …

This is the first comprehensive critical evaluation of the use of rational choice explanations in
political science. Writing in an accessible and nontechnical style, Donald P. Green and Ian …

In many democracies a small subset of individuals enjoys a de facto electoral advantage.
The existence of political dynasties, where individuals from a narrow set of families obtain …

We study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public
expenditure in OECD and Latin American countries. We emphasize the distinction between …

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of
Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article …

SOME TIME IN THE LATE 1960S, congressional scholars began to note the increasing vote
margins of US House incumbents. By the mid-1970s, a full-blown debate about the …

This paper investigates party use of seniority systems to allocate nominations for elected
and appointed offices. Such systems, which can regulate party members' access to offices at …

We provide a definition of institutionalism and a schematic account that differentiates
between institutional theories (in which institutions are exogenous) and theories of …

Theories of organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the US Congress,
explaining why committee systems emerge there, but not explaining variance in …