Journal of Theoretical Politics, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 140-166, January 2021. This paper studies the stability of a multi-level government. We analyze an extensive form game played between two politicians leading two levels of government. We characterize the conditions that render such government structures stable. We also show that if leaders care about electoral rents and the preferences of the constituencies at different levels are misaligned, then the decentralized government structure may be unsustainable. This result is puzzling because, from a normative perspective, the optimality of ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 95-139, January 2021. Many countries place restrictions on the political rights of government workers. This includes limitations on political activities such as taking an active part in political campaigns. Are such restrictions desirable? We present a formal welfare analysis of this question. Bureaucrats’ political activities affect voter perceptions of the government and this can have informational benefits. However, they can also induce policy mistakes and are susceptible to ‘noise’ from some bureaucrats’ innate desire for political ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. This paper studies the effects of cultural identity on electoral and policy outcomes when voters are “behavioral.” Building on the evidence that voters assess political or economic events through the lens of their partisan identifications, we analyze an election between two office-motivated candidates in which voters over-reward or under-punish the candidate that shares their cultural identity. Focusing on issues with cultural as well as distributional implications for voters such as immigration and the cultural divide based on nativism as the s ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. Often foreign countries levy sanctions in the attempt to foment discontent with a hostile government. But sanctions may provoke costly reactions by the leaders of the target country. This paper presents a model in which sanctions exhaust the target country economically and impair its government’s fiscal capacity. Then, an office-motivated leader may find it convenient to default on foreign debt in order to free resources that she can invest to regain internal political support. The default thus becomes a defensive tool to partially dampen the in ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. Power is an important basic concept in Political Science and Economics. Applying an extended version of the uncertain dichotomous choice model proposed, the objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between two different types of power a voter may have: skill-dependent (s-d) power and marginal contribution (mc). It is then shown that, under the optimal committee decision rule, inequality in skills may result in higher inequality of the two types of power and that the distribution of the second type of power (mc) can be even more une ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. Previous game-theoretic analyses of the settlement of the United States assume that Indigenous peoples and settler colonizers either engaged in free exchange or total war for land. We reframe the model to consider that violence, including coercion, was present in most of their interactions; that is, we allow for the settler colonizer to engage in coercion to strategically lower their appropriation costs for Indigenous peoples’ lands. We find that the settler strategically uses violence to pay less in exchanges for Indigenous peoples’ lands. In a ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. We consider a Gellnerian model to study the transformation of a two-region state into a nation state. Industrialization requires the elites to finance schooling. The implementation of statewide education generates a common national identity, which enables cross-regional production, while regional education does not. We show that statewide education is chosen when cross-regional production opportunities and productivity are high, especially when the same elite holds power at both geographical levels. By contrast, a dominant regional elite might p ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. In this paper, I study the ability of a group of citizens to cooperate against a hegemon in a repeated contest game and where group members and the hegemon have different valuations of the prize. I first consider that group members use grim trigger strategies (GTSs) to support cooperative behavior and show that full cooperation within the group is more easily sustained as a stationary subgame perfect (Nash) equilibrium (SSPE) as either group size or the heterogeneity in the valuation of the prize increases. In turn, I show that full cooperation ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. Highly fragmented party systems are composed of a large number of political groups, many of which have negligible bargaining power when it comes to negotiations of electoral alliances. Inspired by the Brazilian system—one of the most fragmented in the world—we provide a stylized model of electoral alliances in which there is a competition for the support of the small parties. Two leading parties try to entice a small one by simultaneously offering transfers (e.g. government positions, support in other elections, prestige). Through a first-price ..read more

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Ahead of Print. We explore how party structures can condition the benefits of decentralization in modern democracies. In particular, we study the interaction of two political institutions: democratic (de)centralization (whether a country has fiscally autonomous and elected local governments) and party (non)integration (whether power over local party leaders flows upwards through party institutions, which we model using control over candidate selection). We incorporate these institutions into our strong decentralization theorem, which expands on Oates (1972) to ..read more